I had a nice long post on my city's library all typed up yesterday, but the internet connection croaked just as I was posting it and of course I couldn't recover it, since I hadn't copied it to clipboard before hitting "post" (stupid me) and IE wouldn't let me go back without reloading the page (stupid piece of shit that passes for a browser). Let's try to reconstruct it a bit...
It all started from me wandering the internet and stumbling upon my city's library's website. Seems that everybody has a website nowadays, but I like that one, it's made well. It even has a site map, which is a good thing since it's full of info. And I like the design.
I should go back to visit that library sometime, haven't been there in years. Think I'll do that as soon as it opens again (they're moving it to another building, according to the site, so it's closed).
Maybe I'll even borrow some books... though I'll have to dig up my old library card. I remember the number - 7387 - but I doubt that will be enough, especially since it's been years. And I don't know where it went, since I used to borrow books without having to show the library card, I showed up once a week so the librarian knew me pretty well. And she let me go over the limit and borrow more than three books at a time, too.
I could of course get a duplicate, but I can't be bothered to pay the fee... and I could register again, but I like my old low number. Even just a few years after I'd registered the numbers were already around 15000+, and that was ages ago. It's probably in a drawer somewhere, I'll have to dig when I get home.
I could of course use my brother's card... but I doubt he still has it, he was never as much of a bookworm as I was, and I used to use both his card and mine to borrow books simply because he never used it, so I could get six books rather than three. (This was before the librarian decided to just let me borrow as many books at a time I wanted.) He's probably lost it. And I don't like his number... 7388, obviously, since he registered right after me (it was summer and mom dragged us both to the library, "it's time you learn about the existence of libraries and stop making me spend so much in books" was how she put it if I remember correctly), it's nicely low but it doesn't have the symmetry-but-not-quite that 7387 has.
I wonder if the librarian I knew is still there... I think so, Teresa Schiavone says the site and the name is familiar. I wonder if she'd remember me or recognize me. Probably not, it's been years.
But then again, I used to go every week... heh. I still remember her face perfectly, and other things like where the shelves with the books I liked the most were, and how nice it was to just sit at a table in a nice and quiet summer afternoon, when it was hot outside but cool inside, and read and relax. (And how I hated it when students came to the library to research something, and ended up not researching but instead talking and laughing really loudly. I left almost immediately in those cases, picked up the books I wanted and borrowed them and left. And I still wish I'd had the courage to smack them over the head with an encyclopedia and tell them it's a library, be quiet, for fuck's sake, some of us are trying to read here.) And there are so many anecdotes I could tell... like that summer there was a temp worker at the library, and she was noting down borrowed books while the librarian tidied a few shelves. So I go up to the desk with my usual stack of books (I'd been particularly evil that day, I don't remember whether it was on purpose or not but I had a stack of a dozen books... 4x the borrowable amount), and she looks at me, at the pile of books, at me again, and starts making noise about how I can't borrow so many books, I will never read them in the time I could keep them (one month, ffs... a dozen books wouldn't last two weeks for me), I must follow the rules, and so on... then she calls the librarian over, points at me, and looks at her expectantly. And the librarian goes, "oh, her. I forgot to warn you about her. She's special. Let her borrow as many books as she wants."
Yeah. I should definitely go back sometime soon...