For the next few weeks, we’ll be observing an anniversary: 10 years since we left San Francisco and moved to Ann Arbor. I’ll repost articles Frank and I wrote at that time for our Ann Arbor blog, aSquared. Bittersweet, very definitely they will be, bittersweet.

[It’s aSquared’s First Birthday … we’re celebrating by looking back at events from a year ago … skip these retro posts if you’re not into sentimentality.]

‘My second visit to Lexington, which I think is rather a pretty place …

‘Lexington, KY

‘Population 260,512 (2000 census). Seat of Fayette County. Second-largest city in Kentucky. Home to the University of Kentucky and Transylvania University.

‘Lexington was named in 1775 for the battle in the same name in Massachusetts (19 April 1775). In 1817, Lexington staged the first Beethoven symphony heard in the United States. Lexington’s public library is billed as the oldest library west of the Alleghenies and may be older than the city itself. The library became a “free” library in 1898, and Andrew Carnegie financed the building of a larger “free” library in 1902.

‘Horse racing in Kentucky began as a pastime of the frontiersmen who settled the area that became the state of Kentucky. Daniel Boone brought pack horses on a hunting trip to Kentucky in 1769. William Whitley developed the first circular race track in Lincoln County in 1780. In 1793, Lexington forbade horse-racing through the streets and confined it to the West Water Street part of town.

‘We didn’t see much of Lexington last night, and we left today before we could see much more of it. We were, frankly, in a hurry to get the last leg of the trip under way. What my main impressions of Lexington were: (a) It’s huge. It sprawls all over the place. The trip from one end of town to the other (where our La Quinta was) seemed to take forever. (b) It’s beautiful. © You’d need more than a day to do it justice.

‘—Posted by Frank at 13:40:00 | 21-Aug-03’