Day Zero - back to work

It is pleasing to be missed when you're only gone a few days. I could have done without the immediate-onset backache, but otherwise...Day Zero began with free latte and ended with my heroic (not really) bat capture just before leaving. I had an audience of youth ministers and music teachers though, that was fun. Whence the bats, you ask? We have them in the belfry, obviously (note to all you new and combative Council members.) But bats can slip through tiny cracks to gain access to interior spaces, and believe me, at Northeast Community we got cracks. The recent thaw (says my husband) is what's bringing them out -- they lay low in the winter, I guess, and now they think it's spring and time for bugs. Problem is, they squeeze into the hallways in the classroom wing and then they are stuck. Zoom, zip! Up and down and around. Fortunately we possess the Bat Net (though my boss the pastor murdered one with a broom just yesterday, home-run style. Yeesh.) The Bat Net is a homemade thing that's been around the church longer than I have, with a very light-weight close-mesh net sewn onto a wire hoop (probably a coat hanger) and attached to the end of a broom handle. Catching bats with one is easy: You stand still in the hallway with the net down and wait for the bat to fly at you, which it eventually will (cause it's a hallway). When you see the whites of its eyes, as it were, up comes the net and the bat flies into it. Piece of cake, but you can't do it too early or the bat will veer around the net. Then you take it outside, flip the net inside out and the bat flies off.Trouble is, at this time of year the bats are cold and weak. All that zipping around the halls doesn't help. I turned out the net, and the bat just plopped onto the sidewalk. I had to prod him into the bushes and leaves (and boy was he pissy.) He probably won't make it, unless he figures out how to get back into the building. It's too cold. Poor thing. But what do I do? Turn it loose in the sanctuary?That's it. Our darned old non-functional sanctuary can become a real Sanctuary, for Bats! Maybe we can get some funding. Just enough to feed the bats, while the ceiling gradually collapses over the next decade. How gothic.