Wow. Here we are on Friday at 5 o'clock. Quitting time. The weekend has started! Except we keep blogging on the weekends. And time is arbitrary - several of us sleep in and stay up late. Some of us blog after we get home from work, so 5 o'clock just means it's time to start blogging.

And it's been a long, strange week here at bilerico. A few of the highlights:

We picked the final design choice for bilerico's new look. We're planning on re-launching on June 1st in our new clothes.

Alex Blaze has been promoted to Editor for the blog. One of Alex's first scoops was to gain two new contributors for the site. We'll be announcing them soon, so stay tuned!

On the flip side, we've lost two contributors; Tony Kariotis and Carrie Wooten have both left the blog. We'll miss both of them. (Carrie, I believe, will continue blogging on feminist topics at a couple other blogs - like the AVA.)

Jerame's January post The man we knew as Katherine Hepburn has been cited on her page at Wikipedia.

Two Congressmen guest blogged on the site this week. Indiana Democratic Representatives Joe Donnelly and Brad Ellsworth both chose bilerico.com as where they would explain to the LGBT community why they chose to buck the party and vote against a federal hate crimes bill. Both Congressmen's press secretaries responded back in the comments threads. (While both Representatives took a beating in the comments section, you have to admit that it takes guts to go walk into the lions' den when you know the lions are hungry. I know staff members for both Representatives commented that they wished there had been this much interaction with the Congressmen before his vote.) Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese responded to the Representatives' entries with his own blog post on bilerico.

And, you have to admit, it's not very often that your blog gets guest posts from two Congressmen and the president of the largest LGBT organization in the country. We were all excited by the opportunity and honored to have been chosen as a space for dialogue and conversation. Shoot, Joe even mentioned his guest post in his weekly e-mail to untold thousands of HRC members.

Which has led to our highest week ever at bilerico.com! We thank all of the new visitors for coming and poking around. We hope we like what you see and stick around for more. And, of course, we appreciate all of our regular readers and friends for helping us to build the community.

See you on the site!