how the internet works for me

Linking up with Works-for-Me Wednesday at We Are THAT Family again.

Why I'm thankful we moved overseas during the internet age:

Facebook

Maisha Kamili's Facebook Page

I know a lot of people waste too much time playing on Facebook. And it's no substitute for real, face-to-face relationships, but for expats, it's such a great tool to keep us in touch with our family and friends! There's a sort of out of sight, out of mind thing that happens when you move overseas. Being away from home, you send update emails, pictures, and videos to keep in touch with people, but very few people send anything back. With FB, it's so much easier for people to respond to our updates, and we can sort of eavesdrop on their lives and keep up with them. I appeal to all of my FB friends: be disciplined in your FB usage so that you don't have to decide to disable your account, and thus disappear from my life for years at a time. Also, post lots of pictures and updates so that I can keep up with you.

Add to that: Instagram. I'm on Twitter, too, but I don't keep up with people as much on Twitter as FB and IG.



Skype
For obvious reasons. It's much quicker and more fun than international phone calls, plus it's free. Also in this category are smart phone texting apps. International texting can get expensive, especially if you want to have a text conversation, but with an app, it's just a small part of your data plan.

my Pinterest boards

Pinterest
Pinterest also gets a bad rap, mostly because of "Pinterest stress." I say, as with anything else, you have to make it work for you! After joining Pinterest, it took me a while to sort out what, exactly, the object of my pinning would be. I've found that it makes a lot of useful resources available to me in one stop.

Cooking in a third world country brings some challenges, one being scarcity of ingredients. I have to sub ingredients all the time because what the recipe calls for either isn't available right now or they never have it here (or I forgot to buy it and shopping takes too long to just run out and grab something). A lot of convenience items that recipes call for (soup mixes, "cream of" soups, Bisquick, etc) aren't available, but thanks to Pinterest and the current western trend of cutting out processed foods from our diets, I can easily find and save conversions and substitutes.

Add to that: homemade cleaning products, home-preschool printouts/lessons/projects, and natural remedies. So many things that I need to know, I can find right there on Pinterest.

The internet works for me! Not the other way around.