World Fair Trade Day

Have you heard of World Fair Trade Day? It's tomorrow, May 14th. It's an international celebration and promotion of Fair Trade.

I'd been wondering what all the products are that are available fairly traded. I knew about the chocolate and the coffee, I'd seen some Fair Trade bananas, and lots of crafts. But I wasn't sure what else might be available. This blog post has a nice list of what items are available as fair trade. This blogger also has some other interesting posts about Fair Trade so have a look around.

101: buy a new laptop

My old laptop stopped working - it just kept shutting down shortly after it had been turned on - so I had to buy a new one. It took me quite a while to decide what to get. But since I'm using it exclusively here to go online and I'm not planning to carry it around much, I decided on a regular laptop instead of a netbook. It's not huge and heavy, but large enough to have a good size keyboard and screen. It also includes the practical features of a good size hard drive and a DVD drive.

A few more books

In the meantime, I've read several more books. Among them:

• Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson
• Six Hours One Friday by Max Lucado
• The Help by Kathryn Stockett
  
• The Miracle at Speedy Motors by Alexander McCall Smith
  
• Crazy Love by Francis Chan
• The Forest People by Colin Turnbull
  
• Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

And then there was a series of inspirational Manga, Serenity: Bad Girl in Town (Vol. 1), Stepping Out (2), Basket Case (3). Apparently, there are more, but I only had the first three.

These are the ones I remember.