PLSO Conference Summary -- Part 3

Part 1: [msg]242401[/msg]
Part 2: [msg]242660[/msg]

On Thursday, I pretty much spent most of the day milling around and chatting with friends. When they were in class, I got a little bit of work done using the horrific Conference Center wifi.

On this day, my wife joined us for lunch. This was also the time for the PLSO annual meeting, where we got to find out the state of PLSO (doing much better!), conference details, etc. As it turns out, there were 410 attendees, a little bit down from the previous year, but pretty close to the norm for the last few years. In times past, 700 attendees was a typical number, but alas, the economy has brought that number down.

Anyway, after our salmon lunch, the wife and I did some more milling around. She managed to get some more goodies from the vendors to be distributed via our prize packages and such. We got some really cool goodies this time.

That evening was the big event -- the Scholarship Program's Auction Dinner. There were about 70 items in the silent auction and I think around 10 for the oral auction. The auctioneer is the same guy that has been doing this for PLSO every year, and he's a blast. I'm wishing now that I'd gotten some video to post here, although I'm sure it wouldn't do justice to the real experience. We bid on a couple of silent auction items, which we won. I got a really nice vintage map of Oregon and Washington in a nice frame and Angel got a heavy glass globe of the world.

We also donated a couple of auction items. I threw a website package worth about $600 into the mix and we also assembled a huge basket of goodies. The basket contained the usual SurveyorConnect/BeerLeg swag (mug, shirt, koozies, stickers) along with several other cool items.

Part 4: [msg]242810[/msg]