Book Review - HUNT WITH THE HOUNDS by Mignon G. Eberhart

Hunt With The Hounds by Mignon G. Eberhart
1950, 192 pages

What a treat this slim novel turned out to be! I've always been a fan of classic mystery novels, at least the design and covers, but I don't know that I've ever really read one. A couple of months ago, we stumbled across a few at the thrift store and falling in love with the covers, Hunt With The Hounds in particular, I snatched them up, determined to read them. I started Hunt that day, but only made it a page in before heading for something else. Turns out, detective novels were written a bit differently back in those days. Finally, last week, I dove back in, determined to read the whole book. It's a short one, only 192 pages, but the writing style is very different from modern novels. Take the first 3 paragraphs of the book:

There had been, as Ruby said later, no other kill that day. That was Wednesday, the ninth of October, an unseasonably cold and rainy day, the day of the Dobberly Meet, the day Ernestine was murdered. She was murdered about twilight with the shadows of fog and coming night blurring trees and shrubbery together in an amorphous mass that seemed to advance and watch and then retreat, like unwilling witnesses who would not come forward.

It had not been a good hunting day; a small grey fox had eventually given them a thirty-minute run and gone to earth on the far side of Hollow Hill; so Ruby had been characteristically literal and accurate.

The day Jed Baily's trial ended was much the same kind of day, except it was in the spring, in March. There was Red Bud and White Dogwood along the misty blue hills, and the meadows we vividly green; it was, however, again unseasonably cold and rainy. By chance it was again the day of the Dobberly Meet but probably in its many years of existence had that particular meet had so sparse a field. The trial took place at the Bedford county courthouse; it was a narrow, cramped white clapboard building with a clock tower.

Great stuff, but hard to read at first. I write with a lot of commas, often in inappropriate places, but this book put me to shame. It tells the story of a small but affluent Virginia community, scandalized by the murder of one of their own. Ernestine, the lovely wife of Jed Baily had been killed, shot in the back in her home. It opens with her circle of friends awaiting the verdict of the trial of her husband Jed, and with an innocent verdict, aided by the testimony of Ernestine's dear friend Sue, who was also in love with Jed, the focus of the investigation turns to the other members of the close knit circle of friends. My favorite part of the book was that you never really knew who did it. I changed my opinion a couple of times throughout, and you were never really sure whether the friends were telling the truth or covering for each other. There are love triangles, twisty fox chases, opulent mansions, bumbling police, more dead bodies pop up, and a lot happens in a book so short.

I loved the time frame this book takes place in, with it's old school automobiles, fox hunts, attitudes about love and marriages. There's also some sort of intangible thrill from holding an old book of this sort, a kind of trashy paperback time machine, that makes me imagine a far classier time, when people wore vests and hats, and getting shot in the conservatory was as natural a location for murder as the library, rather than an alley or office building. Mignon D Eberhart, the "Mistress Of Mystery" wrote 59 novels between 1929 and 1988, and at her peak, sold more than Agatha Christie. Should be fun to track more of her work down.

8/10

Next - Touched By The Gods by Lawrence Watt-Evans

Looking to the near future...

Ahh, March. When it first began, I posted a sincere hope that March would be a better month than the cold hearted and deplorable February was. It certainly was, though not to any level that I would call exciting. While most of this will be described in detail as I reach it in the story, March was the month we took a couple of last ditch attempts, failed at those, and began to look towards the future plans.

We still have a few options floating around, we have Realtors both at home and in Washington looking into a couple of things, but essentially, as of this writing, our dreams are in a holding pattern for the next 12-24 months. Naturally, if things were to suddenly swing our way, and solid, good news arrived, we would immediately dive back in, but for the time being, we need a break.

For the last year solid, Lindsay and I have breathed, ate, slept, and worked Motels. In the process, we've learned a lot, and it has been fun, in a special kind of soul sucking way, but it has been a lot of work, and endlessly stressful. I haven't drawn or sculpted anything substantial in the time we've been working on it, and Lindsay's writing had slowed to a halt. After our most recent, and most complete failure, we have decided to take a break. Apart from the few little possibilities we're looking into, for the next year or two, we are going to concentrate on living our lives to the fullest, and preparing to dive back into the search after we are in a slightly better place. We plan to pay off some debt, build a larger down payment, work in our yard, draw, paint, write, play, and generally try and get our minds back to a good place. Right now, we're so frazzled and burnt out by the process that we've found ourselves short tempered and less considerate about some things in our lives. That isn't us, and we have no intention of letting a few bad experiences turn us bitter, so as hard as it is, we've decided to stop and re-combobulate.

It could be fun. We've never really experienced a lot that Pocatello and the area has to offer, and we plan to change that. We're going to eat at every restaurant, climb every trail, and explore the city we grew up in, and at the same time, we both plan to work on secondary incomes to build up a better down payment for our next attempt. We both plan to work on books; Lindsay a historical fiction, I'll either write a mystery, or a zombie survival novel... we'll see. I also plan to start a full website for my sculptures and artwork, painting more and expanding my commissions. Next week, we're taking a week off, and heading to the coast again, but this time strictly for leisure. We're going to walk on the beach, read books, camp in the back of Strontium and not do anything related to Motel running. (In theory. Whether we'll be able to avoid it is another matter entirely....) It should be fun. When we get back, we'll start unpacking our entire house again, Lindsay's going to start looking for a better paying job that utilizes her degree, and we're going to try and make a fresh start in the same place we've been the whole time.

Naturally, there's a lot of downsides to this, my mom and brother were going to live in this house when we moved, so now they're out of a place to live, and we've spent a lot of time and money chasing phantoms for the last year and every once in a while we both get pretty nostalgic and depressed about what we've lost so far, but we hope to stay upbeat and happy about what we do have.

When we're ready, we'll sell the house, hopefully at a profit, and start in again, a little more skeptical, but every bit as determined.

Where The Wild Things Are movie teaser

This Trailer for the new movie, Where The Wild Things Are, blew my mind! I loved the book, by Maurice Sendak, as a kid and now that there's a movie being directed by the visionary genius Spike Jonze, and with creature effects by Jim Henson's Creature Shop, how can this be anything but spectacular? The movie was delayed for a while, in fact the first teaser photos were released years ago, but from the looks of things, they got it right. It looks like the pages of the book come to life.

House For Sale Part IV

So, we put our house on the market. Knowing a house will sell better if it's well decorated, clean and friendly, we bought a few decorations, took down some of the less inviting ones, like my African masks and big screen TV, and Cleaned Everything. Lindsay's parents, Rich and Sue were an especially great help here, coming over on the weekends to help paint the porch, weed the yard and clean in the house. When we were finally finished, and Jared was meeting with us to take the photos, all we had left was keeping it clean. We had a plan. We were going to move ourselves, the cats and dogs to Linz's parent's basement, where they had a basement apartment that they had reclaimed for their own. We thought this would be perfect, the potential buyers could see our house at any time, without having to worry about us or the pets, and the house would stay clean and tidy.

