The last few days have been a manic social whirl.

( finally catching up )

Because of all this, I managed to miss both darcydodo's birthday, and my fourth LJ-versary. So belated happy birthday to Darcy, and I may do the retrospective of four years on LJ a few days late.

Finally, a very warm welcome to the wonderful hobbitz, a dear friend from Oxford whom I've been trying to tempt onto LJ for years. Her journal is friends only and she only wants to friend people who actually know her. But I'm so very happy that she's finally here.

Now I fall over. Splat.

With some trepidation, I made a long post about abortion. I was slightly expecting that people would yell at me for diverging from everything that is Right and Good, and probably defriend me for my horrible opinions. In fact, the opposite occurred. Lots of people said very sensible things and even more were complimentary! It was linked fairly widely, and far from losing friends, I actually gained several new readers on the basis of that post.

So, welcome to you all. I'm afraid not all my posts are carefully thought out essays like that. If you want to stick around, great, you're very welcome. And if you don't, no hard feelings. I welcome comments; I don't always get around to replying to them quickly. I don't automatically add everyone who friends me, but I do read everyone I have on my friends list. If I don't friend you back it'snothing personal, just the perennial problem of having too much to read and not enough time. There's very little that I friends lock anyway, so you won't miss much.

Not only is every day drama-free defriending day here, every day is also commenting on old posts amnesty day. I get notifications of old comments and I sometimes bring a discussion back to the top if it gets really interesting. I do recommend people go back and read the comments on the abortion post that inspired this, even if LJ has annoyingly collapsed threads and let the post fall off friends pages.

Anyway, it occurred to me I should probably introduce myself. So I'll do the talking about my journal meme, which I have done in the past but years ago. ( all the details )

What else? I'm very proud of the diversity of my friends list, not just geographical but in terms of age, background, opinion and so on. If you're new here you're welcome to introduce yourself, or to keep quiet and just lurk if you prefer. Oh, and if you have a topic you'd like me to write a proper thoughtful essay about, you're welcome to suggest. I will take you up if the topic grabs my attention. And that goes for people I already know as well as the newbies.

Not new to LJ, and not really new to me either, but I've only just connected up the real people with their LJs: lavendersparkle and tzotze. *waves madly*

lavendersparkle is someone I met through the Cambridge Jewish community last year and know just about well enough to want to get to know her better. And I was introducing hatam_soferet to her when I was visiting Cambridge a couple of weeks ago and it turned out that Lavendersparkle had heard of Hatam_Soferet via LJ and neonchameleon. (I mentioned this as an edit to my post about that trip, but then I realized that's a silly way to make an announcement as not many people will see it.)

tzotze, on the other hand, I was friends with years ago and had lost touch with her. So I'm very excited that she's now here on LJ. Since her journal is friends only and partly anonymized I won't explain how I know her, but she is using her real (and rather unusual) name as her LJ handle so if you know her you'll be able to work out that you know her, IYSWIM. Which of course is how I worked out who she was when I was browsing friends of friends.

brenna26 has decided to start posting in her journal. Yay. Everyone should go and be friendly to her, cos she's a very cool person. Plus, her introductory post contains some interesting thoughts about feminism which you might enjoy.

Conversely, brenna26, let me introduce you to some of my friends. You know darcydodo, though she's not online very much recently. And I think you've met lethargic_man (we were going out when I was in Dundee, and I think he came to visit a few times). I think you'll get on with doseybat and shreena, and I generally like introducing everybody to hatam_soferet, pseudomonas, compilerbitch and rysmiel (the last probably has the most interesting journal in terms of just reading stuff if you don't actually know the person). And I shall shut up before I overwhelm you, but yay, lots of cool people.

I am supposed to be helping organize things for the start of Passover this evening, so I'm not really online just now *cough*.

Look, another cool person has succumbed. And note I'm resisting the temptation to continue the theme of my earlier post by calling him a new bug.

Oh look chaps, there's a new bod in the Remove. Who's game to go and rag him?