Does blogging help keep friends...

How many friends does the average person keep in touch with as they move away? Most? Maybe one or two? Many? None? In my case it is few. One I keep in touch with is a fourth grade friend. We don't talk often. I keep in contact with him via IM, reading his blog, and receiving the rare email.

Keeping up with friends made on a mission can be hard once you leave. On a mission some of the strongest friendships are developed, either as a companionship struggling to find people or helping your investigator learn how to listen to the spirit and become baptized. As time goes on, I have lost contact with most of the people I met in England. But a year ago I was able to start one up again after I noticed a posting on the mission electronic board from the daughter of a family I taught. After seeing this, I communicated and finally met up with her and her sister at BYU. During the visit I found out what was happening and that they have been good active members of the church.

What do these two situations have in common? Well they both show that a willingness to write stuff online allows people to stay in touch. In the first example, Ryan, my friend since fourth grade, has a blog in which I found out his wife is going to BYU. They had a vacation in Hawaii and a small one at Bear Lake. This blog information encourages me to want to keep in touch better than if I didn't know what was going on. I'm even thinking of asking if he had a raspberry milkshake because Bear Lake is famous for them.

Contrast these examples with a friend from BYU, which I saw in the temple a couple of months ago. After catching up and finding out that he teaches in a local high school, we left with neither of us asking for any contact information. I knew that through the years of non-contact we had moved on, and it would be difficult to start that friendship over.

So, I am proposing that blogging helps keep friendships despite being many miles away. What do you think? And if you are an old friend, I would really like to hear from you!!

P.S. If you are an old friend and have a blog, a link would be nice. I will throw a link and comment where I can.

Muslin Bag

It is very interesting in the way things have changed over the years. I recently read Giles Slade's book Made to Break , in which he chronicles the idea of "planned obsolescence". This is where products are made to be thrown away (paper products, personal hygiene products, containers, etc.), fashions are made to become obsolete (new patterns or styles), and/or gizmos are made to become technologically obsolete (electronic goods... computers). Historically this has led to times of great prosperity as workers are outputting as much product as possible. The roaring 20s and the modern booms are prime examples. The only large kink in this growth was during the "Great Depression" when these ideas quickly slowed and reversed as nobody had money to buy new products and used products until they were really worn out.

Recently, Michaela was given a Muslin Bag that an elderly couple picked up for us while they were in Vermont. A Muslin Bag is based on the idea of using every bit of a product, in this case soap, and not throw any of it out. These bags are thin fabric bags that you put your old soap scraps in. The Tussie Mussies bag that we were given was filled with different types of broken up soaps, oats and fragrances. It has a draw sting on the top to put your worn out soap into. Now, some wiseguy will think the soaps put into the bag were someone else's used soap, but this would not be the case. It looks like these were soap scraps broken in the factory or seconds during manufacturing.

Increased content

When I started this Blog, I thought it would be a good place for Michaela and myself to post quick posts. At the time it didn't seem like Michaela was too interested, but I am slowly working her down and hopefully soon she will be willing to grace us with her wisdom and wit. If you want to give Michaela encouragement to join this blog, please comment down below. Also, I want to reassure everyone it will not become a Michaela-only blog.

Anyone can post comments

Canning

Well, I have a Microchip project that just came out that is causing me to work 10+ hour days, and Michaela is in school and working taking all of her free time and what do we decide to do... we decide to can peaches. A lady in our ward had a box ship down for $24. The question is when will we get time to can.

This box is what we have left after eating peaches and eating and um eating. We also made jam, a bunch of smoothies, fruit salads and did I mention eating. They are yummy... but we can't tell what we will get tired of first, peaches or hearing "Millions of peaches". Hopefully this winter they will come from a..... bottle.