Karen and I got an offer on our house today. We countered, they countered and we're thinking about what to do. We're definitely close.They want to close in a hurry...like before the end of July. All of a sudden, we have new worries. We're going for a bike trip at the beginning of August and it seems, suddenly, as if we may not have a home to come back to. We can leave our pets with Karen's sister, and have our stuff put into a Pod. But I'm imagining flying back from Washington and wondering where the heck to go.

Actually, something very similar to that happened when I split up with my ex-wife. I came back from a trip and had no place to go. Very weird feeling.

I spent the morning working on the new new near future. I didn't get as much done as I'd hoped but I got enough for Karen to read 10 pages. She wasn't all negative (although this is so much the kind of book she doesn't read) but clearly I've got a lot to do.

I've gone into my week of directing bridge. Mark and Kathy, who normally direct most of the games, are down in San Antonio for a bridge regional tournament and so I'm directing my own games and theirs as well. I fired up my car for the first time in about three weeks because I don't like riding my bike on busy streets after dark. Too many people have been run over on bikes, even during the day. I don't worry too much during the day although drivers sometimes honk at me. But at night, I can just imagine being flattened.

I'm going to make A HUNTER AND HIS PREY by Joshua Calkins-Treworgy the www.BooksForABuck.com book of the day. Ace bounty hunter Portenda doesn't much want an apprentice, but when Jonah Staples makes it hard to say no and when Jonah's sister is kidnapped, Portenda and Jonah set out to find her and save her. A different look at fantasy...only $3.99. Learn more, read the exerpt or buy the book here: http://www.booksforabuck.com/sfpages/sf_08/hunter-prey.html. Available in HTML, Adobe Acrobat PDF, Palm DOC, Microsoft Reader, Mobipocket and ePub formats. Here's the cover (cover design by Karen Leabo):

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