Boston

A few weeks ago, the chair of a committee that I am a part of messaged all of us to ask for volunteers to attend a workshop at Northeastern University in Boston. The workshop was about Scholarly Communications, and sounded deadly boring to me, but I was pretty available for the two days in question, so I reluctantly volunteered. I expected that others would WANT to go--but he only initially got two volunteers, and he needed a team of four to attend. One other stepped forward (metaphorically speaking) and our chair was planning to attend himself, so we had our team of four.

I like to go new places, and I have never been to Boston before, so that should have been tempting, but it wasn't really because I really dislike flying, and the timing was such that we were going to leave on Sunday and come back immediately at the end of the conference on Tuesday. So not much time for any sort of a Boston experience.

However, the conference ended up being much more interesting than expected; I met some really nice people from Brown University and the University of California at Sacramento, and a guy named Ammon from the University of Virginia who was seeking out the BYU group, so probably one of those people formerly known as Mormons or LDS. And the content was actually okay--we would have lecture-ish presentations followed by workshopping at our tables, so we were kept engaged, for the most part. I had some serious jet lag going on--I went to bed way too early on Sunday evening because of exhaustion, which resulted in me waking up way too early on Monday morning, then barely falling back to sleep about when I should have been getting up--so that made for me fairly prone to dozing off. But I took notes to keep me awake (sometimes falling asleep in the middle of a word) and played a bit of Sherlock on my phone occasionally to wake myself up.

View from the windows of our conference room. We were on the 17th floor of our building, and there were lots of windows. The building under construction with interesting architecture is the Mary Baker Eddy Library (Seventh Day Adventist).

On Monday night, our fearless leader decided to take us to Boston Common for our evening repast, even though historic sights were closed for the night. So at least I got a bit of a feel for Boston--and how it felt was like it would be much more interesting to visit when it was more green and less cold. I did take a few pictures.

First we walked through a mall to get to the train station:

Pop-up cards that I thought were cute.

Pop-up cards that I thought were cool.

Inside the mall--those are my co-workers with their back to the camera.

Graveyard in Boston Common - maybe we have ancestors buried there? It was locked (it and the bajillion other old graveyards. I only took a picture of one, although I took pictures of signs at other graveyards.)

Is that maybe the State Capitol Building?

Park Street Church from a distance

Park Street Church closer up

Boston Common Plaque

Where the grave of John Hancock is (Locked so we could not go inside.)

Graveyard for Governors

Another John Hancock site...

Old State House Museum (where the sign from the picture above can be found.)

My colleague Ellen playing a random piano they have sitting around for anyone to play. She played "Saturday in the Park"

The trees have lights. I do not think they are Christmas Lights. They are lights for the sake of lights.

On Tuesday, the workshop ended at noon, followed by the opportunity to tour the Northeastern library and another building that is all new and high techy.

Lobby of the high-techy building. Cool spiral staircase, but honestly, suicide risk is all I could think. Call me morbid.

Ceiling of the lobby of the high-techy building.

I did not take any pictures of their library, which has four floors. On the first floor, there is a small reading room--at least the first thing you see when you walk in the door is books! The only other place you will find books is on the third floor. They have discarded 2/3 of their books. Let me say that again. They have discarded TWO THIRDS of their books.

I don't know. I just think, honestly, that if you want to destroy human knowledge, then put everything online, because all you need to obliterate information is a really good power outage. I mean, I like the convenience of online as much as anybody, but I just think that having the actual factual pieces of paper can be a really good idea.

But if I know anything, I know that I am getting old. So.

We took a more scenic route back to our hotel, taking a few pictures along the way--well, technically, I took only one picture. But as a group, "pictures" would be accurate.

The only picture I took while walking back to the hotel--Musicians Mutual Relief Society. Because Musicians and Relief Society. That was kind of fun.

We grabbed our suitcases from the concierge, and then headed for the airport. I finished the book I was reading (The Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison) and in a few hours, home again, home again, joggity jig.