I came across this article entitled Staying In Touch and it has some great ideas to stay in touch with your friends and family:
• Start a long-distance book club with a friend. Mail each other books you’ve read, with your thoughts, insights, and analyses written in the margins. (Hey.. we started a book club so I'm off to a good start!)
• When you send a letter or a card to a friend who’s notoriously bad at responding, try including a blank, stamped postcard, addressed to you. Even the laziest writer will find it easy to scratch out a response and drop the postcard in the mail.
• When all the critics assemble their year-end best-of lists, compile your own top-10 lineups of books to read, movies to see, and music to hear, then trade lists with a group of people whose taste you appreciate.
• Share a lazy Sunday morning. Simulate the experience of hanging out at a café together: Brew a fresh pot of coffee, toast a bagel, and settle in for some good conversation―and caffeine―over the telephone.
• Start a clothing swap with a same-size friend and mail wardrobe pieces that you know you’d both like back and forth.
• Go to the movies “together.” Each person sees the same film in her respective town on the same evening. Chat about it on the telephone afterward.
• Ritualize your visits with good friends so that scheduling problems and procrastination never cause you to miss a meeting. Choose one day a year and plan to get together on that day, every year, no matter where each of you is currently stationed.
• When keeping in touch with a large group of friends, from summer-camp pals to sorority sisters, set up a rotating schedule: Assign each person a month of the year to write a single letter to the rest of the group, photocopy it, and mail it to everyone.
Hope this helps you think of creative ways to keep in touch with family and friends who might be far away :)
