Saturday comes to a close

Hi all you blog lurkers out there! Hope all that are here in Savannah had a great time. I know I had a great time meeting many of you. So many new faces out there this year, which is wonderful. Thank you for coming and seeing what we are all about.

So ... since I last wrote, here's a recap. Ellen made it in and we all went to the beautiful Trustee Theater to get things set up. The SCAD people were amazing and wonderful to work with. The AV guy got everything up and running nicely for Ellen, as well as our presentation that followed. Once that was squared away, got to hang out in the lovely space of Red Gallery, where we mingled with the SCAD group. Kudos to Florence Bryant here, who has been amazing and helpful and getting the Trustee Theater ready for us as well as the Red Gallery reception set up. The food was sublime and the space was really unique. Back over to the Trustee Theater for Ellen's talk, which was terrific. She was funny and dry, and yet completely relevant, talking about how educating the world about design, making it an open world instead of a closed world, will only elevate our roles, not replace them. Not only was her talk very well received, she is such a warm, friendly person. The sort of person I'd love to hang out and have a beer with, in fact. It's always nice to find that a person so well-respected is a genuine, approachable, likable human being as well.

Larry Pearce received the UCDA Award this year. Even though Larry works for Clemson's biggest rival (University of South Carolina), we love Larry. Another truly lovely, likable, humble kind of soul. So it was such a treat to watch him realize that Dave was talking about him as he read the announcement. To add to the fun, two long-time UCDA friends had visited Larry and managed to scan in many photos of him while he went to work, so we had lots of funny and sweet and probably very embarrassing photos of him to show. His staff made an Office parody about him that was really cute. I doubt there was better recipient for the award this year.

And then the carnival! Beer! Pretzels! Cotton candy! You name it, even corn dogs and caramel apples and music and frog bog, along with a caricature artist and a card guy, well it was a party. Seemed like folks enjoyed hanging out in the square for the evening and we had absolutely beautiful weather for the event. We passed out our networking game, in which folks had to find 12 different people to fit 12 different Savannah-themed descriptions. I'm about halfway there, but others have finished. I think finding someone who has read Treasure Island might be the toughest thing. If anyone needs someone who has sold Girl Scout cookies, I'm the gal. I've sold them as a girl scout and now the mother of a girl scout.

And now I write to you about our first day, dear blog readers. Thanks so much to all of you that I met tonight that told me I wasn't just writing for my own amusement! I'll continue to write. And if you are here and want to add your own fun to the blog, I'd love to have more perspectives to it all. Write me and I'll invite you to contribute.