From GP's Undisclosed Location in the Wilds of Canada...

I'm currently visiting family for Christmas, and internet connectivity is dodgy. I have some material ready for posting, but it'll have to wait for New Year's Day.

I managed to winnow down my books for the trip to:

• Alexander Alekhine's Best Games (Alekhine/Nunn)
• Anthology of Chess Combinations (Informator)
• 100 Endgames You Must Know (Jesus de la Villa)
• Rook Endings (Levenfish/Smyslov)

plus Lev Alburt's Chess Training Pocket Book for the airplane, and some of Karsten Mueller's endgame DVDs. Way too much material, objectively. I figured that being stranded without internet would be a good opportunity to crack open Levenfish/Smyslov and work on my rook endgames, but so far I haven't gotten that desperate.

I actually was able to teach my mom and dad some basic endgame stuff. Dad didn't humour me as much and we only did some stuff with the opposition and bare kings. Mom actually did fairly well...we moved on to some basic pawn endgame positions that I set up, and she even figured out the "underpass" herself on the second try.

My wife still refuses to participate. It's weird. Right now she's probably doing some logic problems or sudoku. As a chemist, she enjoys analyzing spectra and determining molecular structures. We've even played checkers once (neither of us could remember the rules, but it was still fun). But she won't even look at a problem involving bare kings and only 3 files. I tried to point out that it wasn't even chess at this point, only a harmless puzzle, but no luck. The closest I ever got was by equating the White king as a woman advancing her career, and that if it got past "the man" (opposing king) blocking her progress, it would reach the 8th rank and thereby shatter the glass ceiling. That, at least, elicited a "nice try."