Letters...We get Letters...

Actually today, it's postcards that I'm more concerned about, though I did get a couple of very nice letters.

I have been on PostCrossing for over a year now. I have exchanged somewhere near 300 postcards with people around the world, cards which have traveled, my stats tell me, 1,630,078 miles. I am part of a group of people who have sent, over the years, more than ten million postcards!

Pretty impressive numbers.

This is what my map looks like:

(This isn't entirely accurate, though, because I have received a couple of post cards from Brasil and I notice that South America isn't tagged here and I've had a card from South Africa, though Africa isn't marked either.)

I have been tossing postcards in a box for a year and today I got a bee in my bonnett and decided to sort them by country.

Every surface within my reach was covered with a stack of post cards. It was a surprise to me that I had at least three times more cards from the U.S. than from any other country. I rarely send cards to the US and hadn't realized that I had received so many.

I was also surprised to discover that I had received the most cards from Germany. I would have bet that it was Finland or the Netherlands, but Germany had the thickest pile, with Finland and the Netherlands probably the next thickest.

I have a lot of cards from China, Taiwan (all of whose residents have a very distinctive handwriting, I discovered), and from Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.

There were several countries from which I have received only one postcard: Croatia, Norway, Turkey, South Africa, Thailand, the Czech Republic, Vietnam, Italy, Belgium, Moldovia, Estonia, Trinidad & Tobago, and Slovenia.

And I love the dellightful Inge Löök old lady cards from Finland. I only have a few of them, but I'm all ready to go back to Helsinki and go looking for them! Löök was born in Helsinki and her cards remind me of Char and me...how much fun we would have had when we were in that city shopping for cards!

It's also interesting how people write their postcards. Most write short things about the picture on the front, or about their lives (that's what I do, mostly), some write amazingly long personal notes in teeny, tiny print. The disappointing ones are the ones that come with nothing on it, or just "happy postcrossing."

The only down side of Postcrossing (other than the increasing cost of international postage!) is that you don't really make friends on the site. You have the address of someone to mail a card to but unless you want to include your own address, the recipient doesn't have your address. I have received one or two personal messages, but mostly this is about the cards and not findings friends. Still, I have received some really fun cards. If you'd like to see my favorites, you can follow this link.

I also made a major dent in the letters I have not answered during (a) Christmas, (b) my mother's pneumonia, and (c) the computer problems. Still a long way to go, but I'm getting there!

Five letters today alone, along with a bunch of post cards mailed! What's nice about this pen pal project is that some of these pen pals are starting to feel like friends. That's nice.

Taking Stock

Well, this new pen pal project of mine has now been going strong for 142 days, the first letter having been sent to a retired nurse in Germany, from whom I have heard nothing since! Looking back, it was not an auspicious beginning!

I knew when I began that writing "cold" to a name that you find on a list would yield some that would end up being good pen friends, and others with whom you would not click at all.

Over the past five months, I have written to a lot of people and had responses from not everyone, but from a lot [not italicized!] of people.

I started a spreadsheet so I could keep track of who had written when. All of the letters I write are on my computer, so it's easy to keep track of when I wrote and what I said I also keep all the letters in a binder (at present, though I'm sure I will outgrow that soon). But I wanted to have a good idea of how many people to whom I write actually have become correspondents and who has decided, for one reason or another, not to carry the correspondence further.

There are 37 on the list and, as you can see, one of them has been particularly prolific, having written, so far, six times (perhaps more--I think the chart extends off the right edge). Two have written four times and four have written three times (I got a letter from two of those today, so they go in the "written four times" column now!). All the others have written twice, but the start date for writing may have only been a month ago, so the number of times they have written isn't necessarily significant.

This does not, of course, reflect the number of postcards exchanged. I've sent more than 100 postcards through PostCrossing, SendSomething and Swap Bot. I've also sent letters and postcards to random soldiers who are having a rough time in Afghanistan or Iraq and have requested word from "home" through Soldiers Angels. Most of these communications are not answered, but I also get lots of postcards through PostCrossing, SendSomething and SwapBot. I have reached that stage of mail nirvana when it is a rare day that I do not get at least ONE personal piece of mail. It helps balance off the daily catalogs from fat lady stores!

It's not surprising that many of the people with whom I exchange introductory letters don't respond. I have found in researching sites which are posting requests for penpals that many are young women, in their 20s, and sometimes teens. There are few old farts like me and while I have made friends with a few younger women, many times we don't speak the same language.

It's great when you hit a common ground, though. I heard from one young woman recently who has a great interest in history and works at the archives of her local library helping people do genealogical searches. I mentioned how fascinated I was by Thomas Jefferson and you'd think I had handed her $100. I don't know if our exchanges will continue, but I am enjoying getting to know her.

Another woman wrote because she saw my address on my pen pal site. She was actually only the second person who wrote to the address posted on that site. But what a deight she is. We've exchanged a couple of letters and I hope that she sticks around to become one of the regulars.

