Sunny -- Make that Chilly -- L.A.

Shelly's back from sunny, chilly Los Angeles. It sounds like all went well with her meeting, and she ended up with a couple of days to spend with her mom, who flew in to spend the weekend.

The weather in southern California seems to have been a bit chillier than here in Manila.

But, despite the chill in the air, Shell and Kathy apparently enjoyed their convertible. Did they need to be reminded that it was only January, and possibly too cold to have the top down??

I may just have the best mother-in-law ever, as she managed to pick up a copy of the Washington Post for me in Denver before flying out to Los Angeles. Yeah, the news is old by the time it gets from Washington to Denver to Los Angeles to Manila, but there's something about reading the dead tree edition that you just can't get from the Internet. Thanks, Kathy!

At 38, I'm right on the great divide of the newspaper-reading generation and the non-newspaper-reading generation. I grew up with parents who read the paper every morning -- in fact, it was part of our breakfast table ritual, passing various sections of the paper back and forth. Shelly's parents are also avid newspaper readers (her father is, at least), but Shelly, at 34, rarely picks up the paper unless she's traveling, prefering to get her news online. If you've ever studied the demographics of newspaper readers, you'll know that I'm the odd one, and that Shell fits in perfectly with our age group.