That was a little more exciting than I'd hoped

I went into Boston today, for a Friends of Captain Awkward meetup, which this time was at one of the cafes at the Boston Public Library. I found the group, put my stuff down, asked where to go to get food, and walked smack-dab into a plate glass door.

As I was catching my breath and getting someone to bring me ice for my head, I learned that someone else had almost done the same thing five minutes earlier—which makes two of us in the fifteen minutes after they closed the door. At that point, the staff put a table in the way, to indicate "this is not open air." Apparently they were required to have it closed because they were serving alcohol, but that's not a reason not to tape up a snowflake decoration, or stencil some drawings of books on the glass, or something.

Then there was coloring and pleasant rambling conversation. After a couple of hours I said my goodbyes, then got a library card. (BPL will give a card to anyone with a current Massachusetts address.) From there, I headed home: before I banged my head on the glass, I'd been thinking of going to Tosci's on the way home, but that would have been significantly more complicated and time-consuming than just taking the green line back to Lechmere.

I had apparently not used up all my social energy, but was chatting cheerfully with a six-year-old about things like the ice cream cake she was going to have later in the afternoon, photos, and libraries: she and her parents very much like the Arlington Library, but hadn't known about the beehive. (The six-year-old asked me where I'd gotten the bees, and I explained that they're not mine, they're the libraries, and I don't know where the librarians got them.)