A return to Postcrossing

With a new home comes a new address, and new possibilities for mail (snailmail, that is). While we've been receiving lots of letters in recent days (energy/telecom/governmental and move related), this flow of envelopes usually tends to dry out after the couple of weeks, when everybody actually knows you've moved and everything has settled down. Wasn't there some sort of solution to this... I pondered. That's right, Postcrossing!

So I went back to the website I'd visited so many times just a short while ago, and then it turned out that that 'just a short while ago' was actually a hiatus of three whole years. The last time one of my sent postcards had arrived was the 30th of August 2014. The last time I'd registered a postcard had been the 10th of October of that same year. If my Postcrossing stats were a heartbeat, my account had died a good while back:

Sad Postcrossing stats... see the little rise all the way to the right?

Time flies when you're, err, to busy to have fun?

Time to rejoin the Postcrossing community, and get those postcards flowing again! My first three cards went, predictably, to Russia, Germany, and the USA. This was fine by me, als the last two countries have short travelling times, and cards are thus quickly registered, freeing up space for me to actually receive a card (I was at 858 sent and 860 received, strangely, so I needed two of my sent cards to be registered to actually receive a card from someone). Luckily, the person to draw my address for the first time in three years was also a German, so my mailbox was indeed happy for the first time in almost three years!
But sadly, that person immediately wondered why I hadn't been active on the website for so long, and was afraid I had quit. 'For so long' was at this point a mere two weeks, but it did make it very clear that active participation is a key ingredient to Postcrossing; you cannot just draw a couple of addresses, send the cards, and then forget about the whole project for a month. You need to stay at least a little bit active, otherwise, or people will wonder whether you will actually register their card, and then maybe not put as much energy and enthusiasm in what they'll send you.
So since then, I've drawn 5 more addresses, and I now have cards travelling to Belarus, Ukraine, Germany, China, and the USA. It brought back all the old thrills of trying to find the perfect card, trying to match it with the perfect stamp, and then trying to squeeze in as many words as possible to give the receiver a nice long message.
It's fun, but also quite a lot of work. I think I'll stay around 5 travelling cards at any time (my maximum is 26 at the moment, but that would mean actually setting aside a whole afternoon just to draw addresses and writing cards!), which lesses my chance of sending any to rare countries, but what is wrong with Germany, Russia, China and the USA anyway? And hopefully I will still receive great cards from all corners of the world.