Bon anniversaire!

This blog will be one year old as of September 22. I'm posting the blogiversary wrapup now since I'll be in France for the next two weeks and I'll just want to post photos when I get back. So here's something for you to read while I'm gone.

This blog has come a long way in one year! Don't go back and read my first post, it's stupid. In fact, don't bother reading any of my old posts. I can't find any good ones, they're all crap. Here's a better idea: instead of a clips show, I'll do an original year-end flashback episode. Fasten your seatbelts kiddies, now it is beginning of a fantastic story!!

When I started this blog, I was all about law school. I was a year or two out of college and contemplating a serious career change. I had also just gotten married! It was an exciting time, full of hope and promise for the future. I had taken the LSAT and gotten a decent score, so I spent most of my time wrestling with LSAC and winnowing down my choices of schools to send applications at.

I started trying to post photos regularly in my second month of blogging, which I kept up more or less regularly for a while. Then I ran out of cool photos. It's a habit I'd like to get back into, but I'm not rocking the camera as much as I did back in the day.

Meanwhile, I was scrabbling together application materials and writing a personal statement that turned out very poorly after lots of work. I sent it anyway. LSAC got my transcript, I finished my stuff, and applications started going out. Along with autumn came the insidious NaNaWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in November. Spurred on by AmbImb's example, I declared my intention to compose a 50,000 word novel in one month. I did it in two weeks.

I kept on writing at it for the next few months, ending up with around 70-80,000 words all told, but I was never fully satisfied with the manuscript. Currently I plan to trash it and start over with a complete rewrite, but I've got other writing projects in the pipeline as well, and I'm focusing on those for now. Maybe I'll take up my original book again for this year's WriMo.

With my writing goals met halfway through November, I switched to the Dvorak keyboard layout. I started to question my decision to go to law school. I drank wine and wrote some wine reviews. In early December, I was seeing reports of acceptance for other 0L bloggers, and the seeds of doubt were planted. Mailbox fear set in. The next several months brought on a flurry of deferrals, waitlists, and rejections, and law school slowly faded away.

I had a delightful first Christmas with my new family and a happy New Year. All I wanted to blog about was writing, but that wasn't interesting to anyone except me, so I started writing book reviews instead. They weren't very good, either. I didn't have anything to say about law school except that the waiting was driving me mad, but at least those posts seemed to garner lots of encouraging responses.

I took an unlikely trip to the Bahamas for a week in February. While we were there, I read most of Infinite Jest, which is awesome, and which wins the Sui Generis Book of the Year Award.

March was all about blog interactivity. I kicked it off with an all-request day and found that I can write a lot more and better in response to a question than off the top of my head. I recorded a podcast with AmbImb, some people liked that. I posted about the Million Writers Award and heard back from a few of the authors whose work I enjoyed. This was unexpected and wonderful. Thus began my foray into litblogging. All the excitement inspired me to write my own short story, which sucked, although everyone was kind enough not to say so.

I played a mean April Fool's Day joke by pretending that I got into law school. I guess the joke was on me, huh? (Because I didn't.) J got a job doing what she went to school for, and so then we were both working full time. For the conclusion of my law school application efforts, I interviewed with the dean at my local school and attended a class.

I gave up on law school after that, but we did win a TV. I started to reevaluate my plans for the future. With my standing in the legal profession no longer a concern, I dropped my cautious anonymity about topics such as tattoos that I might have. I got involved with a lot of volunteer events through my company. I bought my bicycle and started to ride, and we adopted our little Pug, Lola. We moved into a rental house in St. Paul and I commuted by bike. Life was good.

In June I was still trying to bring up law school every now and then, but it was no use. All I did anymore was ride my bicycle. I officially gave up on law school and gave in to the fact that my content had changed. I was writing about writing, life and career choices, dogs and bicycles, but the law school dream had died. A redesign was in order!

The new bicycle focus gave me plenty to blog about. I was out of steam on the topic of law school, but I was still officially waitlisted at two places. Halfway through August, I was effectively released from both waitlists on the same day, thus ending my law school dreams forever! With that settled, I turned all my attention to Plan B. J and I were both unhappy at our jobs and it was time for a change. What would we do next?

But first an intermission--my grandpa died last week and we scheduled the wake & funeral w/ just enough time to have them before J & I left for France. So that cut into our planning & packing times and we're rushed now. It's been crazy. Well, time to go to Paris. Come back on the 19th or 20th for photos galore. Catch you on the flip side!