Toasting all my "imaginary" (online) Friends and remembering TarHeelGirl

I recently learned of the passing of an online friend and it got me thinking about how real both the friendship and the loss feels to me. So I wanted to take the time to honor her memory and to let the rest of you know how much your friendship means to me too.

R. I. P. TarHeelGirl-Linda 

Linda aka TarHeelGirl was a founding member of my Goodreads group and came over like many did from my Barnes & Noble General Fiction book club when B&N shut them down. She was an active participant in all of our group reads and loved interacting with our visiting authors. She liked a wide variety of genres but gravitated to genre fiction the most. Her avatar – TarHeelGirl said exactly who she was; a North Carolina native and a tried and true Tar Heel fan.  I’ve been going through her posts to remember what she liked etc and learned that she was only 53 when she died. Way too young.
She will be missed.

The following is a post where as an ice-breaker we all said what we wanted to be when we grew up and what we actually grew up to be.

 To the rest of my online friends, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Bloggers, Goodread etc.

I learn a lot from all of you sometimes important stuff and sometimes things I can only use playing trivial pursuit, you all brighten my days and light up my nights, make me smile, make me think, make me cry and sometimes make me angry. But the most important thing you all do is make me feel and I’m grateful to each and every one of you for that.  

That makes us kind of the 21^st century version of pen pals only quicker than the USPS and I look forward to keeping up and catching up with all your ups and your downs and sharing my own.

So raise a glass in remembrance of TarHeelGirl and raise a glass to yourself while you’re at it.