Review time in Sicily

All this happened a week ago. Crazy. I'm back in Rome now, but I'll finish up about the rest of the Sicilia trip. It didn't really work out with the AutoCAD. In fact, it royally messed up my computer- all of my .exe files (Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, iTunes, Skype, Microsoft Word) would only "open" in Adobe Acrobat. Which of course they couldn't open in. I was getting so frustrated because I had a work I had to do on my computer software, and I couldn't do anything! I found a solution online though, and downloaded that- thank you Google.

I'm pretty sure Thursday and Friday were work days because our final project was due on Saturday. Thursday night, we had Party Numero 1 at Nino's house. It was a potluck dinner- Marcella made pasta, Tiffany made a delicious zucchini dish. There was a lot of food, and I ate a ton- it was my first real meal of the day. I had a hard time enjoying myself though, because I was still upset about my sketchbook, and I was feeling stressed about the upcoming deadline. I even letf the party early to go back to studio and do work. Friday morning I was doing well on the drawings that we needed to have. Each family had to have a powerpoint of about 8 slides, and one of them was a rendering, another a section, another a plan. The rest were text and diagrams. Not a huge list of requirements, but meant to be high in quality.
However, Nino wanted to have meetings with each of us about our projects, so after that meeting, I had to redesign my project. The idea for my "lookout" site was to have a "love garden," an area that would provide parking, better (covered) seating, better lighting, and encourage movement through the side, instead of just along the edge. Why love? Because every time I was there, I saw couples making out, or talking. After my crit with Nino, I decided to elevate the parking- have a ramp with platforms going up for people to park their cars and have a space to be alone. The platforms create canopies for seating underneath, and the area would be covered in flowering vines and different plants. Each project had to have an IT (Information Technology) part to it, so there were colored lights on the platforms. When the platforms were unoccupied they were brightly lit. When they were occupied, they dimmed, allowing for greater privacy. This also let drivers know how many spaces were available, so that they didn't have to go all the way up just to realize there were no spaces available.
It was a fun project, but after talking with Nino (the guy in the purple shirt in the picture), I had basically 24 hours to make all the drawings over again. And it was a little difficult without using AutoCAD (it never installed correctly), but I had success! They collected our powerpoints at 1 pm on Saturday, and we started presenting around 3:30 pm. I'm so glad they pushed the deadline forward, because I was able to get real food before the presentations started. Friday night was a little rough, and I was sick to my stomach, but we all pushed through and celebrated on Saturday night with another party at Nino's.

Our presentation went really really well. TIC was the last clan to present, so we'd heard all the other comments. I was a little worried, but decided to go for it. Oh, and all the other clans did the projects as group projects. So overall, they only had 3 or 4 projects, while my clan had 8 individual projects that linked together with a common concept (organic network). And while it sucked not having another person to share the workload with, we were able to complete the same work in the same amount of time. And we didn't hate each other at the end! Nino complimented me on my verbal presentation, saying it was the best one (thank you Toastmasters!) and also said that Allie, Rachel, Kristy, and I had really cohesive projects that connected to each other and made sense. It was a really good review- they loved our projects.

This project was completely different from the Piazza one in that I only used technology. I mean, I sketched, but all of my drawings were on the computer. In the Piazza project, I didn't use my computer once. The entire review was video-recorded too. Hopefully I'll be able to get the link. And that night we had Party Numero 2. Allie and I went with Marcella to pick up the food- aranchini, pasta, e pasta alla melenzane (pasta with eggplant). It was soo good. And wine. There is always wine.

Oh, and I went to the train station on Friday and actually talked to a conductor, since every time Marcella or I tried calling the station they didn't pick up. But to no avail- the conductor said there was no way I was getting it back. Here's my part of our presentation: