A Little Adventure

Top 10 things I love about Texas!

10. The winter weather. I loved that you can go outside on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day and not be too cold.

9. Drive through post office. That was nice when Amaia was a newborn or when Holly was sleeping in the car.

8. Shopping. HEB was a great store to do grocery shopping. I enjoyed that the outlet mall was 15 minutes away.

7. The pool. I enjoyed that we could go to the pool practically anytime we wanted in the summer. It was so hot that you wanted to spent a lot of time at the pool.

6. The trail. Wow, the trail along the Brushy Creek was close and fantastic.

5. Treats. I love Amy’s Ice Cream, Round Rock Donuts and most recently Lick It Bite It cupcakes. They were some of the best treats you could ever ask for.

4. Tex-Mex Food. This is when we learned to enjoy more spice in our food. We loved going to Chuy’s as well as making creamy jalapeno at home.

3. Good ole Texas BBQ. We managed to go to quite a few BBQ places in the area. Oh were they good and boy will be miss them.

2. Favorite Restaurants. A couple of my most favorite places to eat were Mighty Fine and Which Wich. I LOVED them! I will forever be looking for similar places here.

1. Our house, neighbors, friends and the neighborhood. We were in a fantastic location with some amazing people!! We will miss you! I hope to visit again soon…

On the other hand, I am excited to see all that Oregon has to offer. I’m looking forward to exploring the coast, going to the cheese factory, looking at great waterfalls and lighthouses, enjoying berry season, and anything else we can find.

I think we’ll be okay after all…

I have been taking pictures all the time the last year. I have been posting a picture a day (well, most days I get a photo posted) on Twitter. It has been really fun! I have got some amazing photos and very fun to go back and look at. I’ll be honest, most of my photos are of Milo and Holly, because they do some crazy things and I’m with them most of the time. I am planning on continuing the photo of the day this year too.

I know that there are some of you who may read this who don’t have a twitter account. Don’t worry. You can still look at my tweets by going to twitter.com on the web. Here’s a link to my profile.

On a side note, I realized that I have some photos that I haven’t tweeted about or blogged about….I’ll try to get those posted soon.

Wow, we’ll get on the ball with some new posts……sometime soon

Since I have my phone will me all the time, I use it to take pictures of the things I observe. Mainly the kids and such. I realized that I had more than 2,000 photos on my phone. I was looking for an easy way to (a) back up the photos and (b) take them off my phone to save space.

I knew that I could do a back up using Picassa and iPhoto. I tried using both programs and because of the huge amount of photos, both programs locked up. Also, they didn’t solve my problem of taking all the photos off with an easy method.

So I searched and found a great solution I thought I should share. The only problem is that it is a solution for Mac users only. Sorry!

1. Mount your iPhone using either your dock or the iPhone’s USB cable.
2. If you have iTunes or iPhoto set to open automatically, eject the iPhone from both of these applications.
3. Open Image Capture.app ((You can find this application in your Applications folder.))
4. Create a new directory to dump your iPhone photos to.
5. Click “Options” and select “Delete items from camera after downloading”
6. Click “Download all”.

Now there are photos, that I want to keep on my phone. I solved this by creating a new folder and putting the photos I wanted to keep on it and adding them back to my phone. It was a lot of fun to look through the photos. Awesome!

You can find more detailed information here.

I was reading my feeds today and found the Church has put out their iPhone app. It has all the materials you want. All of it is in text format. It is called Gospel Library and is free.

I still like the hymns and children’s song book (I just found this one) apps because the songs are in PDF format.

I thought I’d do a post about a few more iPhone apps that I found since my last post that I like.

TwitBird (Free). I use the free version of TwitBird and Scott as the pro version. We like that you can save drafts of tweets as well as send them to Read It Later.

Read It Later (Free). This is a nice little app that let’s you read articles later. It is a really easy way to read tweets at your convenience. There is also a website you can read your articles too.

Camera Genius ($1.99). I now use this app as well. It is a nice little app for taking pictures.

Simple Note Free. This is a great little note taking app.

Good Reads (Free). If you like to keep track of the books you are reading or want to read, then this is a great app that goes with the website.

Allergy Alert (Free). Since the allergies are so bad here, I found this app that tells me what is high that day as well as 4 days out. Very nice for those who have allergies or who think they have allergies.

Deliveries ($4.99). This is a great little app that lets you track any type of packages you have. After we had a package delivered to the wrong house, I’ve been using this. I really like it and it is easy to use.

ESPN World Cup (Free). This app will let you follow the World Cup. There are other ones out there. The hope is that when a goal is scored, your phone will alert you. When it gets a little closer we can probably find the right app is this one doesn’t do it for us.

Meebo (Free). This app lets you use your Google Contacts to chat like you would in Google talk. Very cool!

Tip Calculator (Free). I use this tip calculator. It comes in handy when you need to pay a tip. You can change the percentage as well as the number of people on the ticket.

Touch Rummy ($2.99). This is a fun little rummy game. I believe I got it when it was free.

Again, I have a lot more apps than this. I have a few specialized apps that work for the things I am working on now. My advice is to browse through some of the lists (like the top 100 in app shopper) and see what they have. If you have any questions or please let me know.