There have only been a few people that I've either ignored or dropped. I made the mistake of joining the IUOMA (International Union of Mail Artists) and discovered that the look of a piece of mail and what you sent with it was more important than actual content of a letter. I'm not an artist and am definitely out of my element, so I turned down a guy from Brasil (who persists) and ignored a woman who wrote recently with such lovely things that I am intimidated to send her "artwork" (mine usually consists of stickers on white paper!).

I also finally ignored a guy from Brasil. It is not my idea to write to men, but this guy was from Brasil, and I haven't had any Brasilians in my life in awhile. But I haven't had any Brasilians in my life in awhile :) so I'd forgotten what 20-something Brasilian men were like. His first letter sounded like he was interviewing me as prospective dating material and when I wrote back and pointed that out, he sent me a 4 page letter listing everything he liked in music, dance, books, beaches, food, movie stars, singers, etc., etc., etc. (I suspect there wasn't a "book" category, now that I think about it). That's it. No narrative, just a list of stuff. I decided we weren't a marriage made in heaven and I did not respond.

So as I review this enterprise, I'd say that on the whole I'm pleased. I think I am developing a few very nice penpal relationships and if I can have a few solid friends like that, I'll be happy...anything else is the icing on the cake.

The Pen Pal Project

If you have been following my Pen Pal Project (and there is no reason why you should have been), I can cautiously say that I've reached a really nice place. I'm actually getting mail almost every day. Sometimes it's only a post card, but there are more days when I do get personal mail than there are days when I don't.

Of course if there is no personal mail, there are also almost every single day three catalogs from fat lady stores. I just cringe and think about how many trees I personally am responsible for the death of!

Out of all of this wonderful new influx of mail, there are many people, of course, whom I will never hear from again. Those are the people from Postcrossing and Swap-Bot who send their...whatevers...to me to fulfill the commitment to participate in a certain mailing task. And then I will never hear from them again.

There are some who never answer letters I send, and a couple of people whose letters I have not answered because the chemistry just wasn't there. One of those was a young man in Brasil. I wrote to him against my better judgment simply because I have such a history with young men from Brasil and I thought it might be fun. I was mistaken.

He's in his 30s and his first letters sounded like someone who was looking for a date, sending out a weird veryshort questionnaire for me to answer. I wrote back a message that amounted to "thanks, but no thanks." He responded with a four page letter filled with every single band, song, movie, actor, TV program, sports figure and I don't know what else because I stopped reading. I just tossed it. This was not going to be a correspondence made in heaven.

There are nearly 20 pen pals who have the potential of lasting for awhile. I find I am more drawn to people in this country, simply because of the cost of postage, but there are two, a woman from Wales and another from The Netherlands whom I like and will continue to write to.

One woman came from a group of people who like to write long letters. I thought I liked to write long letters until I got her first one, which came in an 8x11 envelope and was thirty pages long. Typed. I needed bookmarks to read the whole letter. I'm on the fence about her. At least half of the letter was about her physical problems and I would think that over time that sort of thing could get tiresome, but perhaps now that she has written this lengthy introduction, future letters won't be quite so exhaustive.

There are a few I really like and have already exchanged 3 or 4 letters with. I know those will last for an indefinite period, until they get tired of hearing from me.

There are also my Compassion kids on the pen pal list and the two soldiers in Afghanistan, though I have not heard from either of them. I wrote to the woman who coordinates this Soldiers Angels project and she said that many times you don't hear from your assigned soldier at all, so I guess I just keep writing and hope that the letters are (a) being delivered, and (b) helpful. At least both soldiers are named Amanda, so I can do one letter and just print it twice!

And I've written a few letters to old friends who live at a distance and with whom I've only had an e-mail relationship for many years. Time will tell what the response to that will be. I wrote a 4 page letter today to someone I have not heard from in almost a year. I suspect she is going to be surprised to find it in her mailbox.

Jeri is also on my penpal list. She occasionally writes letters while she's at a cafe or some other place. I actually went out and bought a notebook that fits in my purse and a pen that I liked when I tried it out at Office Max and I'm going to try to hand write letters to her from time to time. I have a letter started and as I was writing it, I remembered that in my lifetime I think I have only received two letters from my mother--she's more the telephoning type--but I really felt very special when I got them, so I decided I wanted Jeri to have handwritten letters from me.

A bonus of hand writing a letter or a note card and all those postcards that I've been sending is that when I want to now, my handwriting is looking better. Not always, but for so many years, my handwriting was just atrocious because I never wrote anything at all (I even typed shopping lists!)

(I've written to Ned and to Tom, but don't expect either of those letters will turn into a "correspondence." It seems to be more a girl thing than a guy thing!)

But the bottom line is that I started this because I sorely miss communicating with people so I started investigating pen pals and discovered this huge community of people who also like to reach out and touch someone through snail mail. I'm learning to decorate envelopes, buy stamps through the mail so I can get commemoratives that our local post office doesn't carry, look at magazines and think about whether the pages could be turned into interesting envelopes, check out rubber stamps, etc.

It's a whole new world out there and I'm very much enjoying it!

Avalanche

Sometimes it seems like you start one little thing, like sending a snowball down a mountain that ends up as an avalanche ... or pulling that one little loose thread in the arm of a sweater than ends up unraveling the whole sweater.

