Rust Street house sold

Closed this a.m. Not a bad way to end 2007.

Boston Globe

Not sure what the header means, but they ran a nice little blurb on 12/23.

A debut with feathers

"High Season" (St. Martin's) is a campy debut mystery set in Provincetown. What impresses Kate Mattes, owner of Kate's Mystery Books, is how well author Jon Loomis captures the town in all its out-there glory - from the drag queens to the fishermen to the denizens on Commercial Street. Clearly, Loomis, who lives in Wisconsin, made the most of his time during two fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

On edit: I'm sure FAWC's official position is all congratulations, but it's worth noting that their summer teaching program turned down my offer to teach a mystery writing class for free. For free! That means that if the class filled they'd make around $6,000 clear; if the class didn't fill but had enough students to run, they'd still make plenty of dough because they wouldn't have to pay me. Essentially, they declined a donation of my time worth as much as $6,000 during what is apparently a financially stressed period for them (big deficits, shrinking donations). That's what a bunch of snobby assholes they are. Still, I love the place. Sort of.

Boston Glob

Review this coming Sunday, apparently. Just in time for Christmas. Not.

Bat II

So, bat hides all day in the 1" gap between the bathroom cabinet and the wall. We don't know this. Bat waits until about 1:00 a.m., after the lovely A_______ has finished grading papers and come to bed and turned the lights out, and then scritchy-flutters out of his crack and into the bedroom, where he flies mad loops around the ceiling, one end to the other. Bat is bigger, seems to me, than your standard brown bat. About the size of a pterodactyl, in fact. So the lovely A_______ trots downstairs, more or less to hide; very sensible, given her condition. I watch bat for a minute, hoping he'll land. He does, perching on the top of the window molding where he can keep an eye on me. He looks like a miniature gargoyle up there, all ears and weird, backwards elbows. I go downstairs to get gloves and something to catch him in: a pillowcase.

Back in the bedroom, it's obvious the pillowcase is useless: bat is up too high, the pillowcase opening's too small and floppy. I grab a towel and fling it at bat, hoping to knock him down. He orbits frantically around the room, doing these wobbly figure-eights. I pick up the towel and give it a good locker-room snap as bat flies past. A miracle occurs: I make good contact, bat's furry-leathery self splats against the wall and bounces onto the floor, stunned. Decent wingspan, as I said. I toss the towel over him before he can recover, scoop him up and hustle him outside, where I release him. He flutters out into the night, takes a hard left turn, and presumably flies right back to his nest in our eaves, along with fifty or sixty or so of his cousins. Did I mention the bat guy said they can't do much about a bat colony 'til spring?

Bat

So, I wake up at about 3:30 last night to small, rustling sounds in our bedroom. At first I think it's the cat, farting around; he does a fair amount of running up and down the stairs, clawing the rug, etc. in the middle of the night. "George," I say. "Shut the fuck up." More rustling, about a foot from my head. I look down and a good-sized bat is climbing up the side of our box-spring, presumably trying to get into bed with us (warm in there). "What is it?" says the lovely A_________, half-awake now. "Bat," I say. Hilarity ensues. We jump out of bed, turn on the light. Bat flies in wild loops around the room, disappears. We go downstairs to sleep on the couch (it's a sectional, thank God). A________ drifts right off, but not me. I'm wide awake, listening for more weird shit. Meanwhile, the cat's doing his nocturnal comedy routine, charging around. It's really the cat this time: I can see him. Bat still nowhere to be found as of this posting. With any luck he's crawled back into the wall via one of the missing light fixtures/smoke-detectors. I turned the big walk-in closet inside out: he's not in there. Called the bat removal guy: turns out there's not much we can do 'til spring. The little fuckers are supposed to be hibernating, but tend to seek warmth when it gets really cold in their exterior wall. Ack.

HIGH SEASON to be reviewed by the Boston Globe

on 12/16, they tell us. Better late than never.

HIGH SEASON makes the WaPo's "Best Books of 2007"

Scroll down to "mysteries/thrillers." They mangled the description a bit (okay, a lot), but who cares. It's still a nice thing.

Offer

So, we've gotten an offer on the Rust St. house, thank God. It's a tad on the low side, but we're coming back with a counter that should be acceptable. It is, as everyone tells us, a buyer's market.

The good news is that if it all goes through it'll free up a good bit of cash. We can restore a bit of the account we've been drawing from to finish up the Garfield house, and still have a great Christmas.

Dear Santa,

About that flat-screen TV. Please make it a Sharp Aquos; the one with the fast refresh rate.

Also, I'd really like one of those new Barber Trifecta fuzz boxes.

Thanks a million,

Jon