Fun Weekend Ahead!

(Beeville Art Museum, Texas)

I’m heading to Central Texas this morning to attend the opening of the work of San Antonio artist Barbel Helmert at the Beeville Art Museum, which will be held tomorrow afternoon. Barbel moved to my town a year or so ago and has become a good friend of mine. I’m looking forward to attending her opening and then kicking up my heels with her in San Antonio on Saturday night. Before that though, I’m very excited to be spending tonight in Austin with WomenBloom founder, Allison Allen! I contacted Allison, whom I’ve never met in person but who I consider to be a good friend, to let her know I’d be in the area. I was hoping to get together for dinner or at least a cocktail. She very generously offered to host me. She’s really neat and I can’t wait to meet her! This will be the first time I’ve had a face-to-face meet with a blogging friend and I know it’s going to be lots of fun! In fact, the whole weekend will be about meeting new people, my favorite thing.

I think the beauty and benefit of this Internet age is the ability to interact with all sorts of interesting people absent geographical boundaries. I’d been reading Allison’s fantastic blog for awhile. When I climbed on the Twitter bandwagon I started following her and one day saw a Tweet that she was staying in a beautiful B&B that just so happened to be about 25 miles up the road from where I live. I Tweeted her back, asking what she was doing out here and letting her know that she was in “my” country. She was out here having a special weekend with her special someone and, after the “what a coincidence” Tweets we had no further contact during that weekend. After she went home we stayed in touch and discovered we had some things in common and that she is very familiar with this area. We’ve e-mailed back and forth and “chatted” on each other’s blog comments ever since. Now for the payoff – I get to meet her!

Hopefully this will be the first of many opportunities to meet more of the great people I’ve come to appreciate since I started blogging. If you’re a blogger, have you had the pleasure of meeting any of your blogging friends? How did it go?