Monthly update...

It has been a habit of mine for several years now to write a letter once a month to a collection of friends and family. (At least, once a month was my intention, I have very rarely lived up to it.) The idea was to stay in touch with people and keep them up with where I was and what I was doing since I moved around so much. This was in 2000, just after I had commissioned and started my military service, while I was in Delaware; This was in the dark ages: before Twitter, before Facebook, before blogs, when all we had was email.

It was surprisingly difficult to make myself write a two page letter once a month. Anyway, starting this blog really put the final nail in the coffin of this process, since blogging is so much easier than writing an email and maintaining a list of emails to send it to. It is useful, however, to actually write entries like that, a summary of what I've been up to. One of my old email subscribers wrote recently and noted that I haven't written in awhile, which was the motivation for this entry and to send out an email to my list with a link to my upcoming monthly post.

I can thank my sisters for getting me involved in Facebook (and I do). I wouldn't have started blogging if it weren't for my last deployment...I've had conversations about this with my dad, who noted that people tend to grasp a method of communication and hold onto it at some point. It's not that email isn't faster than snail-mail, but if you only have mail addresses for all you old college buddies, it's hard to get into email. Changing established means of communication (or anything, for that matter) takes energy and a willingess in change and innovate. So anyway, I am trying to get back into the habit of writing once a month, and I will be posting them here.

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minor edit 23jun09, a couple of typos