I sort of feel like I'm at the start of an avalanche...and it's my choice whether to let it continue or not.

First of all, unrelated to my avalanche, I woke up at 2:30 this morning. As I do every time I wake up in the middle of the night and am looking to get back to sleep, I checked what was on TV and ended up turning on the PBS broadcast of a concert performance celebrating the 25th anniversary of Les Miserables. I figured that would be a sure-fire soporific. It's a show I know well, so I could just enjoy the music while I kept my eyes closed and drifted back to sleep.

Well. Uh. No.

If you get a chance to catch this broadcast and if you are at all into musical theatre don't miss it! It was one of the most exciting bits of theatre. I did some research and it was held at the 02 Arena, a 23,000 capacity venue in South East London. According to the Les Mis page there were over 500 artists on the stage for the performance (presumably this includes the members of the orchestra).

All those big musical numbers were breathtaking. Just see it. Even though the broadcast (with pledge breaks) was 4 hours long.

Needless to say, I was not sleeping so I decided I could NOT watch it, but I couldn't turn it off, so I moved to the couch in the living room, where I could hear it--barely--and thought maybe I could sleep. But no. Finally at 3 a.m., I got up, went to Amazon, found out it was a $20 DVD, ordered it, and then I could turn off the broadcast and finally get back to sleep.

But now to the avalanche. I feel like I’ve just fallen down the rabbit hole. I’ll tell ya, you start mucking around on the Internet, one link leads to another and suddenly you are in information overload.

This all started because I've run out of people to correspond with. I've written letters all my life, starting with pen pals in grammar school, a correspondence with my friend Judy when I went on vacation, a very long time writing back and forth to Peach when she and Bob were traveling around with the Navy. There was a daily correspondence with my friend Phil, until Gilbert died, when it stopped. There was a lengthy correspondence with my friend Ann (who co-founded the Lamplighters), which kind of petered out. My friend Diane died. Peggy has other things to do and if I'm lucky I will hear from her once a month, but it's not quite the same as the frequent exchanges we had. I realized that my mail box was lonely and I missed having that "somebody" to write to.

I read something somewhere that made me realize that there were web sites out there where you could look for a pen pal and I began to investigate them (one of them was kind of creepy, but the rest seemed pretty interesting).

A couple of days ago, I discovered a blog called 100 days of Snail Mail, by a writer who was determined to write at least one snail mail every day and write about her experiences. I decided I wanted to read about the project, starting at Day 1 and on up to today (Day 70-something). Next thing you know, I’m following links to other blogs, learning about somethings called "Mail Art," and "Swaps" and making your own envelopes and agreeing to write to soldiers and sick children or just send a person on a list something they think they'd like to receive from you. All sorts of things. I have 50 bazillion blogs I want to follow, photo sites for doing special stuff. It makes my head spin!

(I have to ad that so far I am the oldest person I have found on any list. On some lists the "old people" are the age of my children. I have found a few in their 50s and 60s, but nobody 68 or older. But it does my heart good to see how many people in their 20s and 30s, both men and women, want to find pen pals. It gives me hope for the future of a correspondence that extends past text messaging!)

At some point in my crazed web surfing today, I decided that I want to learn how to make envelopes, so I gave it a try, using a program that will print a Google earth picture of your neighborhood (or any other neighborhood, for that matter) on a page that you can fold up and make the inside of an envelope. Given how many thumbs I have on each of my hands, I wasn't optimistic, but my envelope wasn't awful. It wasn't really very good either.

But there were a couple of problems. The first is that the envelope it makes is so tiny it's only good for putting inside another envelope, since the post office won't mail anything that small.

The second problem is that my printer is crap. It works great on just regular black and white printing, but the color is really bad. Printing on regular paper is hopeless. Printing on glossy paper is better, but I've printed off some pictures for the Compassion kids and they are OK but if I got them at a photo store, I would reject them and refuse to pay for them.

Now, the obvious solution is to think about getting a new printer. They are certainly affordable these days. Ahhh, but there's where the avalanche starts. The printer is easily accessible, but the PLUG is not. It is behind tons of junk. So the first step in getting a new printer is to move the tons of junk that has been collecting dust for about 10 years. That means relocating all the binders I have for the Compassion Kids. And as long as I'm doing that, I might as well find a way to organize pen pal letters before I get deluged with them (assuming people will actually want to correspond with me).

There are about 100 things that should be done in the process of getting a new printer and I know that if I start, another 200 will make themselves apparent. I will end up with taking everything out of the office (which I did, I think, when I installed the current printer) into the family room and starting from scratch putting it all back.

Now this is really a very lofty goal and a really good idea, but I'm not sure that I'm ready to jump onto the snowball and get enclosed in the inevitable avalanche right now, when I have two Lamplighters interviews to do this week and Brianna's birthday coming up at the end of the week!

(Oh yeah...and I started a new blog, like I don't have enough already, for my own Pen Pal project like all those blogs I have been reading for the past three days). So I probably won't be talking about all this project much here again, but if you're curious you can find the new blog here.