My friend Jim Belshaw, who writes a newspaper column and has long had a love-hate relationship with blogging, sent along an Atlantic essay by Andrew Sullivan about blogging. Sullivan was one of the first bloggers I read who deserved the label, as it has now come to be known. But before blogging was the thing it is today, I was introduced to the phenomemon by a wonderful site called Advogato, a gathering place for free software developers who wrote mostly about what they (and we, for I was one of their tribe then) were working on.

One of Sullivan’s central points involves the way blogging creates a record of what you were thinking as you were thinking it, which sent me back to the spring of 2001, when I joined Advogato and started blogging myself. Even then, I wrote about iris and killdeer:

Lissa spent a good part of yesterday weeding in our huge iris bed in the front yard, picking through the plants. “It’s like getting reacquainted with old friends,” she said.

I had the same feeling this morning when I saw a pair of killdeer on my morning bike ride. It’s finally getting warm enough to ride outside in the mornings, so I’ve been heading up the bike path along the flood control channel. There’s a big bend in the channel where the water slows down and drops silt, and it turns into a little wetland every year, despite the flood control people’s best efforts to keep it scooped out. That’s where the killdeer hang out, pretty little birds with a white collar and a cheerful song. Old friends.