Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

A Busy Day, Spent Largely at The Ojibway Club

Woke up early, sometime just before 7am. On any work day that would count as having slept in, but up here the only commute I had to do was to head outside to

I joined Erika in her daily delivery of the girls (Vanessa, Annie and Kassandra) over to the Ojibway Club. She soon discovered that yoga classes were offered every Tuesdays and Thursdays, so off she went to that. The local store sold newspapers, so I picked up the day's copies of The Globe and The New York Times and settled in for a while to do some reading by the dock. While at the shop I also picked up a couple of postcards depicting the local lighthouse along with the stamps necessary to send them off to my Aunts and Uncles in England. Prior to settling down with the newspapers I went wondering about the immediate grounds of the former hotel, and went inside to look at some of the local notices and to read the captions on old black and white pictures scattered about the ballroom depicting the history of the establishment. There are pictures of Edwardian-era adventurers going out for boating trips, big catches of fish, and scenes from various phases of construction for the century-old building I was in.

Erika met me dockside when she finished her yoga class, vowing to come back for more on Thursday. We went to explore the grounds further together, to see if we could find what our kids were up to. We lucked out on finding Vanessa in the Arts & Crafts building, where she and a bunch of other kids were working on a paper-marche piggy bank. What struck me most about the Arts & Crafts building was that each kid who had played in the place had been invited to write or otherwise paint their name on the walls. One of Vanessa's friends (by the name of Lola) pointed her mother's name on one section of wall, who also happened to be the woman who was the yoga instructor the class Erika had just finished. Didn't find where or what Annie was up to, but we had fun taking in the sights of the island during our leisurely stroll. Erika expressed that she didn't really feel that she was part of the group that casually comes up here every year, and I responded that while the both of us may always be outsiders, the hope is that our girls will grow up and be a part of the local summer community of visitors to the area someday.

Checked my BlackBerry for messages from work. One of them was an invitation for me to present at a DITA XML conference in Brussels, Belgium. Nothing could be so far from my mind right now that the technical complexities of my work. Unfortunately my company is restricting travel budget only to sales-related efforts at the moment, visiting so Brussels is not in my immediate future.

We picked up Kassandra from the dock (she goes for the half-day program), some further supplies from the island's grocery store (many items on sale thanks to it being the end of the season), and I ended up buying a copy of Our Pointe au Baril, which is a local history of the islands.

We brought Kassandra back and basically decided to hang out on the island until it was time to pick up our girls. Erika set off on an errand to Pointe au Baril Station, while I stayed and wrote on the postcards I had bought. Around 2pm there was a bit of excitement when I spotted a boat on its side by the southern end of Eyrie Island just across from the main island we are on. I didn't see anybody on the boat and there was otherwise no sign of any distress, leading me to think that maybe it was a boat that had gotten loose from its moorings and beached itself. I went back to our cabin and donned my swimming trunks and flippers, but by the time I returned there was another boat already on the scene, along with some kids emerging from the other side of the island, who must have “abandoned ship” when it got stuck in the shallow waters. Soon the beached boat was put into tow and a small flotilla of kayaks and power boats left from the other side of Eyrie Island, heading back to Ojibway.

In the evening the girls went back to Ojibway for kid's movie night. While the kids watched "Madagascar" we were invited to have a grand dinner at the Ojibway Club. While there we met Peter and Fay, old friends of Josef's, and whom we hadn't seen since our initial visit up here years ago when Vanessa was still a toddler. Both are resident in Southern Carolina, but come up here for the whole of the summer now that Peter is retired. Peter has been coming up here since 1967, and I got him to talking about the place. I asked him about whether he thought that water levels had fallen over the past year, and he responded that in his estimation it had gone down by almost a foot in just the past week. He talked about channels that were no longer navigable by boats with any draught to them, and how the waterline was visibly dropping year over year. He didn't know what the cause of it was, but he expressed the belief that global warming (which he emphatically did not believe in) definitely had nothing to do with it. I had heard something in the news about billions of liters of water being siphoned away from the lakes, but I had hoped it was either a mis-heard news story or an urban myth (much like the “NAFTA highway” that was recently exposed as being a confabulation).

Sometime during the conversation a challenge was thrown up between Erika and Ariane: make your way to Peter and Faye's island cottage separately by boat using only a map of the islands. Not so much a one-on-one challenge so much as an individual test as to whether either of them could take a nautical map and use it to make their way from point A to point B. I have every confidence in Erika, and basically whoever is able to do it pretty much proves that they are capable of navigating their way around the islands solo.

After the very filling dinner I picked up both of our girls from the movie hut, drove back in the boat in the dark to our island, and went to bed happy but exhausted.

Labels: BlackBerry, Eyrie Island, Kassandra, Pointe au Baril, The Ojibway Club, yoga

Trip to New York City, Pt 1

This is the first of two back-to-back business trip that take me to two different conferences.

Got to Pearson in the morning, and took the just over one hour flight to New York City's LaGuardia airport from there. I didn't have a window seat unfortunately, but I had a great view of flying over central Manhattan, looking down at the Empire State building as we were coming in for a landing. The flight was smooth as silk up until the end, when crosswinds jostled the plane side-to-side, but the landing was clean and I soon got off and grabbed a yellow cab to head to my hotel downtown.