Scott and I decided to do a photo of the day, starting today. These photos will be published via our Twitter accounts. You can find us at calittle14 and scottLittle. We hope you enjoy the pictures.

A few people I’ve know have gotten either an iPhone or an iPod Touch in the last little bit. I thought I’d do a post about some of my favorite apps and include links for your convenience.

There are a few websites, I’d recommend checking often. The first one is Free App Alert. Each day they tell you which apps have become free. You can get some good apps there. The other website is App Shopper. At this website you can see whether the price has dropped or increased as well as have them e-mail with app updates, if you put the apps you want on your wish list. This is useful so you can know what updates were included for the app. Also if you want to read someone else’s must have iphone apps you can read about them here on App Advice.

Now on to my favorite apps. When you are just starting out, you will need to expect to spent a little money to get some apps.

Groceries – The Grocery Shopping List ($1.99). This app is the best. I like that it has a lot of groceries already programmed in it. Also, you can have lists for different stores and change it around so the groceries are listed in order of how you get them. For instance, I always get my produce first, so that is on top of the list.

A To-Do list. I use OmniFocus, which is only on the Mac and a super expensive app. I really like it and use it all the time. You should look at the to-do apps on App Advice for some other ideas.

Weather Bug (Free). I have both weather apps on my phone. I like weather bug because it gives me an accurate feel for what the weather is currently at home. There is a weather bug station at a nearby school.

Darkroom Pro ($0.99). I got this free, but it is a great photo app that helps with taking better pictures. This is an iPhone app.

Evernote (Free). This is a great little note taking app and can be used on the web as well as on the desktop.

Facebook (Free). If you are on facebook, this is a must.

Flashlight (Free). This app is perfect for when you are up in the night and need a flashlight. I use it when I need to go help the kids.

RedLaser ($1.99). This is an app that I feel all iPhone users need. With this app, you can take a picture of any UPC code and it will tell you if you can get it online and if so, the price. This is a very useful app.

Church Apps – I have several free church apps, that are great.

LDS Radio (Free). This app lets you listen to anything on the Mormon Channel. You can also listen to things like General Conference as well when it is on. It does use up a lot of battery.

You should have a scriptures and hymn app. I use this scriptures app. Although I don’t use it in church. For hymns, I like this one. Both of these apps are free. Also, very useful is the iWard ($3.99) app. It gives you the ward directory on your phone. I like this better than iStake because I don’t have a need for iStake. I’m waiting for the new Gospel Principles manual to come out, but I understand that it is coming soon.

As far as games. You just need to decide why types of games you like. My favorites right now are: Phase 10 ($2.99), Angry Birds ($0.99), and Tap Tap Revenge (Free for now – get now it before the price goes up). I have a lot of other games. There are a lot of games for kids. Just check some out to see if they will work for your kids.

I’ll put in here the podcasts that I listen to. I regularly listen to This American Life and Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me, both of which are NPR podcasts. I also listen to a myriad of church podcasts. You can subscribe to them here. You can decide which ones you’d like. I also listen to audiobooks. You can download some for free at Project Gutenberg. I also get books from the library and them put them on my phone. You can also do this with any audio items you download off the internet and make them into an audiobook. If you want instructions on how to do this in iTunes please contact me and I will e-mail you.

There are apps for basically anything you could want. I have a lot more apps, but these are a few of them. If you have any other questions about any of my apps or which other ones I have, please let me know.

For several weeks now, Holly and I have gone walking 3 days a week on the trail by our house with some ladies from the ward. It has been very enjoyable. We have been walking around 3 miles each trip and sometimes a bit more. Our house is near the trail so I walk from our house.

This morning was nothing out of the ordinary. I prepared like normal. I checked the weather and saw that we had a 30% chance of rain. Oh, it won’t rain. I grabbed Holly’s blanket and thought, this will at least keep her warm. I’ll be fine once I start walking. We got part way down the trail when it started to rain. Then it rained harder and harder. We ran a short section to the tunnel and waited a few minutes for the rain to stop.

While in the tunnel, we took this picture of the kids (all girls today). They seemed happy. They started to get restless, so we moved on in the drizzle. Of course, Holly decided to take pull back the canopy on the stroller and got full on wet. She was rather cold when we got home. The kids wanted to go play at the park, but we didn’t because of the rain. When we got back to the cars, one of the ladies asked me if I wanted a ride. I said sure. I didn’t want to walk back to the house in the rain. It was nice, but I’ve decided I’ll take my raincoat with me each time we go now. My gear shorts/capris did keep my phone from getting too wet, so I was happy.

Scott & I got new phones last week. We have taken some great pictures of the kids and were testing out to see how it worked to do blog posts from our phones. We hope that it will help us post more frequently. We hope to capture some of the fun and entertaining things we are doing. The last two posts were posts from our phones.

I decided that I wanted to make a couple more table runners for a few different places in our house. This next one was for the top of our roll top desk. It took me quite a while to finish it, but I finally got it done. It looks pretty good, but it is no where near perfect. My sister-in-law tells me that it has character. It certainly does have that.

The table runner for our roll top desk.

The next table runner I’m going to attempt is one for Milo’s chest of drawers. I have the fabric I just need to get started on it. It might take me a bit longer to get done. We shall see.