Jack’s weekly guest blog on the merry chaos of the bookshop….

There’s absolutely no telling, when we wake up in the morning what the day in the bookstore holds in store (ha!).

Once we’d dealt with the obligatory phone call at 8 am from the guy who stumbled across a stray kitten while walking his dog, things seemed calm – until – – –

Regular customer Bob and his grandson came in to exchange books and use up some of his credit. Since he always heads for the ‘mystery room’ and the kids’ room lies beyond it, I warned them to close the mystery room door as we have a couple of older foster cats in there and we didn’t want our bookstore moggies messing with them.

They were in there a long time and I’d actually forgotten about them when the phone rang. It was Bob, whose grandson had managed to lock Bob in the kids’ room while remaining unsupervised in the mystery room. Both spent some time shouting to each other through the locked door trying to get the door unlocked, but to no avail. And the wee lad couldn’t manage to open our mystery room door and toddle out for help from me. Although he had his cell phone, Bob couldn’t remember the bookstore number, so he phoned his wife to get it, then phoned me to come and let him out.

Meanwhile his wife put out a plea on FaceBook to get her husband rescued. She messaged Wendy: “Did you rescue Bob yet?” Wendy saw the message and thought Bob was a kitten that needed fostering, so sent back, “Which one is he? We adopted out four Bobs this year.”

Thus began a completely different and erroneous wild goose chase, as Sylvia is allergic to cats and couldn’t figure why Wendy was trying to foist one on her when she needed her husband out of the kids’ room! While that was going on I rescued Bob and everyone had a good laugh–including the couple from Buffalo NY who made the trip down to get Wendy’s signature in their copy of ‘The Little Bookstore’.

Hey ho. another day, another adventure.