This plan didn't really work out. Since taking back over the basement, her parents had re-decorated, and added some new furniture and a nice flat screen, turning it into a sanctuary of sorts, and though they made every effort to make it work, it was pretty clear from the first night that the plan would not work. Between our odd hours we keep and our quiet, but big and clumsy dogs, it was a problem waiting to happen. So, a day or two later, we headed back home, devising an elaborate system for dealing with kenneling the dogs and cats while we were gone based around whether people might come by.

We really didn't need to bother. From when our house was listed, on October 16th, to when we finally gave up on January 27th, we had 3 viewings. Our timing was utterly horrid, placing it on the market just a few days before the Real Estate market took a dramatic turn for the even worse. That said, it was still a valuable experience, both the prepping and the sellling process, and we think things will go a lot smoother the next time.


In the meantime, we continued looking into B&B prospects in the Pocatello area...

Book Review - THE NAVIGATOR by Clive Cussler & Paul Kemprecos

THE NAVIGATOR (A Kurt Austin Adventure) by Clive Cussler and Paul Kemprecos
2007, 448 pages

Last time I read a Clive Cussler book, I was pretty underwhelmed, but at the time, I was in the middle of a pretty stressful period in our Motel hunt, and I didn't really enjoy a few of the aspects of the story. The most recent, The Navigator by Cussler and Paul Kemprecos, is a much more recent novel, Cussler has written something like 2 dozen books since Sahara, and maybe that's why I liked this book better. Or it could be the co-author, or maybe I was just in a better mindset and could enjoy a cheesy worldwide adventure story. At any rate, The Navigator was a lot of fun. It tells the story of a Phoenician Captain, A couple of NUMA agents, Thomas Jefferson, a stolen antiquities recoverer, a Librarian, a Millionaire Ren-Faire player, Merriweather Lewis, Artichokes, Gold Mines, The Ten Commandments and more! Exciting, isn't it!

In all seriousness, I really got a kick out of The Navigator. The authors did a great job at keeping things moving, and creating a pretty good sized cast of characters constantly moving towards a little too pat and easy, but mostly satisfying conclusion.

7/10

Book Review - CHILLWATER COVE by Thomas Lakeman

Chillwater Cove by Thomas Lakeman
2007, 379 pages

It seems like there are 3 ways to write a book; Meticulously planned and plotted, with every twist and turn of the story anylized and thought out, Creating a story idea, a world and characters, and letting the writing dictate how the story ends, and creating a clear beginning and end and letting the middle tell itself. I can't say for certain, but I'm pretty sure Lakeman used the third method for writing Chillwater Cove. The beginning starts very strongly, with FBI Agent Peggy Weaver in the nitty gritty of a trafficking bust that goes suddenly and horribly awry, and in the aftermath, she stumbles across some pictures. Of her dear friend that was abducted and abused when they were children. This was a great way to lead into the story, and I was looking forward to what came from it. Unfortunately, once she returned home to Tennesee to talk to Samantha, her friend, about it, things start to meander pretty badly, and I lost interest quickly.

Her father is the sherrif of a small college town, still set in their racist and hateful ways, and he and Peggy have a troubled relationship that never quite rings true in the book, it always feels more like silly squabbling, rather than a deepset, long lasting problem. As Peggy investigates the nature of her friend's abduction, things get more complicated, throwing in Melungeons, dirty cops, racist spartan societies, conspiracies, land schemes, horse breeding and artificial women.... essentially, it gets muddled pretty quickly, and Lakeman seems to have trouble keeping some of this straight, there are plots that end too easily, others that drag on for too long, and some that never materialize when they should have.

However, just at the end, when you think everything should be wrapping up, yet you find yourself looking at the surprising number of pages still left, it gets good again, and the story takes on a faster pace and tighter plotting. It still seemed to leave a few plots dangling, and certain things seemed a little over the top, but Chillwater Cove manages to pull it out in the end, and becomes a pretty enjoyable book.

6/10

Now Reading - Hunt With The Hounds by Mignon G. Eberhart

Book Review - A YEAR AT THE MOVIES by Kevin Murphy

A YEAR AT THE MOVIES - ONE MAN'S FILMGOING ODYSSEY by KEVIN MURPHY
2002, 362 pages

I love this book. I bought it back in 2002, just before a trip, and it's one of those books that I go back and read every year or so, because it makes me love movies again. I was a manager at a local theater for a few years, and there were aspects of that job that I will forever look back on fondly, from the days in the projection booth assembling the films, to late night screenings, to exploring the odd little booths and machinery in the place. Apart from the slovenly customers and dozen 16 year olds I was in charge of, it was a job that I could have done for the rest of my life. There can be something magical about the world of movies, beyond the flicks themselves, and spending that much time around them helps drive that home.

Kevin Murphy was one of the founding members of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and made a pledge for this book to watch a movie every day for a year. Naturally, rather than hitting his local multiplex every day, he traveled the globe, watching films in festivals, igloos, sheets tied between trees, anywhere he could. Along the way, he ruminates about why we love the movies, both the films and the experience. He works in a theater, brings his own film for exhibitions, smuggles in a full Thanksgiving dinner, and sees the same crappy blockbuster movies over and over.... for SCIENCE! I love his writing, he seems both cynical and jaded and madly in love with cinema at the same time, and has perfect justification for both. His mission started on January 1st, 2001 and as I re-read the book, it was kind of a kick to read about which movies he saw and remember how many middling flicks came out in 2001. Corky Romano, Pearl Harbor, What Women Want, Scary Movie 2, Cat & Dogs, Tomb Raider, Pootie Tang..... What a collection! I absolutely loved that he went out of his way to visit independent single screen theaters, and found mini theaters in bars, and still gave the giant IMAX and multiplexes an equal billing, experiencing all aspects of the biz.

A Year At The Movies always makes me want to rush off immediately and work for a theater again, to feel the frames slide through my white cotton gloves as I look for the spliced section, and watch the flickering screen through the little window in the projection booth, see people react as one, in a giant wave of laughter or fear. Excellent.

10/10

Now Reading - Chillwater Cove by Thomas Lakeman

House For Sale Part III

Having decided that the best way to get enough money to buy a motel, we started making some improvements to our house. We spoke to our Realtor, and he suggested a few things, but said that overall, we were on the right track. In a way, at this point I feel we made a mistake. Rather than doing what we could, we started charging some of the improvements to our credit card, justifying it by planning to pay it off completely upon selling. We also talked to Jared, concerned about the timing of placing the house for sale, as it was early summer when we started, and typically the time houses are placed up for sale. We still had a lot of work we wanted to get done before putting it on the market, and we were worried about the time of year it would be put on during. He told us not to worry, that there was a second boom of house buying, typically around Aug-Nov, when people are done with summer vacations, and are ready to start thinking about where they'll live for the coming winter and new year.

