It was inevitabl
e, but no less embarrassing for that, when a good friend who uncomplainingly looks after the bookstore regularly, arrived today thinking he was needed only for me to realize that he wasn’t.
James became our ‘go-to’ guy for shop cover a couple of years ago and has proved an absolute godsend. He knows where everything is, can sweet talk customers and ‘hand-sell’ with the best of them. Not only that but he makes sure our menagerie, including the ever-changing kitten population is well taken care of.
Ever since ‘The Little Bookstore’ was first published five years ago we have had times when we’ve been away for extended promotional tours or just on vacation and discovered that there were interesting people out there that relished the idea of running a bookstore and living in it. We’ve been fortunate to find them and give them that opportunity and some have done it more than once.
Where James fits in is when we need just two or three days and sometimes as little as a couple of hours.
However, with Wendy in WV on her writing residency, there are a few extra things for me to keep an eye on, including the afore-mentioned kitten population.
Around the middle of last week the team that runs Appalachian Feline Friends were getting geared up for a kitten transport to another rescue in MD and that can sometimes be a bit ‘changeable’ from day to day. Two of our long-term fosters here in the store are Fang and Delight and they were scheduled for updated shots today. However, they then got spaces on the transport which was leaving first thing this morning. So they got rescheduled for their shots to Monday.
This afternoon I was tending to mixed bunch of customers when James arrived. “Hello” I said – “what brings you here?” Sure enough – I’d asked him to mind the store while I took Fang and Delight for their shots and completely forgotten to tell him they’d already been! Just to complete the whole sorry story, the transport was cancelled because too few kittens were ready to travel. So Fang and Delight are happy bookstore cats with up to date shots.
Wendy Welch: Books, Yarn, Cats, Opioids 
I’m glad so few kittens had to be transported! I have faith that the primary motive of moving animals from shelter to shelter is to expand exposure and adoption prospects, but I’m aware of its having been done as part of petnapping and animal hating activities, too. Fewer animal transports is better.
(If we could just persuade Petfinder to get rid of the nasty sticky cookies, I’d bring the adorable Petfinder pictures back on my web site! Readers liked and miss them, and I enjoyed doing them…the Internet has the potential for expanding animals’ adoption prospects so much better than transports.)
I can assure you that we only work with very reputable organizations and double check ourselves as well. We only do a limited number of transports each year. One motivation is to prevent the euthanizing of cats and kittens in our local kill shelter. We have succeeded in getting from 350 per year to zero.