iPhone Life Recently

It's December.  If you're like me, you're hustling and bustling and trying to find time to fit everything in among all of the parties, baking, wrapping, cooking and card-writing.

I actually had a handle on things until about last weekend.  While this has been a year of strange curve balls thrown our way, last week one of my best friends went through a pretty enormous, life-changing misfortune.  It's one of those traumas that keeps getting worse and larger in scope, despite all evidence to the contrary that it's already as bleak as can be.  So last weekend, all obligations fell through the cracks as I thought about her and was with her.

Thursday rolled around and I just sat down to upload some photos to the blog and work on some posts when I noticed Seamus, one of our little kitties, was having a medical emergency and had to be rushed to the vet.  He spent about 2 days at the vet hospital after having a procedure, which clearly threw my blog plans out the window.

I have a little kitty at home recovering now, and it's soooo sad because Seamus is usually our full of energy, full of mischief little spitfire.  He's a whirling dervish for real.  Now he's just sleeping off the experience and cuddling with us, which is very sweet but very jarring given that it's him!  I'm glad he's home and we're all breathing easier.

What have I done in between all of the surprise and upset that has crept into the season so far?  Well, yesterday I baked cookies.  I also went to a warehouse book sale, which is one of my favorite things to do each Christmas.  We've visited with family and stayed in watching holiday movies.

Some things are going to fall by the wayside though.  For instance, I'm not sure if I'll get my Christmas cards out in the mail this year, for the first year ever.  I have a day off tomorrow, then I'm working 4 days in a row till the weekend.  Next weekend won't give me a spare moment to fill them out because we are having what can only be described as a Christmas Bonanza the entire 2 days.  THREE Christmas parties on Saturday, followed by a Christmas play and dinner on Sunday.  I have the fortune to be on vacation the entire next week, so I should really push myself to mail them then.  But, I know I'll have last minute errands to run, plus getting together for my sister's birthday, plus helping my friend move home from Texas.  I think I'm letting the Christmas cards go much easier this year because I bought my cards in the $1 Spot at Target.  Usually I pay about $10 a box and there's no way I'd essentially kiss $30 in cards goodbye and never mail them.  This year, $3 total?  If it saves me the time and energy, I'm kinda all for it.

So, as seen through my iPhone Photo Stream, this has been a snippet of my life lately:

Downtown Berea after dinner with friends.

My nephew!

Super silly.

Home from the vet hospital and so, so exhausted.  Poor little Seamus!

Christmas tree, Take 2.  Our lights burned out a few nights ago so I had to take down all the ornaments, remove the lights, re-string the tree with new lights and re-hang the ornaments.  In spite of all this, I am still a proponent of unlit trees.  A bunch of people I know have recently had parts of their pre-lit trees go out and it's apparently a nightmare of epic proportions to re-string them or remove the lights.  Plus, I like being able to change up the light colors each year.  I am enormously fond of blue Christmas lights, so some years we do an all-blue tree.  Some years, all white.  This year, white and blue.  I like being able to change it on a whim.  Or, decorate it twice in one season.  Bah!

Peanut Butter Blossoms

Peekaboo!

Another Photo Evolution

I decided to play around with one of my many photo apps again.  A quick exploration of how this particular photo evolved:

The original photo!  This is unedited in my iPhone.  And yes, my husband is reading a book called "Effective Project Management."  I, on the other hand, can usually be found with something by Maeve Binchy.  Love her!

I moved on to Picfx, where I ran the "Police" filter over it, giving it a nice blue look.

Last but not least, I opened the new photo in Finger Focus.  This app allows you to zoom in on any part of your photo and direct focus on a particular element. In this case, I zeroed the focus in on Seamus, while the rest of the photo remained blurred.  

Photo editing:  I just can't stop!  I'm having a great time with it because this is something I never did in the past.  Seriously, how did people survive loading digital photos without their smart phones?  It was such a pain to insert the memory card in the computer, upload everything, then open the file and re-upload everything to a share site.  By the time all that was done, the last thing I wanted to do was any edits.  The exception would be the "auto correct" button in Shutterfly, or occasionally playing around with some color saturation.  I love how instant everything is on the iphone.  