We thought that sounded about perfect, and started in on the improvements. Our first step was pulling up the old linoleum in the Laundry Room, something that Ludo had helpfully started as a puppy with his teeth, and replacing it with industrial strength garage paint, in a nice gunmetal grey, and painting the walls. At the same time, we started re-painting the Craft Room, and trying to find paint matches for the other rooms in the house that we didn't plan to re-paint completely. The Library and Theatre Room were easy, we'd saved the color codes and names for each, and merely had to grab a couple of quarts, but the other rooms in the house were tricky. We hadn't repainted them, as the owners had clearly just re-painted before we bought the house, and we liked the colors a lot. Of course, the few paint cans they left laying around when we bought the house belonged to other parts of the house, so we had to resort to carefully picking away at a section of paint to get enough for a sample, and even then, they didn't match quite right. Next time, we'll just re-paint the whole bloody thing.

We also refinished the bedroom floor, painted the porch, filled the holes where once hung my collection of masks, and started thinking about the two bigger projects, the bloody bathroom and the ugly kitchen.

After fiddling with the bathroom colors a bit in Photoshop, we decided that the best thing would be to re-paint the white trim, choose a nice almond color to match the gold fixtures and sink, and use a light pink color for the top, that would also go with the rose flooring we chose. While it wasn't a large project, we did learn a few valuable tips about painting trim, and working in tiny rooms.... Laying flooring in a small room like that was especially time consuming compared to what I'd thought it would be.

The kitchen was a lot more fun. We pulled up all of the ugly old linoleum, and carefully cleaned the floors, replacing it with higher quality vinyl tiles (We thought about real tile, but decided we wouldn't get enough out of them for the expense) and while my mom scoured the dollar shops looking for some decent "Fat Chef" decor to match the curtains that had been hanging since we moved in, we also repainted some of the room, added some trim and baseboard and put drawer pulls on. The difference was pretty dramatic!

Before

After
(Masked Serial Killer not included)

We were quite happy, and after a few more changes and touch ups, we were ready to put the house on the market! If only we knew what would happen at about the same time....

Book Review - THE CLOSERS by Michael Connelly

THE CLOSERS by MICHAEL CONNELLY
2005, 447 pages

Up until recently, I'd never read anything by Michael Connelly, though when I picked up the first book of his I read, The Lincoln Lawyer, I got the feeling that I'd heard his name before somewhere. Turned out, he is a respected writer of mystery and thrillers, and I enjoyed his style quite a bit.

The Closers features his most well known detective, Harry Bosch, returning to the force after a few years in retirement. He joins the Open/Unsolved force, and begins picking at long healed wounds, attempting to use a bit of DNA on an old case to uncover the fate of a long dead girl, stolen from her home and killed on the hills beyond. As he struggles to follow cold leads, Harry and his partner uncover something darker, a conspiracy that leaves the detectives unsure who to trust, and whether the truth is worth exposing.

I really enjoyed The Closers. It was tightly plotted, and while some of the twists were apparent, there were enough left that you kept turning the pages. Harry Bosch is a great character, full of quirks and attitude, and someone you would want on your case. I really liked the secondary characters in this story, the mother, who has left her daughter's room untouched for 17 years, was especially moving to me, her grief and hope that some day, her baby's killer would be found.

8/10

Next - A Year At The Movies by Kevin Murphy

House For Sale Part II

Reading back over the last post, I realized that I got a bit off topic, considering it was meant to be a post about our recent work on the house, and I started it with a story about a car wreck from years ago....

Oh well, it'll get there eventually. Besides, I think everyone needs an image of a hot pocket and change flying around the cabin of a car as glass shatters around it.

The Theater Room, decorated in the previous owner's dead things.

Our house, which oddly, I just realized I never really called a "Home" when referring to it, was in pretty good shape, it just had a few little things that needed done to make it ours. Both of the basement bedrooms were painted for kids, one with purple and yellow handprints all over the wall, and one in bright blue and red colors (It was Spider-Man's room according to the sign on it when we viewed the house...) and the basement family room, soon to be our Theatre room, was a plain white.

The Library room, before painting.

We re-painted the handprint room, choosing a nice neutral warm brownish tan, with a brick red trim that we then turned into our oriental themed Library.

The Library, shortly after painting, still cluttered with moving crud.

We re-painted the Theatre room a cool blue-grey, and then, we decided to hold off for a while and get moved in before Lindsay had to take off for school in Missoula. Somehow after that, apart from a few little upgrades, things kind of just stayed as they were. We left the Spider-Man room, now Linz's Craft Room red and blue, and we left the bathroom painted in a dark whorish red, despite us both hating it, and thinking it made the bathroom far too tiny feeling.

The Spider-Man Room, before we moved in.

I'm not sure why we stopped working on the improvements we had planned, I think we just kind of became comfortable and complacent. Got a couple of cats, and 2 big dogs, planted a garden that was easily devoured by the voracious evil weeds we had in the back garden area....

Eventually, we decided that we wanted to buy and run a motel. Ideally, the best way to dive into that would be to sell our house at a profit, and use the proceeds to dive in. To that end, we started a list, walking off each room and writing down any changes, improvements and work that needed done. It was a long list. It's truly amazing how little things pile up over the months, we found a page or two of things that needed done in every room, from simple things like filling some nail holes, to completely ripping out the kitchen floor and replacing the ugly scarred pink linoleum with something that didn't invoke horror.

Ludo, chilling on the scarred up kitchen floor.

It was going to be a lot of work....

Book Review - DROWNED NIGHT by Chris Blaine

DROWNED NIGHT by Chris Blaine
2005, 324 pages

What a fun, odd, little series of books this is. The novels of the Abbadon Inn, are, as best I can tell from only reading this one, and looking up the others online, are a group of unconnected novels, each revolving around the mysterious and imposing Abbadon Inn located in Cape May, off of the Atlantic. Drowned Night tells of a family, come to run the Inn as temps, who hoped to put their troubles to rest and escape to the beach a bit. Unfortunately, there is a dark presence tied to the Inn and it's past. Chris Blaine (Nee Elizabeth Massie) weaves an interesting story, as ghosts, an evil presence, some horrible beast and creepy locals blend together to make the poor family's summer a bit more than they anticipated! I liked this book. At first, I kept wishing the author would make up their mind about what kind of book it was, whether ghost story, supernatural Horror or Monster Massacre, but in the end, its all tied together pretty well, and there's some great atmosphere and ideas in the book.

I love the Inn, naturally, as it's a gorgeous old Victorian Mansion, and while I kept picturing it taking place in the Pacific Northwest, rather than off of the Atlantic, I think that was more my own stubborn mind than anything. While I don't think the story totally worked (The evil creature/ghost/presence was never really explained...) I'm intrigued to track the other 2 books down and see how they fit in the mythology.

