Monday, February 20, 2006

A Trip to a Museum

While friends went road-tripping this weekend to Florida, I stayed behind and explored Richmond instead. Explore, though, is stretching it a little. I did drive around much more than I've driven on any other day but most of the places I went to were ones I'm already familiar with. Going downtown to the Edgar Allan Poe museum, however, was new and interesting. The museum exists in the oldest standing building in Richmond, complete with a garden which you instantly recognize as straight out of a 'Poeish' story. Not very surprising given that its design is based on a poem (To One in Paradise) by him. Fresh from that trip I'm steeped in Poe trivia and eager to share it with the world. There are all kinds of anecdotes about about Poe's unfortunate childhood, his hostile foster father, a lost-regained-lost love he first met at the age of 15, a successful military career he deliberately court-martialled from, a wife half his age who was also his first cousin and to top it all his very mysterious death which remains unsolved to this date.
People back then had such interesting lives. Or maybe its just the writer folks who (then and now) have interesting lives. Maybe you end up writing if you have an interesting life in the first place.

Monday, February 13, 2006

Stop, Do Not Pass

Unusually for me I'm finding it extremely difficult to finish a book these days. I'm in the middle of 3 different books right now and since I just bought a couple of other books, this list is probably only going to grow. Or maybe I'll find one of these 2 interesting enough to read from cover-to-cover and snap out of the general state of limbo I've been in of late. The suspense keeps me enthralled.
One of the 2 books I ordered is Ptolemy's Gate, the third and final book in Jonathan Stroud's Bartimaeous Trilogy. After Histrionix raved about it, I decided that on second thoughts Amulet of Samarkand was fairly enjoyable and decided to check out the second book. It did not disappoint and was also the last book I actually managed to finish reading. All good signs.

Decorating your room can be loads of fun (and work) as I've been discovering. I've only done a half-baked job at it so far but I'm enjoying the cosiness of the everything-on-the-floor setup, which incidentally was forced on me when the roof of the old townhome I've moved into decided to deny queen sized box-springs access up the stairs. But now my bean bag is at the same height as my mattress and it all seems to fit. Funny how things work out.

Aargh more entries in the list of my car woes! I managed to discharge my car battery again sometime back and today I broke my rearview mirror while coming out of the garage. My poor car even got some scratches.