Thursday 31 May 2007

keeping in touch......

It is now 8.00pm and have just finished a nice long chat ( one hour) with one of my dearest friends in Melbourne..... well, she really doesn't live actually in Melbourne, but more like NW by about 2 hours.

It is great to be able to have the contact with people that we miss seeing in person......many, many years ago when I lived in Montreal and Detroit we didn't have the advantage of the Internet, emails, and low cost phone calls. I could phone home to my mother no more than once a year at a cost of about $60.00 for 5 minutes. Keeping in mind that $60.00 then was half a week's wages!

But now with Skype (and other similar communication packages) it makes living overseas so much more enjoyable as we are able to stay in touch with all our friends and family more often.
Even using a "phone card" is easy and so much cheaper!!

I think the big Telco's better pull up their socks and start to be more "in tune" with what the customer wants and needs. :-)

But my blog, emails and letter writing is still a major part of keeping in touch with my friends. I enjoy writing letters in particular and probably send about 10 a week.........no, not long hand, but using the computer and I can then file them in month order and before writing each letter I can check back on what I told them in my last letter.........another advantage with sending a letter is that I can embed a photo of what I am talking about. This especially comes in handy in sending letters to friends that do not have Internet access. But I do find that anyone, regardless of if they have email access or not, all enjoy receiving a 'real' letter.

I have a friend that is in 24 hour residential care (after a stroke last November) I write to him each week and in the 3 page letter I would place at least 3 or 4 photos.......this makes the letter far more interesting for him as he can visually 'see' what I am telling him. I enjoy writing to him as I know how much he appreciates them!


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