7/10

Next - The Closers by Michael Connelly

House For Sale Part I

About 4 years ago, while I was heading to my graveyard shift down Reserve Road in Missoula, I stopped at a light. I was eating a hot pocket and as I lifted it to my mouth to take a bite, I looked in my rear view mirror in time to see a red sports car slam into the back of my Honda Element. It turned out that the driver, a young girl, had been bent over in her seat, trying to reach her cell phone that she'd dropped, and hit me going over 50MPH, never touching the brakes. She hit hard enough to push me into 4 vehicles ahead of me. Amazingly, I walked away shaken, covered in pepperoni, and with some gnarly bumps on my calves where they'd kicked up into the dash, but otherwise safe. My Element was totalled. When she hit, she hit hard enough to bend the frame of the car, buckling it up into my seat, breaking it, and forcing it to recline. She crushed over a foot in the back and roughly 8 inches in the front of my car, and shattered all of the windows. Somehow, when she struck me, the change I had in a pocket by the steering wheel flew up and back towards me, then up and forward to land on the dash. Surprisingly, my airbag never deployed. Quite frankly, to this day, I'm amazed I walked away from the accident, and will forever trust in Honda Element's ability to protect me. The lady in front of me was hurt badly, and ended up in the emergency room overnight, the girl that hit us, miraculously only hurt her index finger. Looking at her car, she should have been dead. Luckily, she happened to sit up right before she hit me, so the airbag helped her. When I had my wife call my work to let them know I wouldn't be in that night, the Store Manager told me I had to be there, and couldn't call off. This was one of many reasons we had to get far enough away from that store that she couldn't follow me on her broom.

At any rate, the accident gave us a little bit of money, that we decided would be best spent on a home, rather than a new car, Lindsay was going to be heading back to Missoula for school and wouldn't need her car, so we bought a house in Pocatello, and I drove the Avocado Dreamboat until about a year ago, when we needed to buy a new Element.

We got into a house at a good time, rates were decent, and they were approving pretty much anyone. We qualified for a $225,000 house, but set our own limit of $100k, so that payments would be reasonable. We got together with our very dear friend and advisor Gordon Wilks, owner of Gate City Realty, and father to our current Realtor, Jared, and he agreed to help us find a place. At the time, while we looked, we were living in the attic bedroom in the In-Law's house, a far from ideal situation, so we were pretty anxious to get out of there. However, we took our time finding the right place, partially because we loved looking at houses! It was great fun to head out with Gordon, and see what he would recommend. He has a great sense of humor, and was really good at spotting what we liked about places (Sunrooms, big basements, fenced yards, lots of space...) and narrowing the field to eliminate things we didn't (Low ceilings, bad neighborhoods, houses that were 3/4 garage, frosting cups labeled "Spit" in marker...) After about a week, we found a place we really liked, and put in a bid. Unfortunately, someone else did too, and we lost. We muscled on, and kept looking, going out on our days off with him, and searching the Internet the rest of the time.

One day, we were cruising around the West side of Pocatello, looking at a friend's place that she was selling, and we drove past a road called Rosewood Avenue. Lindsay commented on how much she liked the name, and how she'd like to live on a street with a pretty name. Less than 5 minutes later, Gordon calls us, and tells us to meet him on the corner of Rosewood and Foothill, where a house was just listed for sale! We looked at the place, a 3 bedroom on the corner, and liked it a lot. It had a big fenced yard, a nice family room, and a big kitchen. We told Gordon that we liked it enough to bid on it, and we managed to beat everyone else in. We finally owned our own house!

Of course, there was a lot of work to do....

Book Review - INVISIBLE PREY by John Sandford

INVISIBLE PREY by John Sandford
2007, 384 pages

Despite having something like two dozen books, I'd never read anything by John Sandford, but picked up Invisible Prey the other night, and found it an enjoyable read. It's the fourteenth to feature detective Lucas Davenport, but I found the back story of the characters easy enough to follow without knowing anything about them before page one, a good trait in a book like this.

The plot follows Davenport as he works two cases, the accused statutory rape of a girl by a senator, and a seemingly unconnected chain of murders. I enjoyed Davenport's attitude, he's very laid back but tenacious, and a good detective, and Sandford writes in an easy to read, noir style prose. Not quite Lee Child short. But short sentences. The storylines meshed together well, and the ending hit at a nice pace, without ever really feeling forced or cut short like a lot of thrillers. I'll have to keep an eye out for more.

7/10

Next - Drowned Night by Chris Blaine

Brains......

An FYI for the 4 people that read this...


As of Thursday night, it looks like I'm back on the Graveyard shift rotation at work for the forseeable future, (Unless we can manage to get our motel, of course...) which means a wee bit more money, darker bags under my eyes, and some seriously confused dogs, who find it their duty to protect Lindsay at night, and as a side effect, keep her up all night...

With that in mind, it's likely that this blog will be updated heavily every other week, with lean updates while I'm on shift.

Book Review - LOST LAKE by Phillip Margolin

Lost Lake by Phillip Margolin
2006, 452pgs

In 1985, a congressman is brutally tortured and murdered in the summer home of a powerful general. His daughter was in the home as well, and tells the officer that responds to her screams that he was killed by a man named Carl Rice, her ex-lover, a member of the non-existent Unit, a top team of assassins and soldiers. Carl Rice disappears somewhere along the shores of Lost Lake....

Twenty years later, struggling artist and attorney, Ami Vergano's new lodger, a transient furniture maker that calls himself Ryan Morelli loses control at her sons little league game in Portland Oregon. Two men are injured, and Morelli is shot. Soon, Ami finds herself caught up in a web of intrigue that includes a top secret organization that may not be real, a delusional newspaper writer, whose father is a powerful general and may just be the next president.

Lost Lake was a pretty good story. I really felt that most of the characters were believable, and Margolin knows how to describe a scene with just enough detail for you to picture it, but not so much that you get bored reading details. Although you know from the beginning, he still does a good job at keeping the suspense going in regards to the Unit, whether it exists, and who Ami can trust. Pretty fun stuff.

7/10

On a side note, I think the wording on the cover blurb is kind of amusing.... so he wrote Gone, but did not write Forgotten?

Now Reading - Drowned Night by Chris Blaine

Book Review - THE ALLIGATOR'S FAREWELL by Hialeah Jackson

The Alligator's Farewell by Hialeah Jackson
1999, 360 pages

Sometimes, one thing about a book bothers me from the get-go, and I have trouble removing myself from that, and the Alligator's Farewell was one of them. The premise is intriguing, a man working in a nuclear research lab dies, and the body is horribly irradiated, and the head of the security firm is trying to determine how he died, and why. Unfortunately, the assistant rubbed me the wrong way from the beginning, Dave was too over the top and silly, wearing women's shoes, and acting both flamboyantly gay, and super macho depending on what was called for. The authors name also annoyed me, as her real name is Polly Whitney, and she has chosen such an improbable name for some reason. Maybe there's a great explanation, but having that outlined on the back cover, it just had me wondering the whole time I read it, why she chose that pseudonym. In fact, it was probably a more engrossing mystery than the actual book. The main character was creative, as she's a sexy knockout who's also deaf, but it seemed like a gimmick that really only affected her when it needed to for the story, otherwise she could read lips just fine, and somehow drove at breakneck speeds while Dave signed conversations with her....