Got to the Grand Hyatt, which is just beside Grand Central Station. Lots of marble and brass everywhere in the main foyer to the building. Am here for a conference being hosted by SDL, a firm that provides localization software and associated tools. I can't get into the details of why I am here as that is strictly work-related, and I hope that this will not be a "hard sale" conference, though I have been assured that it will not be.

The hotel room was clean, if somewhat more spartan in spots than what I would have expected for the price being paid. I guess that's New York for you. The small safe in the room doesn't work, (the display saying "BATT" in big red LED letters; batteries run down presumably) and they were obviously working on the plumbing as I couldn't flush for the first hour or so I was there (this thankfully didn't last). The bed was big and comfortable, and while there wasn't any view to speak of outside the window, at least the quiet promised a good night's sleep.

Answered all of my work emails on my BlackBerry, and decided to venture out to do some "museum-ing" I wanted to do. Got in a cab heading south and I asked the driver to take me to the Brooklyn Museum.

The Brooklyn Museum has a world-renowned collection of Ancient Egyptian antiquities, and has the second-best collection in NYC. It has a lot more besides, but that was what I was most interested in seeing, especially a couple of pieces I knew we're in the collection.

I was not to be disappointed. I entered the main gallery, camera in hand (with the flash turned off), and headed towards the Predynastic and Old Kingdom displays.

The initial and signature piece of the collection is a predynastic figure of a woman with outstretched hands and a bird-like beaked face. There are a couple of similar pieces from the R.O.M.'S collection as well. No-one knows the intent of these figurines, which have been interpreted variously as "mourning women" or as fertility symbols.

One of the real jewels of the collection is an alabaster statuette of the young pharaoh Pepi II sitting on the lap of his mother the Queen regent. I knew the piece was here thanks to the work I had done on the history of this pharaoh for Wikipedia, and was looking forward to seeing the piece in person. It is much larger than I expected it to be, just under an arm's length tall. It is one of a very small number of three-dimensional representations of this pharaoh, and the photos I have previously seen of this piece manage to convey the serene look on the face of the queen, but not of the slightly grumpy and put-out look of the young king sitting on her lap.

Alabaster statuette of Pepi II sitting on his mother's lap

I was disappointed in not finding a statue of Ahmose I, another pharaoh I had co-written a Feature Article for Wikipedia on, instead finding an empty plinth where it had been. Again, another case of an object for which there are few examples, so I was disappointed at its absence.

No statue head of Ahmose I here

I exited the Old Kingdom displays and doubled back to the galleries heading the opposite direction. I started out at the Amarna galleries, with pieces dating to the time of the "heretic" pharaoh Akhenaten, who turned a multi-theistic culture into something approaching monotheism, worshiping the sun disc, called the Aten. The striking thing about this period is the distinct change in the art from this time, dispensing with much of the stiff formalism inherent in much Ancient Egyptian art and instead moving to a more languid style, sometimes breaking with various established conventions. I was pretty much spoiled when I visited the Egyptian collection in Berlin, as it has a large room devoted entirely to Amarna-era masterworks, and while there's nothing to rival the famous bust of Nefertiti, there are some interesting pieces here as well

The first piece I saw was the so-called "Wilbour Plaque", named after the former owner who donated the piece to the museum. It depicts an Amarna-era pharaoh (which narrows it down to Akhenaten, his successor Smenkhare, or possibly Tutankhamen -- I would favour the first identification in this case), along with Queen Nefertari. What makes this piece interesting is that the faces were never done as part of a larger relief, now lost, but instead as perhaps a sort of guide for other relief sculptors, the hole at top center made deliberately for hanging the piece on someone's wall.

The Wilbour Plaque, depicting an Amarna-era pharaoh and Nefertiti

Beside this was a larger piece that depicted the pharaoh Akhenaten. What I found most interesting about it was the systematic way in which the cartouches bearing his name had been chiseled away at, reflecting the destruction that was visited up most of the pieces in the room, many in a fragmentary state.

Detail from a relief depicting Akhenaten, with his names in cartouches chiseled out

Much of the rest of the room was devoted to reliefs from Amarna, many depicting the royal family and others showing more pastoral or everyday themes. One of the more instructive was a pair of reliefs depicting Nefertiti, the top one from the early part of the Amarna period, the bottom one from the end of that era. The top one depicts a face with highly exaggerated features, with large eyes, a straight nose and full lips. The bottom one is more subdued in style generally. The extensive text beside these pieces suggests that the change in style was due to a new successor to the title of Chief Royal Sculpture, specifically the same Thutmose who created the famous colourful Nefertiti bust I saw a couple of months back in Berlin.

Two Amarna era reliefs depicting Nefertiti, from the early and late Amarna periods

One in particular that struck me as interesting was a particular talat showing a team of horses pulling a chariot. Egyptian reliefs are often "busy", filling up every available space, but this team of horses has an empty space it is evidently heading into, giving more of an impression of speed than it would otherwise be if the space was filled with text. And one of the horses is looking straight at the viewer, another thing simply not seen in Ancient Egyptian reliefs, which always have faces and heads depicted in profile.

Amarna relief depicting chariot and its team of horses, one of which looks straight at the viewer

More to come...

Labels: Ahmose I, Akhenaten, Amarna, Ancient Egypt, BlackBerry, Brooklyn Museum, Grand Central Station, Grand Hyatt, Manhattan, Nefertari, New York City, Pepi II, SDL, Smenkhare, Tutankhamen, Wilbour Plaque