Saturday morning cartoons and sleep were replaced with a hundred bloggers at CubeSpace. We woke up collectively to a series of speeches, tips, and new friends we didn’t expect.

Like Lorelle VanFossen of Lorelle on WordPress. After showing a video, she suddenly appeared on the scene dressed as a “fairy blogmother”. She was charismatic, zany, and touching. And she woke us up. One of the best parts of her speech was when she told us about Glenda Watson Hyatt and her blog, Do It Myself.

The Left Thumb Blogger

Until hitting the publish button, E-mail had been my most effective means of communicating with the world. WordPress has given me a voice. Without my disability and speech impediment getting in the way. I can meet with people more effectively and in a different way than meeting people face to face.

People can already know me from the inside when they first meet me, so they are not taken aback by my disability.

However, meeting face-to-face may induced some apprehension in how to deal with Glenda-ish, my unique speech pattern caused by my cerebral palsy”…(read more on her blog).

After this, Lorelle pointed out the bottom line, that “that’s all we want, isn’t it? We just want to be heard”.

And with that, she waved her wand (literally, she had one) and told us that she’d be granting all of our wishes. Then she asked us to tell her our stories.There were many.

And afterwards, we all went outside and got our picture taken as a crowd. It was a great way to wake up in the morning.

That was just the first part, of course.

You can follow along too, if you’d like.

• Here’s an exhaustive custom RSS feed (which includes all Twitter feeds associated with #wordcamppdx, #wordcampdx, and #wcpdx and the Flickr stream),
• Flickr photo stream of  #wordcampdx
• The Live UStream Feed of the event.

If you haven’t met me, and I haven’t met you, I’d love to meet you at WordCamp Portland. I’m @caseorganic on Twitter and the words “Amber Case” are on my name badge. See you there!