Typically, a book takes me a couple of days to read. I started this one on the 2nd of February, and didn't finish it until the 23rd... Now, we were pretty distracted at the time, but that's still a pretty long time to slog through it.

2/10

Next - Lost Lake, by Phillip Margolin



P.S. This was written while under the influence of a brewing migraine, so it may be more scattered than usual.

A Dream On The Verge

This is a difficult post to write.

After 4 months of intense discussion, excitement, frustration and hope, the motel we have been attempting to enter into a Lease To Own agreement with has fallen through. While I will undoubtedly go into more depth when I reach the motel in the stories, ideally after I've had some time to separate myself from the emotion, the short story is that he wanted more money than we had to give, and we started to have some real doubts about the stability of the property, both the buildings themselves, and the owner.

It was an incredibly difficult decision to make, but we reached a point where we could see that more time discussing it would only be delaying the inevitable, and make ending it harder for us. This motel was the only one we contacted, out of 20 that was willing to consider a deal with the amount of money we had to offer.


Of course, we're nothing if not persistent, and we are determined to run a motel. It's our dream, and we are confident that we could excel at it in ways never imagined. Between our artistic ability, dedication and friendliness, all we need is a chance. There is one other property we are looking into. It's smaller, and less than half the price of the other, and after a lot of reflection, we've decided that not only are the buildings in better shape, but we like the area well enough to try for it. The problem is that the owners aren't interested in a Lease To Own, or other owner oriented plans, essentially, they want to get the money and forget about the property.
Throughout this entire process, Lindsay and I have been explicit in wishing to do this ourselves, relying on help only in a moral support capacity, but we have come to the conclusion that we need help if we're to achieve our dreams. We are currently looking into lenders, SBA, Government-assisted loans, hard money people and every other conventional methods we can, but we have come to the conclusion that if we are to find the 20% we need to secure a loan, we are going to have to ask people for assistance.


If any of you, my friends and family, know of any angels out there willing to invest in our future, at a good interest rate, please fire us off an email at avalon_ink@yahoo.com. We are hoping to find one single investor for the property, but we are willing to take on multiple investors to reach the amount we need, if we can find them.

Thank you!

Kristopher & Lindsay

09/22/08 - Pocatello, ID - House Hunting

A couple of days later, we met Jared at Gate City Real Estate to begin looking into buildings around Pocatello that might fit for a Bed & Breakfast. (After an excellent breakfast at Red Hot Roasters, and a stroll around the neighborhood)

He had a pretty full list lined out for us, including a few we asked about and some surprises as well! Our first stop was one at the top of our list, but also one we were pretty sure we wouldn't be able to purchase. For all of these houses, we had come up with code names for them, to give them a bit of personality and help keep them straight in our heads. We aren't sure, but we think Jared might have thought us crazy for the code names.... At any rate, we went to see the Pink House first. The Pink House was an older building, currently used as apartments. It was less than a block from the ISU campus, and had been used pretty hard by the tenants. They were asking $299k for it, and with the amount of space and proximity to the college, it was probably worth it, it just wasn't something we could afford. Of course, not being able to afford something had never stopped us before, so we dove in! The Pink House, so named for the odd salmon pink colored stucco on the exterior, was really intriguing. There were five apartments in it, three below, one above and a large one on the main floor, and the building had a lot of character, lots of sliding doors, high ceilings, little cupboards built in. It was also obviously home to a pretty good sized pile of rowdy college kids, as evinced by the beer pong table, fence of beer cans, dings in walls and Bob Marley posters in places of honor. Lindsay fell in love with the attic apartment, partly because she's obsessed with attics, and partly because the tenants were a couple of cute co-eds with a cat, rather than loud frat boys. It was clear that with years of renovating and remodeling, the Pink House could become a really cool place, but it was too much money and work to seriously consider. There were a lot of interesting catacomb-style basement corridors and the craziest boiler system any of us had ever seen too.

Our next stop was one that Jared lined up, that we'd never seen before, afterwards dubbed the Yellow House. Obviously, the Yellow House was named for the exterior, bright yellow siding. It was just a block off of one of the main roads into town from the interstate, just far enough back to avoid the street noise, but easy to find still. It had a small apartment upstairs, with bedroom, bath, kitchen and a small living room, which we thought would be pretty easy to turn into 2 beds and 2 baths for the B&B. The Yellow House was full of odd little details, and some of the most phenomenal wall coverings I have ever seen in my entire life. Clearly, an older person had lived here previously, as there was a pretty decent security system installed, and it just kind of had that vibe, but whoever it was, they had some great taste in decor. The bathroom wallpaper was a metallic silver with gold and bronze fish, which beautifully set off the pink bathtub. In one bedroom of two on the main floor, it had an entire wall of 3 foot deep storage and the other had an entire wall of mirrored tiles. Clearly, where some people thought one of something would do, the previous owners of the Yellow House decided on 7 times that. The basement had an additional bathroom, family room, bedroom (With shag carpet) and an oddly sunken pantry/storage area. It also had a roomy laundry room and separate bonus room. The Yellow house had a nice sized yard too, with RV parking, a 3-4 car garage/shop, a little covered patio and a garden area. I really liked it, it had a nice feel and a lot more space than you'd think from the road. Lindsay was obviously dazzled by the wallpaper, and had trouble seeing it's potential.

We then hopped over the train tracks to the West side of town, where we toured a building that we kind of tacked on at the last minute, a big yellowish apartment building that had the feel of an old western Hotel. I call it the Old Hotel, Lindsay calls it The Yellow House... much to my confusion. We could only look at a couple of apartments, but the Old Hotel had clearly seen a LOT of work lately, all of the electrical was replaced, and all of the carpet and fixtures looked new. It had something like 10 apartments in it, on 3 floors, and while it could be a gorgeous place, it would have taken thousands of dollars to convert it, undoing much of the work already piled into it by the current owners. Lindsay is still obsessed over it however, because we never got to go up into the attic....

For our last stop of the day, we headed back towards the college, to the Old Frat House. Located about a block from Pocatello's gorgeous cemetery, the Old Frat House was a revelation. From the outside, it's very unique looking, all tall sides and sharp corners, essentially a box with a tall roof, but it still had a lot of personality, and inside we could instantly feel the potential. The Old Frat House had a spacious main room as you walked in, with 12 foot ceilings and old hardwood floors, opening up into a couple of staircases and a nice, modern kitchen. On the main floor, there was only a kitchen, main room, mud room, half bath, and some closets, which was kind of nice from a B&B logistic viewpoint, it would offer some separation between the guest rooms upstairs and our living space downstairs. On the second floor, there were 4 bedrooms, all quite spacious, and each sporting 2 closets, clearly left over from its Frat days. There was also one bathroom off of the main hall, and a second off of the huge master bedroom. On the third floor, we found an amazing attic room, with its own set of closets and plenty of room for Lindsay's crafts and writing. In the basement, the Old Frat House had another bedroom, a small den, a storage room, laundry area, one full bathroom, and one bathroom that I got a huge kick out of. Clearly all still remaining from the Frat days, the second bathroom in the basement had 2 toilets, 4 sinks and 3 showers in it, and the toilets were just chilling together without any kind of privacy measures taken at all. I loved it. Obviously, we could see the potential in the building immediately, it had such a great feel walking in, and enough rooms to comfortably fit guests. The only real problem we saw was the lack of private baths, but we figured with the half bath on the main floor and the crazy mutant bath available to guests as well, we could overcome that. It also had a nice sized yard and off street parking for about 5 cars.

