2009 -- The Year of Saying Hi, Thank You, Etc.

Among the many start of the year nesting activities I've actually accomplished this holiday break (I love Xmas on a Thursday!) has been to sort through my greeting cards and the random box of my mother's greeting cards I brought back from Wisconsin (this is one of maybe 13 or 14 boxes full of note cards, greeting cards, postcards and invitations my mother had accumulated).

I bought these fabulous card keepers and sorted probably more than 1,000 cards. I actually tossed about 70ish -- when you have 930 left, you can spare 70 old, yellowing cards.

Obviously, this is further evidence that I am my mother's daughter, and that compulisive accumulation of note cards is genetic -- we'll be looking for the DNA strand for it soon.

So what to do with all of these cards?

And then a letter I wrote but did not mail in April 2002 fell out of the box -- addressed to Ramona Advani -- and I knew what I should do.

Use on of these every day (ok 7 every week?) to connect with people, near and far.

The first one is to Ramona - who I have not seen since College (that's a couple of decades) -- but who made a huge impact on my life, by one day saying to me, "you should try PR, I think you'd be good at it," so which I said "what's PR?"

Who knew? I'm sure she doesn't.

And now a theme for the year -- despite tightening belts, challenging work environment, kids who need more and more of my time -- I'm going to make sure I take a moment to say hi, to thank those who may not know that they helped, and stay in touch in the snail mail way with whoever pops into my head.