Present Joys

What a day today was! Let me tell you about it:

• I got a lot of sleep: eight hours of sleep. Better sleep than I’ve gotten in ages.
• We met this super-cool dude Bryan Kahrs in the hotel lobby at 9am. He talked about his life and reviewed some of our portfolios.
• Then we all walked to Chipotle in search of a cheap lunch. After that, Anna, Julia, and I wandered around the city with Lutz, Burleigh, and Vicki Golden, where we found both a really cool street market and the Oscar-Meyer Weinermobile.
• Then we toured Target HQ, which is quaintly nested in downtown Minneapolis, and was great. While there, we took a peek in the Target-branded gift shop.
• After that, we headed over to the convention center to register, where we got a big bag of random things. We then proceeded to shop around the tradeshow floor for even more random things like free posters and paper samples and chapstick thingies.
• Went to the conference’s first general session, which was three hours long and featured a ton of different interesting things (including George Lois!)
• Ate hors d’oeuvres and stuff during a really busy opening reception, where I got to meet Michael Bierut! And do all kinds of other fun stuff, including: spending time with people I enjoy and drinking weird things and trying to coordinate 14 people jumping in unison at a photobooth.
• Rejected my friends’ requests to “go dancing” (whatever the heck that even means) and instead went to a late-night screening of the very nice documentary Sign Painters.
• More sleep, right now? This is so very nice.