All in all, it was a really productive day, and we were pretty surprised and excited by how many good choices there were in Pocatello. Nearly all of them we viewed would make a passable B&B, and there were still 4 or 5 we couldn't line up viewings for!

Jared had also arranged for us to go look at the interior of Greystone 2 days later, and we needed to start in on the prospect of getting our house for sale, a project that we had been prepping for for months already at this point, so that we could afford to build a B&B!


(Sorry about the lack of photos for this post, I was using Lindsay's little camera, and was hesitant about taking photos of homes where people lived, and as of recently, my computer is broken, and hers has no Photoshop, so I'm a man with no cropping ability! I'll try and update with some photos later.)

The Richfather...

Don't even think about refusing him.

(One of around a thousand photos from my sister-in-law's wedding in Bozeman, MT, which are very slowly being edited for her album...)

09/20/08 - Lava Hot Springs, ID - The Greystone Manor

Jared immediately went to work for us, asking us to send any potential hits to him, and said he had a few ideas we might like too. Jared is kind of the tech guy at Gate City Realty, and he takes a lot of the other listing agents photos, so we figured if he knew of any gems that we'd have the inside track.

We weren't wrong! just a few days after returning home from Pendleton, Jared called and said he was lining up a few houses to look at, and that there was another place he wanted us to see that was no longer technically on the market, but one he thought we'd love.

The building was called The Greystone Manor, in Lava Hot Springs, Idaho. Jared told us that it had been used as a wedding and reception facility, and that the owners rented themed rooms from there as well. Frankly, it kind of sounded like a baby version of what we eventually wanted to open, so we excitedly found out where it was, and on a morning off, loaded up the dogs and drove the 35 miles to Lava to check out the exterior and get the lay of the land a bit. Lava Hot Springs is a small town of around 500 to the Southwest of Pocatello, and as the name suggests, is home to a pretty impressive Hot Springs system. They have an Olympic sized pool, some really nice hot pools, and a number of impressively good restaurants, including a Thai one that is supposed to be one of the best in the area. (Currently housed in an old gas station!) It had been a while since Lindsay and I had been to Lava, and then only at night, so it was kind of fun to cruise around the town a bit, looking at all of the tourist themed shops and restaurants. For a town of only 500, Lava has a pretty decent amount of commerce and is obviously pretty reliant on the steaming hot water coming from the earth. There are a number of hotels in the town, most seemingly owned by the same company, just spread out around town with different names. There's also a "luxury" Themed Hotel called the Lion's Gate Manor, which we wanted to cruise past and look at, as they were one of the businesses we tracked for a while.

The Greystone Manor, as viewed from the main street.

It took us a few attempts, but we finally tracked down the Greystone Manor, about a block and a half up from the main road. It was a gorgeous old grey building, roughly 1.5 stories high, that took up the corner of the block.

I fell in love with the stonework almost immediately. The Greystone was a very imposing building, especially in comparison to the residences around it. You could feel the age and history flowing from the cool stones as we walked around the exterior, trying to see if it was occupied, or not.

Soon, we decided that it was vacant, and though it showed signs of recent life, it was pretty clearly in a state of disrepair. A lot of the mortar between stones were crumbling, the area was very overgrown, and there were a few hornets nests hanging from the eaves. We got brave and tried to peek in a few windows, but for the most part could only see a staircase and an entry alcove, but what we saw made us want to see the inside. Badly.

There was also a yard across from the alley, that appeared to belong to the Greystone - either that or some enterprising waterer had usurped their hose to keep it green, which would be great to eventually build an area for outdoor weddings, or a secondary building for room rentals. Obviously, this was some pretty far flung thinking, but it was nice to see that it had some land attached.

Sadly, there was a lot of crumbling, dejected things around the manor, from dead plants to the old sign, a few desiccated strands of lights still hanging from it, as it leaned against the gorgeous old walls. We immediately called Jared and told him we wanted to see inside later in the week.
After wandering around long enough to get a feel for the place, but not long enough that someone reported us as trespassers, we headed into town and hit up the museum there. Their museum is a quaint, typical small town type, where a lot of emphasis was placed on small town individuals and events that scarcely figured outside of the area, but they managed to put it together in a clean and fun manner, and we spent a few minutes browsing around. We asked the proprietor if she knew anything about the Greystone Manor, and she said that she thought they did weddings there every once in a while, but that it was essentially vacant.

As we browsed the museum, we stumbled across a written history of the LDS church in Lava Hot Springs, where we found a short but informative page on the construction and early history of the Greystone. Amazingly, when it was built it took over 18 years, during which time, classes were held in the unfinished basement. It was only recently (In historical terms, which meant around 45 years ago) that the church was sold and became a hotel/wedding facility/wasp breeding ground.


After we left the museum, we travelled in a large and essentially fruitless search to find the graveyard, one of our little passions, but while we looked for it we did find the Lion's Gate. Surprisingly, it was a very modern looking house on a hill, and from the outside at least, utterly charmless. While we'd seen pictures of the interior, if we'd rented a room here, we would have been pretty dismayed to see the plain exterior and untrimmed lawn.


As we headed back to Poky, we passed the world's slowest granny, who had a line of 15 cars piled up behind her, and pottied the dogs at the Flying J, where we discovered that the only place they had that wasn't decorative and useless Lava rock was their pretty little grass patch in the very front of the store. As a result, the lawn was absolutely covered in dog poop. (Though none of it our dogs, we clean up after ours! ) You should really consider a doggy rest area, Flying J!

Book Review - FREE FALL by Robert Crais

Free Fall by Robert Crais
1994, 304pgs

Free Fall is one of the books I read on my recent trip to Boseman, and it was a welcome switch after the mildly disappointing B&B mystery I'd read earlier. Elvis Cole, the main character of Crais' detective novels is a great creation. A detective with a sharp tongue, quick wit, good with a gun and the ladies, and sporting a Hawaiian shirt. He manages to be classic nior while feeling fresh and fun, and once you add his super quiet, super effective partner Joe Pike to the mix, you have a team to be reckoned with. Crais likes a lot of over the top characters and plots in his stories, but somehow he manages to make them seem fun and natural in his twisted vision of LA, and the books are always a kick.

