Family, and discovering Richmond

I'd been around Richmond, VA a little when I was at Ft. Lee and would spend weekends at my parents. Now that we've had a week of touring around, I'm finding Richmond much to my liking though Steve cringes at the thought of living anyplace with a winter. My tastes and preferred lifestyle are inherited from my parents, who are foodies and culture vultures. Richmond is loaded with history, has good restaurants of a wide range of cultures (there is one excellent and very authentic Mexican place in particular that my dad and I discovered in 2005) and a thriving art and entertainment scene. There's the Ginter Botanical Gardens, which I've been to only once but enjoyed a great deal and a good number of theatres as one might expect in a college town.

Also, there's work and you can rent an historical 3-bedroom townhouse for $1,500. I could get into this but Steve is nixing the idea.

We did get to see my grandmother. Abuela was supposed to come down last weekend but it snowed and she was nervous. We drove up to Woodbridge on Tuesday to visit her. Woodbridge appears to be one great big mall at this point, and I recognized very little of the boring little suburb I grew up in.

We were supposed to leave tomorrow, but our flight got cancelled so we're here another day and will fly on Thursday through Houston instead of Newark as originally planned.

Keeping up with current reading

Having my Kindle books in my Droid phone is handy. My laundromat reading has been Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson, founder of the Central Asia Institute which builds schools in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan. I've met a couple of people who didn't enjoy this book, but most do. Steve read it on his Droid in one night and now wants to visit Afghanistan. It's an interesting and uplifting book that gives one hope that one person can indeed make a difference.

Kindle also has all the "Malazan Book of the Fallen" books to date. I read Gardens of the Moon as a paper book and loaned it to Ryan, who is in severe George RR Martin withdrawal. It sucked him in and he asked his mom for the remaining eight books for Christmas. I've sent it on to the E-Prince who says he's enjoying it but "meh" on the characters so far. We'll see. With Ryan though, I've created a monster. We finished the second book The Deadhouse Gates in tandem. I continued on through Dan Abnett's Prospero Burns but received a text from Ryan saying no, I absolutely had to continue on to the next Malazan book, Memories of Ice. I did so and found that Erikson's style improved massively between books 2 and 3. Previously the books were engaging but a little hard to follow; now they are more vivid and he rectifies his previous bad habit of not describing anyone. When you don't know if someone is human or not human because of a lack of description, you have a problem. I presume he got a better editor.

We played Scrabble with Mom this evening. Now it's time for me to take a shower and get back to Malazan.