Ramanan put together a list of intersting first blog posts. My first post to this site was just about three years ago last week, but the first two months of the site were lost when my host crashed, burned, and disappeared with not so much as a word. As a result, the remaining first post comes in January 2002, a few days after we moved into our little house.

I poked through the archive to see what has happened around here in the last three years. Here is a biased, unreliable, and entirely non-random sampling.

• Of course, none could forget Frijole Negro, the cowboy hat-wearing cat my wife encountered one day. It may not be a monkey washing a cat, but it’s pretty close.
• Then there are my prelim notes for Meyer and Rowan’s landmark `Institutionalized Organizations’ article, which always get lots of search engine hits around final exams.
• I’m particularly fond of my multi-year ongoing cooler repair saga, at least during the cool season when I can look back on it and laugh.
• When huge fires tore through the Catalinas, I wrote a little about fire and fire ecology.
• Some vacation stories and photos.
• About this time every year, I start to think about skiing.
• Finally, there is, of course, a bit of sociology lurking about. I’ve thought about, among other things, protest and protesters (more mid-term exam google-hit favorites), professions and complications, teaching medical sociology, strategic voting, and my churning dissertation.

I won’t go off on any “in the old days” rant, except to say that, hey, 2001, that’s pretty old-school. How disappointing that all I have to show for it is, as of today, google’s number two hit for pie holes. Truly, this is the promise of the internets made manifest.