Free Fall concerns an incriminating video, bad cops, good cops, gangs, a drive in theater, an angry cat and is a fun escape. I'll keep this review short, and say simply that if you're looking for a good LA Noir book that takes place in the sun and goes to some dark places, then Free Fall is for you!

8/10

Next Up - The Alligator's Farewell by Hialeah Jackson

Our next step: Closer To Home

As we worked on our dream to own a Motel, Lindsay and I quite often found ourselves in a reflective mood, looking back on our lives in Pocatello and what we would miss or be happy to leave behind. One thing we kept coming back to was our large group of friends, family, associates and for lack of a better word, connections we had in Poky. I ran a gas station for a few years and in that time built up a group of friendly customers in virtually every aspect of life, from college professors to construction crews, and Lindsay had steadily done the same a block away at Budget Tapes & Records. As we talked more about it, we started to wonder whether we should look into doing something closer to home. Obviously, a motel on the beach was out of the question, and Pocatello already has a few excellent wedding facilities and a a romance themed hotel, but it was lacking a different aspect of hospitality, a Bed & Breakfast.

There had been a B&B in Pocatello a few years back, a block from where Lindsay had grown up, and according to the scuttlebutt when we looked into it, it no longer existed because she had made enough money to open one on a tropical island. That sounded like a pretty good reason to consider it to us! On the trip home from Pendleton, we began seriously batting around the idea of starting a B&B in Pocatello. Unfortunately, we kept butting up against the likely ROUS of startup cash again, but thought that with our drive and ambition, the right location, and using our network of people in Pocatello, we could build a thriving little business and get our foot in the door.

When we arrived home, we immediately started in, looking up properties and contacting our Realtor extraordinaire, Jared.

The hunt was on, yet again!

Movie Review - CORALINE (2009)

Coraline
3D, 2009, 100 min, PG

Wow. Going into this movie, I figured I'd enjoy it but I never counted on the depth of my love for this movie after today.

Coraline is a story about a young girl, freshly moved to the rainy woods of the Northwest with her loving but extremely distracted and dysfunctional parents. Their new home is a gorgeous old Victorian house, transformed into apartments with a swirling stone garden behind it and eccentric neighbors above and below her. While her parents are utterly absorbed in the gardening catalog that they are writing, Coraline is left by herself in a huge, mysterious house. As she explores, she meets a slightly off-kilter neighbor boy, whose grandmother owns the house, an even more off-kilter circus showman and his trained kangaroo rats, and a couple of old burlesque dancers who are off their rockers. One night, Coraline discovers a small door in the wall, locked by an old skeleton key with a button on the end. By day, the door is bricked up, but that night, led by the mice, she discovers a mirror universe, where her parents are loving and friendly, good cooks and successful, and her neighbors are even more over the big top than before. They also have buttons sewed onto their faces where their eyes should be.

Each night, Coraline escapes into the other life, where she plays with her increasingly odd "Other parents" and the mirror version of her talkative neighbor friend, who is mute in the night realm. Then, one night, her "Other mother" asks Coraline to stay forever with them...All she has to do is give up her eyes, and sew on buttons.

From there, Coraline's worlds begin to go creepier and crazier, as her "Other Mother" does all she can to steal Coraline forever!

This movie was phenomenal. Based on a story by Neal Gaiman, author of many respected comic books and novels, and directed by Henry Sellick, the director and animator for Nightmare Before Christmas, the flick is a seamless combination of traditional stop motion animation, computer wizardry, and pure, unadulterated magic. The voice acting is all flawless, and perfectly cast, especially Dakota Fanning as Coraline, and the Oregon landscape of the movie, with drizzly days and creepy crags made me very homesick for a home I don't yet know. Every once in a while, you find a movie where everything just clicks together seamlessly to create a perfect union, and this movie is that kind of rare beast. From the music (By French composer Bruno Coulais and They Might Be Giants) to the design, to the humor, to the slow building sense of wrongness, everything in this was flawless. Coraline was filmed in true 3D, so when you go in a properly equipped theater, they give you a pair of magic Clark Kent glasses to wear. I've always wanted to love 3D, but for me and my heavily prescribed glasses, they've never seemed to work for me, but the new digital theater 3D is great. Frankly, events like this could be the savior of theaters. (Along with my long professed plan to re-introduce serials...) While there were a few events that went oddly colored and double for me (Though not for Lindsay, so I assume it was the results of the glasses having to perch over my regular glasses) the rest of the movie had an amazing level of depth, texture and color, from any angle or position in the theater. I loved it.

I had a friend tell me that she loved this movie more than Nightmare Before Christmas, a movie that she and Lindsay both revere, and about halfway into Coraline, my wife turned to me, and wholeheartedly agreed. It is probably one of the best animated films I have ever seen, both scary and hilarious at the same time. That said, it is obviously not for everyone. Some people might be a bit dismayed at the themes in the movie, and I would strongly discourage any youngsters attending, as there are a lot of scary moments, creepy creatures, a general feeling of dread at times and, well, the old burlesque dancers that live in the basement aren't completely retired....

I loved Coraline ever so much!

10/10

Pack Rat s

For the last seven months or so, Lindsay and I have been in a constant state of unknown. Each time we head out on a trip to visit a property, although there is a slim chance of it going through, it always exists, just enough to make us constantly aware that we may need to pack up and move with a fairly short notice. As we started evaluating that, we realized how much junk we own. We're both collectors, be it books, magazines, toys, yarn, art supplies, CDs, DVDs, Candles, you name it. If it's something that interests us, we have a lot of it, and having as many hobbies as we do, that adds up! We currently live in a good sized 3 bedroom house with a garage, office, 2 storage sheds, and a couple of large closets, and as we started contemplating a move, we realized how things had started to fill up over the last few years in this house.

So we started trying to whittle it down. This is no easy task here, as just with our DVD collection alone, we have close to 4,000, many of which we've bought to watch and have yet to do so. Although we currently have no sound destination, we've started packing and condensing our lives into boxes. At my work, all of our prescription vials come in the same, uniformly sized boxes, and I've started taking every empty one they get, in the hopes of using them almost exclusively. They're a nice size, well suited for moving, both large enough to fit a decent amount in, but small enough to still carry easily. As we pack, we've started throwing out things, attempting to streamline and condense our "stuff." Some of it is easy, we've thrown out old clothes and adapters to things long lost and broken, some of it is difficult. I had boxes of magazines that I'd saved for some inscrutable reason, and I've spent months now slowly browsing through them, cutting out anything I think is truly worth saving and disposing of the rest. I'd estimate that something close to 10 large boxes of magazines has been condensed into one large and heavy one. Some things we haven't shrunk at all, like our books. Though some are certainly disposable, most are either worth reading one more time, or they're things we could possibly sell used in the lobby of our motel when we find one.

Unfortunately, while all of the work is rewarding in a way, it also has a side effect of making us feel very out of sorts, kind of transitory with no goal in sight. It also makes me a bit nervous about fitting all of it in a moving van if the time comes....