You can usually find me playing around with photo editing while I'm watching TV, when I have a quick 5 minutes to myself, or on my days off when I'm relaxing in bed before getting the day started.  It's a new hobby that is holding me hostage!

iPhone Weekend

What Thanksgiving Looked Like For Me

iPhone Weekend

I thought I'd post my weekend iPhone fun early on Sunday morning.  Yesterday was a busy day full of errands, but today, we're collectively holding our breath and relaxing before the craziness of Thanksgiving week hits us. 

I'll be cooking the sweet potatoes for quite a lot of people, plus making an absolutely awesome cheese ball for an appetizer.  I'll probably post the recipe for that later, because it will work for any and all holiday parties as the season kicks off.

We're taking it easy on cooking this week since I'll be cooking quite a bit on Wednesday in preparation for Thursday.  We are, however, making enchiladas for Monday and Tuesday.  Yum!  I figured we'd pick something drastically different from the American Comfort Food Fiesta that is Thanksgiving.  I seriously can't wait to dig into some enchiladas tomorrow night!

My friend Sue had her birthday party at La Strada in downtown Cleveland last night.  We had an absolute blast on the upper level.  It was also a Masked Party...see the photo below for our get-ups!

East 4th at night.

I went shopping for Thanksgiving early Saturday morning.  And while the store was busy, I had the egg nog section to myself! Ahhh...egg nog.  A sign of glorious things to come!

Silly Seamus.

Masked Birthday Party fun!

iPhone Weekend

So this was a really great weekend!  For starters, it's a long weekend, which is why this post is going up on a Monday instead of Sunday.  Also, I got to spend a lot of time with people who matter very much to me.  On Saturday, we went to dinner with my family to Don's Pomeroy House.  This is definitely a "special occasion" type of restaurant, but we were celebrating two things.  First, my brother found out he passed the Ohio Bar Exam and was recently sworn in as an attorney for the state of Ohio.  That's right: my baby brother is a lawyer!  That only makes me feel sliiiiiightly geriatric to say!  All joking aside, he worked so hard to reach this goal.  Even when he was in high school, he knew he wanted to eventually become a lawyer, making him one of the maybe 5% of people who actually do what they wanted to do when they were younger.  Yay for him!  We also celebrated the fact that my husband got a new job!  He's been at his current company for over 7 years.  It's a great place to work, but it's also far from home.  His new company is much closer to our house and will provide a lot of valuable experience for his career.  The process was long....we knew he was in the running for the position for about 6 weeks before finally getting the news that they were offering it to him!  What a relief to hear the news and I am so excited for him!

Dinner at the Pomeroy House was a special Fixed Price menu for Cleveland Restaurant Week.  We each got to choose 3 courses.  I had the Red Chowder, Filet Mignon and Vanilla Bean Ice Cream.  Mr. My Blog for Bonnie had the Stuffed Mushrooms, Swordfish and Chocolate Mousse.  The rest of my family had several combinations of other dishes that were offered.  Yum!  It was so nice to celebrate some good news because this hasn't been the best of years for my immediate family.  Granted, given the state of affairs that a lot of people have found themselves in the midst of, we are lucky.  But we've still had some crappy curveballs thrown our way.  It's glorious to be ending the year with some awesome news!

