SSR 4: Bluephies Blogger Meet Up

Friday night, after an afternoon of fun viewing SATC2 with my high school friends, Megan and Kajsa, Julie and I met up with Ashley to attend a Blogger Meet Up dinner at Bluephies.  Bluephies is only a few blocks from Edgewood College, where I attended my freshmen and sophomore years, and is a place I often find myself when I am back in town because it’s close to campus and a great place to stay and chat a while long after you’ve finished eating.  It’s also one of Julie’s most favorite places in Madison and has an easily customizable menu to help tailor to any vegetarian/vegan needs, so it seemed like a perfect fit when we were planning the meet up.

We had a few Madisonian bloggers and readers who weren’t able to make the dinner, but that didn’t stop us from having bunches of fun!  In attendance for dinner:

Yours truly, Kelly, Ashley & Julie.

 

I ordered a glass of merlot offered on the dinner specials menu, and then had a heck of time deciding what I wanted to eat.  Ok. That’s not entirely true. After reading the menu for about 90 seconds, I was committed to TWO side dishes but thought that perhaps I should have some sort of entre as well.  I noticed the option that you could make any burger on the menu a set of two sliders for $4, and thought it was a nice way to bulk up my dinner. I had a hard time deciding between all the yummy options!

 

I finally settled on the black bean burgers, and wasn’t disappointed! These little guys were packed with flavor.
I only ate one of the sliders, however, because these guys stole.the.show. Introducing the most delicious plate I met in all my days – asparagus frites with honey mustard dipping sauce.

I also ordered a side plate of sweet potato fries, which were quite tasty, but didn’t even compare to the asparagus frites.

We had great conversation going on at the table throughout dinner, and I really enjoyed my time with the ladies.  For dessert, I ordered another glass of wine and a piece of carrot cake, which was so rich and wonderful that I could barely eat half of it.

Even more rich and wonderful was the in-depth conversation on blogging, blogger-reader relationship, social media, anonymity, and more that took place when my friends Megan and Kajsa showed up to join us.  As I mentioned recently, Megan just defended her thesis, which included a lot of research and performance of blog monologues.  Kajsa is working on her dissertation at the UW, and has been studying communication and new media for years.  I’m quite confident that Megan and Kajsa were as interested in us as bloggers and readers, as we were with them studying us!

I had such a fabulous evening with these ladies!  I would love to set up some more discussion between bloggers and non-bloggers who are so interested in the community from a scholarly perspective.  I think we could have asked one another questions for hours!  (we actually were the last group in the restaurant, 45 minutes after they closed!)  After speaking with Kajsa about our conversation later in the weekend, I learned that she had gained a lot of information and inspiration for the next project she hopes to work on from our discussion on the encouragement and support we as healthy living bloggers lend one another in this community.  I think it’s pretty awesome and can’t wait to learn more about her ideas!

It’s really interesting to me to think about how there are groups of people, classes, and projects studying what is such a big part of my life!  Would you like to be included in future discussions and surveys?