Sometime in the next week or so, we will have definitive word back on a property we are working with. If it is positive, we'll have to be fully packed and ready to roll within 3 weeks. This is very exciting. If things go south, in a way this is exciting too. We've decided that after this property, if it falls through, we are going to take a break for a while, lick our wounds, pay off some debt and try to get our enthusiasm back for the hunt. This current place looks pretty good, so maybe we wont have to worry, but if it fails we're kind of okay with that too, because at least then we know what we're doing for around a year. It's not what we want to be doing by any means, but at least it's a solid goal, and we can plan around it.

Of course, that means we have to unpack everything......

September 15th, 2008 - Pendleton, OR - Part VI

This chapter is also known as Failure, Yet Again!

Not that it really ended up too bad, and we not only saw it coming, but were OK with it, but waking up the next morning in The Rugged Country Lodge, it was still a bit of a bitter pill to realize that we'd once again put a good amount of effort, time and money prepping for another failure. Of course, we still had to actually go to the bank and talk to Kris, but we were pretty sure that nothing would come of it.

We got up and greeted the surprisingly brisk morning, and ate some decent, but unimpressive breakfast in the Rooster Room, and checked out. It was still a bit until our meeting, so we parked at the bank, and wandered around downtown for a half hour or so, anxious and nervous, despite being pretty consigned to our inevitable outcome.

At 9am sharp, we wandered to the bank just as Kris was unlocking it. She introduced herself and shook our hands, guiding us into a conference room. Kris chatted with us for a while, telling us that she had been quite excited to meet us, and had been working on our project since we talked. She knew we had virtually nothing in the way of a down payment and had arranged for a gentleman to come in and talk to us about helping finance the RCL, what some people refer to as Angels. I suddenly got a little nervous that this might actually go through. Kris seemed incredibly confident in the Angel, and was really excited to look over our plans. We explained our intent to add some romantic themed rooms and she told us that she had visited a few like that in a different city and loved it, she got even more excited as we elaborated on our future plans to overhaul the website and the image of the Lodge, turning it into a locals spot as well as quality lodging for travelers. Just as we were about to go further into detail, showing her the business plan we'd written up, the Angel arrived.

Sweeping into the room, he shook our hands firmly and sat at the head of the table. He introduced himself and what he did, which was essentially be the bag man for investors, a kind of local Small Business Loan Association, and proceeded to mention the people he worked for, or knew. Now Pendleton is a pretty small city, around 16,000 people, and apparently the people he named were pretty big wigs there, but to us, they were just names, and while we tried to seem impressed, it wasn't easy. Shockingly, he went on for another 10 minutes, name dropping in a vastly important manner. Finally, he got to the nitty gritty and explained to us that he'd looked into the Motel, and that it looked like a great property, and he was interesting in assisting with the financing. We would just need to gather up our credit report, business plan, $70,000.00, a couple of worksheets, pack some bags and we'd be on our way to owning a motel! We kindly asked him to back up a bit, just in case we misheard him, $70,000.00 you say? The Angel nodded solemnly. "You do have at least that much, don't you?" he asked. Across the table, Kris' eyes were huge, she had obviously not seen that number coming either, and she seemed like she was pretty pissed off. "No, not even close to that, sir" we said. He looked at us and said, serious as a heart attack, "Well, you probably know someone you can borrow it from. Borrow it from your parents." Clearly, he was under the mistaken impression that Lindsay's parents who own a little local record store, and my mother, a divorced kindergarten teacher, made ridiculous amounts of money and could easily peel a thousand C-notes off of their rolls to help out their kids. Maybe my mom should have taught school in Pendleton! We tactfully and somewhat incredulously informed him that we really didn't know anyone that could help us, that's why we were talking to him. Kris, seeing our obvious gobsmackery, quickly started closing things up, gathering the Angel of Death's paperwork and handing them to us, telling him that she wanted to talk with us about our options, and we would most certainly be getting ahold of him soon, as she could clearly find an extra 70k chilling in our offseas account, don't you worry none, you betcha!

After the Angel swept out of the room, the papers on the table rustling like leaves in his wake, Kris deflated. Clearly she had thought him to be our savior, a cowboy in a white hat, bursting in with guns blazing, spurs jingling, and moneybags overflowing and instead he came in, twirled his moustache diabolically and foreclosed on the family farm. She apologized profusely, and attempted to fill us with hope that she would find a way for us to get the property, promising to get in touch with us and explain our options. We were told to not give up hope!

We never heard from Kris again. Really, as we climbed back in to Strontium, to begin the long drive back to Pocatello, we felt sorry for Kris and the Cowboy Angel. Kris, because she had been SO CERTAIN of our success, to the extent that some of the papers I glimpsed in her hands looked pretty clearly to be preliminary purchasing worksheets, and instead the Angel had been exactly what we assumed he would be. A businessman, not an Angel. A Businessman is never going to go out on a limb and loan two "kids" thousands of dollars for a business, regardless of their vision and drive. We knew this and it's the main ROUS we've struggled with since day one. We don't have rich parents (Though Lindsay's dad is named Rich...) and we don't have some secret Ace up our sleeve. All we have is our vision, some management and hotel experience and whole hell of a lot of drive, motivation and energy. All we have to do is find someone that believes in us and those qualities to do them right, not in the almighty dollar.

As we drove home, we also started feeling really sorry for the Businessman. He was someone that was clearly successful, well off, but at the same time, he seemed kind of sad to us. He placed such a large amount of importance on dropping names of big people in the city, and then seemed kind of crushed when we weren't awed by them. We love little towns, absolutely LOVE them, but Pendleton had a strange feel to it, like instead of this crazy little western town in a valley like it was, it seemed like some odd subdivision full of gossipy housewives.
We tipped our hats to Pendleton, and The Rugged Country Lodge (or the Silver Rose, as we had considered changing its name to...) and headed towards the rising sun.

If you ever pass through Pendleton, Oregon you should stay at The Rugged Country. The staff is friendly, they have fresh cookies in the lobby, and as long as you don't read the mildly creepy "About Me" letters in the room book, it's utterly charming! You can visit them here.


If you're looking for a genuine bed and breakfast, you couldn't choose a better one than the Riverwalk B&B.

Other points of interest in Pendleton:

The Underground Tour - An absolute GEM. I'll have to do a post on this later, I love it SO much!

The Pendleton Woolen Mills - They have a great store and museum here. Eventually I'm buying a nice wool greatcoat from them. They'll last forever.

The Wildhorse Resort and Casino - I couldn't begin to tell you how to get there, but I've heard they have some good grub!



As we drove home, we stopped at the Hungry Redneck Cafe again, and ate our fill of some excellent diner food and a berry pie that was almost as good as their strawberry. We also formulated our plot for our next step, something that had slowly climbed its way into our consciousness over the last couple of days..... Something exciting, and a little closer to home.....