It's difficult to celebrate the first birthday of this blog this week. The initial entry, on September 10th of last year, was something that Larry wrote about filing documents in Family Court of Delaware called Deficient Practice of Advisory Notices of Deficiency.
The second blog entry was made a little more that two weeks later, and was a question and answer session written by Private Investigator Michael T. O'Rourke, who contributes some really interesting material to the blog under the title Tricks of the Trade, approximately once a month.
After a week or so into October, I joined Larry in posting to the blog. We hadn't figured out yet how to have more than one person use their own logons to get to the site in Blogger. I didn't think to differentiate the postings I made from the ones that Larry was making by writing my name above the poster name stamp that blogger inserts (i.e., posted by Larry Sullivan at 6:16 PM). ( We weren't trying to mislead anyone. We were just tying to use a technology that we didn't quite understand fully at the time. Bloggers' documentation has gotten better.) A little later, when I realized that might be misleading, I started signing my name to the posts I made as part of the body of the post. When Larry switched to Blogger Pro, about a month or so later, that was a lot clearer on how to write a blog as a "team."
So, while tomorrow is the first birthday of this blog, it wasn't very active for at least a month. Instead of writing about what happened last September 11th, we sort of put the blog aside. I think that both of us were more than a little staggered by the events of that day. And when we did start writing, we both engaged in a bit of "defiant normalcy," as I've seen someone else describe it, by not focusing or writing about terrorism, or warfare, or our government's response. To a large degree, we've avoided those topics. It gets harder to do, and harder not to think about as the anniversary of that date approaches. I started to go through the BlawgRing (set up by jca at Sua Sponte -- thanks jca!) tonight, and the first blog I came across (jmbzine.com) began with a thoughtful and expressive post from Saturday, called 911 Commentary, which is very much worth a visit.
We probably won't focus too much on those topics this week, and will continue with our "defiant normalcy." This blog was intended to be about a law practice in Delaware, and about news, information, and web sites that we found interesting. There have been a lot of other weblogs that started up over the last year or so which include legal issues, and we've received an incredible amount of amusement, information, and inspiration from the authors of those sites. We've added a number to our links list on the page, and will probably be adding more in the days to come.
Larry had espressed a desire to celebrate by having cake, and treating the day like a birthday. I'll join in, but I won't just be celebrating the birth of this blog, but also the sites of the many other people out there who spend part of their day sharing their thoughts, their experiences, and their insights online. Thanks to you all. You're a very large part of what makes this interesting and fun.