On Sunday, I got to get together with 2 of my amazing friends from high school! (Bonnie, of the My Blog for Bonnie title of this blog, is also a very close friend from high school!)  These two particular friends, though, went downtown to see Beauty & The Beast with me.  I actually saw this show back in like 1996 when it first came out.  I saw it with my mom in Toronto.  It was great then, and while I don't remember all of it, I remember enough to know that they updated it a lot more in this revival.  There were a lot more special effects and the set design was different overall.  We loved it!  Before the show, we walked around Euclid Avenue looking for a place to get coffee.  We ended up going into a new restaurant called Cowell & Hubbard.  Instead of coffee, we treated ourselves to drinks.  I had the "Peach Pomme Grenade" which consisted of Peach vodka, Chamomile, Pomegranate juice, Lemon and Canton.  I loved it!  The restaurant itself was very hip and modern.  Lots of dramatic lighting and red upholstered seats.  I love that these 2 girls used to goof off with me in Spanish 5 (though it was deemed an Advanced Placement course, I think we can all agree that no advanced learning ever took place.  Unless you count making enchiladas as a class in the home-ec room or watching 'Como Agua Para Chocolate' as intensive Spanish training).  And flash forward a lot of years later, we are still goofing off and laughing as much as we did then.  I had such a fun time that it was easier to stomach the fact that I stumbled into a $20 parking lot by accident and had to fork over that amount of money just to park my car.  Ack!  Oh well, at least I was directly across from the theater, which made getting home a breeze!

Thick as thieves! 

Neville peeping out from behind the curtains.

Wall detail at Playhouse Square

Dessert and Coffee

Curtain at "Beauty and the Beast"

Still enjoying Autumn...

Going out to dinner collage.

Weekend iPhone Fun

Color Splash and Neville!

New purse!

Kissing her Kitty Cat pajamas

Lazy weekend nap on my lap

A toddler's self-portrait

Lost in the Shuffle

Somehow, this photo didn't make it into my recent iPhone weekend montage. I ran it through Lumie and liked the effect. I thought it would be a nice thing to post on a Wednesday, since we are as close to a new weekend as we are to the previous one.

Side note: I can't wait for Friday! This will be my first day off in weeks where I actually feel healthy!! Woot woot

iPhone Weekend

I'm starting this post earlier than planned, because initially we were going to head over to my sister-in-law and brother-in-law's house for a birthday celebration, where I was clearly going to snap more photos to possibly put on here.

Sadly, the Sickest Month Ever continues in the My Blog for Bonnie household, with my husband becoming victim of this mutant virus on Friday.  He typically has an immune system of steel and never gets sick.  When he does, he bounces back quickly.  And I can tell he's doing much better with this bug than I was, but still, I'm so bummed for him!  And I hate that we have to miss a family birthday.

This morning, when he woke up, Mr. My Blog for Bonnie told me he had one of the worst headaches he's ever experienced.  

My response:  "Do you want to go to the hospital?" (*obviously displaying my deep-seated hypochondria*)

Him, after a long pause in which he undoubtedly questioned whether or not he married a crazy person:  ".........No."

So I trekked out to CVS and a few other stores to get him some cold medicine and decongestants, having depleted the supply myself for the past several weeks.  Ironically, today was the first day for me in about two and a half weeks where I woke up and felt pretty darn close to normal.  Typical.

Anyway, I do have some photos I took yesterday and Friday.  I played around with several more apps on my phone.  Here they are!

 

I took this photo in PicFrame, and was eager to make my first photo collage.  I didn't edit any of the 4 photos ahead of time and just slapped this together.  I do love all of the different collage frames you can use in this app, and I need to play around more to discover the different effects you can then apply to the frames.

This is my lovely, wonderful friend.  We were at a Sweet 16 Birthday party last night for the daughter of one of our friends.  I ran this photo through Vintique, which is becoming one of my favorite apps.  It's very similar to Instagram but there are more filters and you can add lots of fun frames. 

I took this one using Lumie, which is a lot of fun.  You can add hearts, glitter and all sorts of other effects on top of your photos!

Instagram!

This one was edited in Camera+  and by the way, I'm sipping on a cup of this heavenly Pumpkin Spice Chai right now!

I was so excited about Over that I just had to try it out on any old photo!  I took a blurry one of my cat Seamus (am I really an 85 year old woman who takes photos of her cats to test out different photo apps?  Apparently!)  This app seems like it will be so awesome...you can add text in different fonts and sizes so quickly.  I always see inspirational quotes on landscape photos in Pinterest and I guess people have probably been using this app to create them all along.  Love it!

My Weekend According to iPhone

I have discovered all of the glorious apps that make photo editing a blast. Correction: I've only discovered a few, but they were enough to occupy alllll my time this weekend.