Well, I’m finally back to normal routine, which means I can actually sleep in on the weekends. It’s amazing how those few extra hours can mean the difference between being alone in your car and having a screaming match with the nametag you’re wearing around your neck that got caught on your ear whilst you were trying to remove it, and staying calm when you get knocked out of HQ Trivia at question 4 because you don’t know ANYTHING about American geography. On Tuesday, I said to the nametag “Get off me, you stupid f*cking piece of sh*t!!”, but last night, knowing that I had an infinite number of hours to laze around in bed, I simply looked at my phone and quietly whispered, “Calling the lines on the periodic table ‘periods’ isn’t very f*cking creative.” Note that I’m no less sweary when I’m rested—I’m just more subdued about things.

Anyway, on Wednesday, Ken sent me a BBM (which is like a text message that very old people use with a Blackberry, and yes, I had to download a specific app onto my iPhone to receive them because Ken won’t text like an actual human being) which said, “There’s a box of books on our porch. Do you know anything about this?” After work I called him to find out more:

Me: What’s this about a box of books?
Ken: I came home and there was a cardboard box full of books on the porch.
Me: What kind of books? Can we put them in the little library?
Ken: I don’t think so. Some of them are kind of…adult.
Me: You mean, like, porn? Did someone leave a box of porn on our front porch?! Who would do that?!
Ken: Well, they’re kind of porn-ish. There’s one about 50 Shades of Grey from Christian Grey’s perspective.
Me: Putting aside the fact that somehow you know his name is Christian, what else is there?
Ken: There’s some pretty racy stuff…Also, I only know his name because I read the back of the book.
Me: Sure, honey.

Then he read me the synopsis of one of the other books, which is a ‘Harlequin Blaze’ novel: “For venture capitalist Adam Sutherland, attending Camp Winnehatchee’s reopening was a no-brainer. He’s even reuniting with former camp counsellors to chip in and help revive the camp. What he ISN’T expecting is to find a girl sleeping in his bunk. Or that the girl is none other than Julia McKee, who went from shy and awkward to scorching hot babe…Julia intends to show her bad-boy childhood crush just how to put the ‘wild’ back into the wilderness. And this time, he’ll be the one left wanting more…”

Me: OK, we definitely can’t put that in the little library. ‘Scorching hot babe’? That sounds super-cheesy, and kind of like a guy wrote it. What does it say about the author?
Ken: The bio says that the author is a woman who has written 65 books for Harlequin Blaze since 1993. Get this—“she enjoys music, theatre, and musical theatre.
Me: A woman of wide and varied interests.
Ken: Also, “She is active working with high school students in the performing arts and lives with her cat.”
Me: What? Does her school board know she writes porn? Do you think that “active working with high school students in the performing arts” is a euphemism? Is this where she gets her story ideas?! There is so much wrong about this…that poor cat.
Ken: Well, we can’t put any of these in the little library, that’s for sure.

Let me explain about the little library. A couple of years ago, Ken and I wanted to do something for our community. We have no actual library, and on the weekends, the school library is closed. So we built a cupboard, mounted it on a pole, and stocked it full of children’s books so that the kids in our community would be able to find something to read on the weekends. It’s been very popular, and regularly, I can look out the window and see a family stop, peruse the shelves and pull out a book. In the past, people have donated books to the library, but they’ve always been children’s books, except for the one time someone gave us a box of Spanish textbooks, which we donated to Value Village. Everybody in town knows that it’s a CHILDREN’S library. So why would someone give us porn? (And believe me, I opened up a page, and it’s very explicit. Also, in order to write this post, I had to touch one of the books that someone else had read whilst ‘enjoying’ its graphicness, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, I realized after that there was someone’s blond hair sticking out from between a couple of pages, so I am now in full-blown handwashing mode). Is it someone who read My Week 181: 50 Shades of Eww and wants to keep that ball rolling? Do I need to put up a sign that says, “Donations are welcome—no porn, please.”? Or conversely, a sign that says, “My marriage is fine!” in case it’s someone who’s just trying to be helpful?

At any rate, I have no idea who the books belonged to, but now, I’ll be walking around town on the lookout for a blond woman with a big smile on her face.