{"id":304,"date":"2004-08-19T21:00:19","date_gmt":"2004-08-19T21:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.breigh.com\/wordpress\/archives\/304"},"modified":"2010-01-31T17:18:37","modified_gmt":"2010-01-31T15:18:37","slug":"package","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/archives\/304","title":{"rendered":"Package!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I got in touch with a few old friends from UO that I haven&#8217;t spoken to in absolute ages.  One of the guys I know from my very first days in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.uo.com\/\" target=\"blank\">Ultima Online<\/a> and the other came along later but was one of my guild members and a pretty good friend.  So often I would look at my ICQ and see these old names but didn&#8217;t bother to say hello.  Tonight I did, and we&#8217;ve been chatting since.  It&#8217;s so great catching up with old friends, it sure does make me nostalgic.  When I think back to the old days in UO with all my gaming buddies.  That&#8217;s when gaming was fun..So the theme of today&#8217;s blog is sort of &#8220;Internet friend appreciation&#8221;.  It&#8217;s funny, because when I started making this website I was going to make a &#8220;Friends&#8221; section but when I thought about it, I didn&#8217;t know who to put on there.  My high school friends? Sure, we still chat and email but some of them I haven&#8217;t seen in almost 8-9 years.  Friends from PEI? Well, I didn&#8217;t really live there all that long and while I consider people from there friends and I do keep in touch with some, it&#8217;s not really &#8220;current friends&#8221;.  Then I thought about my friends in Toronto, same thing.  I don&#8217;t really have any really close friends in in the Netherlands.  There&#8217;s people I know, that I&#8217;ll hang out with and visit.. but anyone who I think I&#8217;d devote an entire page of this website to? No.. I don&#8217;t know any of them that well.<\/p>\n<p>So that left me with my internet friends.  I have more than enough of those but wouldn&#8217;t I seem kind of lame to have all these people I&#8217;ve never even met on my &#8220;Friends&#8221; page?  It was almost easier to just omit the whole thing than face the idea that I&#8217;ve moved around so much over the years that I haven&#8217;t really formed any solid friendships.  Even those I would have considered solid along the way have dwindled to a &#8220;Hey, how are ya?!&#8221; every few months.<\/p>\n<p>There was a guy I would speak with daily online who had a totally different view of friendship than I did.  He firmly believed that it&#8217;s impossible to have friendships online.  Was he right?  In one way I think, naw he can&#8217;t be!  Look at my friend Andrea, she&#8217;s as much a friend to me as any woman I&#8217;ve ever known in real life.  She knows more about me than most people in the world. How could I not call her a friend simply because we&#8217;ve never met face to face?<\/p>\n<p>Then I think of people like Pothead Jon, who I thought I had these really great friendships with.  I trusted them, confided in them and believed there was a really solid friendship and then I found out how dreadfully wrong I was. That they were never really a friend at all?<\/p>\n<p>So which is it?<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I&#8217;m getting off track.  This whole thing is taking on an entirely different theme than I initially planned on.  Today I was sitting on the phone with a Canadian woman I know here in Rotterdam when my doorbell rang.  There was a package for me!! Oh my god, I love packages!<\/p>\n<p>It was a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.roots.com\/new_canada\/html\/index_canada.shtml\" target=\"blank\">Roots<\/a> bag full of Canadian stuff.  A keychain thing that hangs around my neck (Great for when I&#8217;m biking!!!), a Canadian Olympic pin, a Canadian cap and a t-shirt with Canada on it.  Now, anyone who knows me worth a damn would know how thrilled I was when I opened this package! I love things from Canada and this just completely made my day!  I was so excited I just had to take pics to show her.  <strong>Thank you, Gail<\/strong>!!!<\/p>\n<p>Gail&#8217;s not the only one who has brightened my day over the past month.  I got a nice postcard from <a href=\"http:\/\/klbarrus.blogspot.com\/\" target=\"blank\">Karl<\/a> while he was in Florida on business (God I wish I had business that sent me there! Disney here I come!!) and <a href=\"http:\/\/bleu.west.spy.net\/~noelani\/\" target=\"blank\">Noelani<\/a> sent me TWELVE boxes of KD (If you don&#8217;t know what KD means, SHAME ON YOU!  It means Kraft Dinner, you know.. Mac &amp; Cheese?).  That&#8217;s enough to last me months and months!  Are these awesome people or what? Thinking of me over here and sending me postcards and little care packages? *Happy Sigh*<\/p>\n<p>How can anyone ever doubt the value of online friendships when you meet people like this? :)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I got in touch with a few old friends from UO that I haven&#8217;t spoken to in absolute ages. One of the guys I know from my very first days in Ultima Online and the other came along later but was one of my guild members and a pretty good friend. So often I would &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[153],"tags":[21,87,35,414,18,404,221],"class_list":["post-304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","","category-geek","tag-canada","tag-food","tag-friends","tag-gail","tag-gaming","tag-internet-people","tag-kraft-dinner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3221,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304\/revisions\/3221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.canadutch.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}