I’m going to go backwards when telling you about my weekend at IFBC in Seattle. This first post is actually about my last meal.

I did not take a photo of my last meal in Seattle.  I did not Instagram, or Tweet, or even Facebook.  I did not “check in” to the little French bistro where I had brunch at the almost silly hour of 2pm.

That was not my original intent.

After wandering through the Pike Place Market for over an hour, snacking on crab cocktail and flipping through stacks of vintage this and handmade that, my plan was to go eat somewhere, take a ridiculous number of pictures of my meal, and check myself in with a photo of the glass of sparkling whatever-was-on-the-menu to which I was treating myself. Then, I noticed how low my phone battery was getting.  As I looked around, charger in hand, for a place to plug in, the hostess walked over and offered to plug it in at the hostess stand for me. I panicked. I was at a bit of a crossroads here. Do I take Joe Yonan’s advice from that morning and unplug, or did I grip my phone to my chest with Gollum-like protectiveness and just do as much social networking as I could before the phone died? I mean, I hadn’t even taken a picture of my plate yet!

Ultimately, I handed over my phone.

I spent the next hour sipping bubbles and enjoying the delicious house cured salmon in front of me. It was the best decision I could have made.

After an entire weekend of live tweeting and Facebook posts and taking pictures of every single morsel that went into my facehole, that one meal was mine. I’m going to keep being kinda selfish and not even describe it to you now. What I will tell you is that through the entire meal, I didn’t think about anything else. I didn’t think about the weekend, or the blog posts I’d do after I got home, or how many page views I’d get after publishing them. I just ate my food. And you know what? It was really, seriously, truly, lovely.

Thanks, Joe, for the advice. I expect I will be using it a lot from now on.