York County online: January 2009 Archives

Remember a couple of weeks ago, I talked about the new Virtually Organized Web site?

And remember that I said its owner, local professional organizer Debbie Jordan Kravitz, was giving away a site-warming prize?

I WON!!! I am getting a $50 gift certificate to the Container Store. (Here's her post declaring me the winner, if you want proof.) I can't even tell you how much it made my night late last night to find that out!

Debbie's only request is that I plan out my project and THEN buy, rather than just adding additional clutter. And I think I know what I'm going to do. I'll soon be posting photos of my just-started scrapbooking work space, and I saw a couple of neat things at the Container Store Web site that would be perfect fits.

Thanks, Debbie! :)

If you know me in person, you know I'm a study in contrasts. At work, I'm super-super organized. Heck, I have my paperclips sorted by type. You think I'm kidding? I assure you, I'm not.

At home... well, not so much. My house generally has what I like to call that "lived in" look. You know, it looks like a whole zoo lives in it? My cooking skills include immense drive-through knowledge and the ability to go an entire week on microwaveable dinners.

All that said, some of my favorite Web sites deal with homemaking and organization. I guess because I really want to have a super-nice house and make special dinners for my family. In fact, my deepest desire is to have a husband who's NOT the sports editor, who invites his friends over to watch the Super Bowl, so I can make little football-shaped hors d'ouevres. Seriously.

Some of my favorite sites include I'm an Organizing Junkie, The Hyper Homemaker, Flylady and Unclutterer.

But those are all national sites. And while they're cool, nothing beats hearing from someone with a local perspective. One new favorite locally is Mrs. Nicki S. Ordinary, written by a former coworker of mine who's gone out from newspapers to make her way in the field of special education - and who loves to share frugal tips and homemaking tips.

Another is one that just relaunched - local professional organizer Debbie Jordan Kravitz's Virtually Organized.

Not only is Debbie's site cool and locally focused, but I'm shamelessly touting it because she's giving away a $50 gift certificate to the Container Store to one lucky winner, and one way to earn chances to win is to blog about her relaunched site.

Hey, we (sort of) neat freaks have to stick together, right? :)

Any other house/organization/homemaking sites I should check out? I'm always looking for new ones.

Over the weekend, I had two neat Web sites in my daily calendar.

The first, new7wonders.com, is open for your vote on the "New 7 Wonders of Nature" worldwide.

The voting is done in rounds, so you can vote once in this round, then the winners will advance to another round of voting, when you can make your picks from those selections.

I took this picture in Niagara Falls during our big family road trip in the summer of 2007. It's one of the choices for the new natural wonders list, and I happened to like it, so I voted for it.

Anyway, that was from Saturday. Helpfully, the next day's calendar page offered this site, which gives you a virtual tour/computer reconstruction of the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, only one of which is still around today.

There have been tons of attempts to update the list, some of which are documented here.

It got me thinking: What if we had a "Seven Wonders of York County" contest? What would be your nominees? The idea would be to pick things that are unique and that have great value to "our culture," however you define that!

I'll throw out a couple of contenders:

The fairgrounds
The Shoe House
One of the markets

Agree? Disagree? Any other ideas? Throw as many at me as you can think of, and I'll put them all up for vote.

A bit of shameless self-promotion today; please take a look at our new blog, Record Tracker, which takes a look at public records in Pennsylvania.

Basically (and I'm REALLY oversimplifying here), the law says that many records kept by government agencies have to be made available if they are requested. Want to know what your lawmakers are spending your tax dollars on? That's findable using open records.

The new blog will help keep an eye on the open records process and what documents are available. In conjunction, we've got a news section called Full Disclosure that shares news on the open records law, as well as our reporting compiled through open records.

One of our editors, Scott Blanchard, is compiling all this information, so if you have info you'd like to see reported, drop him a note at sblanchard@ydr.com.

As my Christmas gift to myself, I get a page-a-day desk calendar each year. Last year's was made up of Scrabble puzzles; this year, I wanted to go with something a little different.

So, in keeping with the half of my job in which I'm the online editor, I picked the "Page-A-Day 2009 Wacky Web Sites calendar: 365 for the weird & wired."

I'm looking forward to trying out a new site each day. Lucky you, readers, you'll get to share in the ones I enjoy.

Today's is pretty fun. This page from Tulane University lists the "special" holidays and commemorative days for each day of the year. Today, for instance, is the "Festival of Sleep Day," and if you remember how I spent part of Christmas Day, you'll know why I like that idea so much! (My birthday, ironically, is Square Dance Day. Won't be celebrating that one!)

January is, among other things, Hot Tea Month (yay!) and also Prune Breakfast Month (boo!!!) Oh, and Diet Month. Don't get me started...