Hooray! I have been waiting all year for a letter from you and it finally arrived today. Yes, I do usually get your Wednesday letter on Friday, and as you can now see, Tuesday's letter gets to me Thursday.

If I get your letter on a Thursday, then I can mail a response the same day. But wait that does not really matter. If I get a letter from you on Friday, an answer hits the post office Monday morning and you get it Tuesday evening in time to send an answer on Wednesday. I guess it really does not matter; there will always be letters crossing in the mail.

I have still been pretty much in a vegetative state, and know there is plenty for me to do. It will get done, soon I hope. I almost put this letter off till the weekend, and there will probably be more to follow.

I am thinking I have sent you at least one letter that specifically thanked you for that letter you mailed to me the Wednesday before Christmas. I received it Friday before Christmas. My pastor friend down in Raleigh took the time to type out a letter Christmas Eve, and I received that the Tuesday after Christmas. Between the two of you I had a nice emotional connection with the outside world.

That is where my mind started thinking about your comments as to how your 'vacation' went. I was thinking of you the whole week as we to had rain and mud in the yard from a day or two before Christmas. I thought about how in one respect I am more in tune with the way members of the opposite sex feel as respects what makes for a strong emotional bond between two persons.

Without sounding too gay, wait a minute, rephrase that, without sounding gay at all, the friendship between you and I is certainly mostly in our head and heart. We can not get together for a few beers, a ball game, bike ride or other physical manifestation of our friendship.

Certainly I have made some changes in my behavior as respects our friendship and have been rewarded by a positive response from you. For example making sure that I spend more effort on cleaning up the posts I send you. I have also become a good reader (listener). Bobbielou seems to miss my letters, yet she has not gone to check her mail for a whole week. I am pretty sure that there was at least one letter waiting for her. It is just difficult to write to her without some feedback from her.

Yet as your Christmas letter showed, you did think about me and what you could do that would be meaningful to me. That was really cool. I did not even hear from my parents till Tuesday or Wednesday after Christmas. You certainly write me longer and more frequent letters than my parents do and I think that is a sign of the strength of our friendship.  ¶ 9:56 PM