I’ve decided to make September contact-a-family-member-a-day-for-a-month month. My goal, as the name suggests, is to contact a different family member every day for the month.
One of the main reasons I’m doing this is because I feel like I’ve lost touch with my dad’s family over the last couple of years, and family is really important to me.
I chose this month because it was the next full month when I made this decision – some time in August. But, frankly, September has both its benefits and its problems.
The biggest problem is that I’m busy. Since I just started school (for hopefully the final time), I’m working my way into a rhythm, which so far means I’m reading a lot. It might have been easier to pick a later month when I’ve gotten accustomed to my new grind.
Another (non-September-specific) issue: I don’t even have 30 family members (if only counting both my parents’ immediate families, it’s 27). I definitely don’t have 30 family members that I could reasonably contact – in part because some of them are still too young to be on cell phones or Facebook. So I’m including friends in this as well, particularly friends that I haven’t spoken to in a while.
But September also has some advantages; one is that I’ve just started school. (Funny how that worked.) So I can update my family on that, which I’m sure they’re all dying to hear about.
The other benefit is that September does have some special dates that I can take advantage of (i.e. birthdays, anniversaries, football season, International Talk Like a Pirate Day).
A couple of other “rules”:
I’m going to try to update my Twitter feed with my progress. So for example, I called Grandma Sherrick last night and then tweeted: “Talked to my grandma tonight. Turns out Pennsylvania is really close to Ohio,” because she told me that Pennsylvania is really close to Ohio at least three times.
The other rule is that I’m including all forms of contact: phone calls, texts, Facebook, email, F2F (that’s face-to-face, a form of communication that requires abbreviation in this futuristic world), and even blog.
With that in mind: I’m dedicating this blog to my Grandpa Dunn, who hopefully still reads these. Hi Grandpa.
(Just in case he doesn’t read this, I’ll see him in about a week, so don’t feel like I’m cheating him.)
Event of the Week:
Contact-a-family-member-a-day-for-a-month month started yesterday.
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