OurGirl: A Few of My Favorite Things

i've come to realize that while list posts are the lazy girl's fall back to a meaningful blog contribution, they are also indispensable when the lazy girl finds the inspiration isn't hitting just right. don't get me wrong, i have many, many topics to discuss—its just the trouble of finding a suitable post for this particular blog. you know, the OurGirl specialty: a rambling tangential post of eosteric minutiae, quirky, with a touch of the everyday mundane that keeps my end of the blog humming along in obscurity.

in order not to disappoint, here is a list of stuff that i am currently interested in:



im a big fan of this for-profit, world-wide microlender—the vineyard blog has had a widget posted on it since its inception, over a year ago. for each kid's birthday, we give them the needed $25 bucks and they sift through kiva's journals and find an the entrepreneur. we loan the entrepreneur the money and follow their journal. it gives the kids an understanding of how other people in different nations work towards improving not only their lives, but their families lives and their community. the kids have grown up inside one family business after another, but its cool to be able to provide them with a global view.

i'm a big fan of wikispaces. in my grad studies, i find it invaluable. we set up a wikispace, everyone joins, and instead of sifting through endless emails, we have a highly participatory repository of pages, links, uploads and discussions. we can even see the history of each page's edits, if so desired.

widgets are addictive. i've made widgets for my vineyard blog, my etsy shop, and for other people's websites. i find sproutbuilder really intuitive to use and post. experiment yourself!