Our new friend Erin Delaney has a friend who is in the hospital and who could use a “boost”.

Can you spare some time to write a note and get a few friends to write notes too? She will be in the hospital for a while probably and could use some mail to keep her busy.

Read the whole story about Charlotte Lewis at Erin’s site.

Mail can be addressed to:

Charlotte Lewis
C/O Erin L. Delaney
R. 1220 South Prospect Street
Nanticoke PA 18634

Also, please repost if you can.

Remember last month when I said, “Hey everybody… let’s freak someone out!” Well, I don’t think it really freaked her out as much as completely and utterly thrilled her which is WAY BETTER than actually freaking someone out anyway.

I got email from Erin Delaney recently and she has given me permission to post it here. Ironically, you will notice that she mentions she doesn’t have my snail mail address. I was probably one of the last ones to write her (my bad) and I’m hoping the problem is that she just hasn’t received my note yet and not that it was waylaid by the U.S. Postal Service. (I might have really made the Postmaster General mad with all my marketing brouhaha from a few weeks ago.)

Anyway, here is Erin’s note. I am sure you will be as thrilled to read it as I was. How delightful. This was so much fun we’re going to do it again with another unsuspecting victim.

Wendy,

If I had your snail mail address, I would have mailed this message to you. I must say that it was one of the most exciting moments to get a call from my boss who had five letters all addressed to me from Flower Mound, TX; Chicago, IL; Pittsburgh, PA; Newport, RI; and Rochester, NY. I have to say that it was definitely a “freakout” moment! The excitement of opening each letter was overwhelming. I actually opened all of them then just looked at each trying to decide which treasure to plunder first.

Of course your dedicated readers mentioned your website, which I happily took a look at. I noticed that one of your readers, Stephanie, mentioned that she was overseas in Austria and that it posed a problem for proper timing for the full “freakout” effect, but I’d tell her that a good letter is worth the wait!

After reading each letter and reviewing your website, I was compelled to email you and let you know that I am going to write a follow up article for the Weekender based on your website, letters, and readers soon. It’d be great to talk with you (or even correspond with you) and I will keep you and your readers posted on when it will go to press.

Please let your readers know that I loved the letters and that I will respond to all of them that I received. I’d even love to correspond with even more of them! Furthermore, thanks for letting me know that letter writing hasn’t become a lost art.

Feel free to post this on your site if you’d like and check out my blog as well!

Erin L. Delaney
Read my blog at: www.erindelaney.blogspot.com

Do you feel like writing a celebrity? Over at Spread Change, I’m asking people to send a note telling John Tesh how great he is for making the site Intelligent Kindness. If you feel like sending him a little note, you can wander over there and get the info.

I noticed a person on Twitter (@iBlogBetter) who is starting a letter writing project. I’m not sure yet what it will turn into (he’s not saying) but he says he wants to revive letter writing and is looking for people to send in their address if they want a letter from him.

You can find him over this blog: I Blog Better Than Your Mom

(He actually does blog better than my mom.)

Want to give someone a wedding present for less than a buck? There is a woman who is collecting congratulatory cards for someone’s wedding. If you want to participate, be sure to do so before mid-May.

Read more about it here: http://www.wildpostcards.com/2009/04/send-a-postcard-to-a-wedding/

Better hurry!

I know it’s not Friday yet… but I’m posting this right now to warn you that Friday is nearly here.

Have you heard about Postcard Friendship Friday? It’s a great little meme that people participate in every Friday. You can blog about a postcard or, actually, it seems like anything postal related. It looks like great fun and quite a few people participating.

If you want to join the crew over there, go check it out and be sure you put a link to your blog there so people will come visit you!

Are you in the mood to do something weird and fun? Let’s write Erin Delaney a letter.

Who is Erin Delaney? She writes for a publication called The Weekender and recently wrote a story about letter writing in which she encourages everyone to get busy and write letters. So, what the heck. Let’s drop Erin a note and tell her we’re in the game. Why not?

Let’s see how many people we can get to write her, just for the heck of it.

Erin Delaney
c/o The Weekender
90 E. MARKET ST.
WILKES-BARRE, PA 18703

Leave a comment if you’re playing!

Did you see this recent story in the news? It’s amazing! ABC’s Person of the Week

Go look… I’ll wait for you to come back.

Okay, if you go to the Wish Upon a Hero site you can search for wishes that involve sending cards or letters. Grant any wish you want, but be sure to also send some cards and letters while you are there. You’ll make someone’s day!

Thanks, PostMuse for pointing this one out for me…

She mentioned in a comment to one of my posts that she knew of a small book made from five envelopes. It’s cute and handy! Not only highly useful, but could make great mini gifts! And it looks like they could be made in a very short amount of time with very little material.

Go check it out: Mini Envelope Book

I’m currently reading a book called Ghosting by Jennie Erdal. It’s about a woman who is a ghostwriter for an interesting and eccentric publisher back in the 80’s/90’s.

Last night I ran across a section in the book where she talks about her husband leaving for an extended (2 month) stint overseas for work. This was back before email and when calling overseas was very expensive. Her children were small and had no well-developed sense of time. So in order to help them understand how long it would be before their father came home she came up with a great idea how to mark the passage of time and also create a meaningful keepsake.

Below I will print the excerpt from Ghosting by Jennie Erdal.

Two months is a long stretch in the lives of young children, and at the start they had found it impossible to imagine the size of so many days and weeks lumped together. To help them get the idea, I acquired a huge roll of paper from a local mill, cut two pieces measuring ten feet by six, stuck them together for extra strength, and bound the edges with strong masking tape. With the help of a long ruler, felt tip pens and six small hands, the sheet was divided into sixty squares, each square representing one day and marked with the date and the day of the week. The children all liked the idea of filling the squares with “something for Daddy” — a poem, a picture, an account of something that happened at school, a message or a short letter that he could read when he got back. I said it could be a sort of diary, a record of what they had been doing or what they had been thinking about when he was away. In a way it would be like speaking to him. I told them they didn’t need to do something every day, just when they wanted to.

The huge paper sheet was pinned up in the kitchen. It stretched from floor to ceiling and took up nearly the whole wall. I explained to the children that for the first few weeks they would have to stand on a stepladder to fill in the squares, but as time went by they would be able to reach without the ladder, just by standing. When they could sit or kneel on the floor to fill in the squares, it would nearly be time for their dad to come back. the wall chart looked intimidating at first, very white and empty, but soon it began to fill up. And as the weeks passed it was transformed into a wonderful specimen of modern graffiti art. There were complex compositions in bold leaning letters or soft curly script, thoughtfully decorated with polka dots or crosshatching; and every so often, great surrealist splashes. Emily, the eldest, filled some squares with more abstract pieces that reminded me of the paintings of Mark Rothko — indeterminate shapes in muted, tender colours.

Isn’t this a fabulous idea? I love it! My son has a small calendar that we cross off every day so he knows which days are school days and which are “stay home days” as the calls them. I love the idea of a big, ginormous wall calendar like the Erdals did to pass the time.

What kinds of things have you done to either mark time or pass time? Tell me your brilliant idea!