As advertised, Julie, the girls, and I made an appearance at the Seattle weblogger's meetup tonight. It was good to see Anita Rowland again -- this is the second time that I've met her, but both times I haven't gotten the chance to talk to her very much. Maybe Julie will post our picture of Anita playing with the girls. People were very accommodating towards the girls, and I thought that they acquitted themselves quite nicely. 7-9:30pm in the midst of adults is a long time for kids their age, so I was really happy with how they did. Abigail thoroughly enjoyed the experience, Michaela thought it was "just okay", and Elisabeth wanted to be passed between Julie and I. I think that she was warming up just as it was getting time for us to go. The two older girls universally approved of the donut with sprinkles and kool aid (!) that we bought as their share of the coffee house tax. Abigail got her own conversation - people wanted to know about her school and what she's learning.

I ended up talking to Eric of WiredFool and Anita's husband Jack Bell, who were cooking up some geeky .NET stuff. Mark Ajarn and I talked a little bit about the ups and downs of self-employment. I also spent a little time talking with Phil of Phillustrations and Cat of Justlaura.com. We got to meet Jake of 8bitjoystick.com (who has a summary of the folks where were at the meetup). Jake is also from our side of the water -- maybe someday there'll be enough bloggers for us to have one of these on our side of the water, too. Most of the other blog related meetings that I have been to have been in the context of technology folks, or at technology conferences, so it was interesting to be in the midst of bloggers who are not writing about technology oriented subjects. Phil and I talked about his photoblog and some of the ways that it provides some motivation for him to get out there and shoot some photographs. I think that this is true (but to a lesser) extent for me as well, that having something interesting to write in the blog is motivation for being more focused on stuff that I'm working on.

One of the oddest things that happened was that I sat down with one of the girls, and someone said "your're that guy", to which my immediate reaction is "no I'm not -- and whatever it is, I didn't do it". Well, it turns out that I did do it -- this fellow had read Monday's post about the meetup and showed up because of it. Unfortunately, I got distracted because I needed to tend to one of the kids, so we never actually got to talk. My apologies for that, and please do get in touch if there was something specific you wanted to talk about.