Gone all day yesterday, but blogging was not forgotten. Far from it. After a trip to the Philadelphia Art Museum where I immersed myself in the morbidly self absorbed art of the unabashedly Stalinist surrealist Frida Kahlo, I got in my car and hightailed it to Baltimore for a very different event, and a more appetizing one -- both in the political and literal sense.

So I spent a very enjoyable afternoon at the Baltimore Blogger Meetup, which was held at Mama's on a Half Shell -- a restaurant I highly recommend, especially for seafood lovers.

Longtime blogfriend Rachel Sawyer of Tinkerty Tonk was there, was were David Foster of Photon Courier, who also posts at Chicago Boyz, and Jonathan of Chicago Boyz. (I guess you could say Chicago invaded Baltimore.)

I never know how pictures are going to turn out, and we were sitting outside in the afternoon sunlight, which makes them even more unpredictable. While it isn't one of the predictable photos of people looking and squinting at the camera, the best photo I have shows Rachel and I looking at Jonathan's camera, instead of my camera (which was in the hands of David). So it's a picture of us looking at someone else's camera.

If there's any truth to the old superstition that cameras capture souls, it shows our souls being captured by Jonathan! (Speaking of "souls," Jonathan also took a photograph of everyone's feet, and I don't have it, or I'd feed it up and readers could make judgments about whether the attendees and their soles were well heeled or something....)

We had a wide-ranging conversation about everything from popular culture to economics to the election and even the highly politicized weather.

And finally there was the check!

As you can see, the generosity and munificence of bloggers who subscribe to the theories of Milton Friedman know no bounds! *

It was a lot of fun, and I wish such events happened more often.

*Should I feel obligated to point out that the $2.00 was not really the tip?

(People have been known to take me too literally, so maybe.)

UPDATE: Saying "if I revealed anymore, I'd have to kill you," Rachel posts a highly classified picture of the footwork that went into the meeting.