Greetings from Springfield

Hello there and greetings from the MLA Conference in Springfield. I arrived here yesterday with some colleagues from the Everett and Malden libraries, and after some difficulties involving finding parking (hotel parking lot was full), and getting to the highway, we made it in one piece. Yesterday, was the day of authors and I enjoyed seeing them so much (more in the next post on the specifics). Seeing author programs always reminds me why it was I started working in libraries when I was 14 years old. Speaking of that, I ran into a woman who was a reference librarian at my hometown library back when I was a page, and whose kids went to high school with me. I think she was a little weirded out by the fact that I am pushing 34 and worked with her 20 years ago. No worries. She looks exactly the same as she did 20 years ago.
Springfield, incidently is the hometown of Dr. Seuss. There is a beautiful sculpture garden in the quadrangle which includes the Springfield Library and The Springfield Museum of Fine Arts. There is also a picture of the Cat in the Hat in my hotel room. And yours truly posed with a little Cat in the Hat for the Springfield library who will be using it on their Facebook page. They agreed that we can use it for our Facebook page and Flickr accounts.
In other news, I ran into some of our sales reps, including Nancy from Recorded Books, Lou who represents several of our reference publishers, and Paul who does the same. I was very excited because Lou gave me a reference set for free that I was planning on purchasing, anyway. (The bad news is that I had to schlep a four volume reference set throughout the conference hall. The good news, I now am much stronger than I originally thought.