App Love!

Today I want to share a few of my favorite photo apps. I love to take pictures but I will be the first to admit that I don't always get the best lighting or frame the shot just so. These apps are great for those little tweaks! I usually take my photos on my iPhone and edit them on my iPad mini. I love Apple's Photo Stream feature - that's how you can access your phone pictures on your iPad or computer. It makes the editing process so easy!

Rhonna Designs ($1.99, App store)
I am IN LOVE with this app. It's a full-featured photo art app with thousands of choices. You can go as simple as a frame, or as complex as a photo that looks like a mini scrapbook layout! I particularly love that you can crop, re-crop and move your picture around throughout the process. Also great: no additional in-app purchases necessary (apparently they will have some available in the future - hey, a girl's got to have options!) Visit Rhonna's Blog to learn more.

A Beautiful Mess ($0.99, App Store, Android soon)
This app is great for adding colorful doodles and text to your photos. I love the many border effects! It has a limited color palette, which simplifies the process for people like me who can never choose -just- the right color. You can purchase additional fonts, borders, doodles etc for 99 cents each. The new undo-redo feature is just what this app needed! I love their blog by the same name.

Adobe Photoshop Express (Free, App store)
The mac daddy of photo editing software, Photoshop has come to your phone or tablet. Love that it is FREE! I did purchase the Adobe Camera Pack, which allows you to use denoise - an essential tool for me. If you just want to crop and fix the lighting, this app is great! I would still recommend saving heavy duty editing for your desktop/laptop computer.

Padgram (Free, App Store)
While this isn't a photo editing app, I couldn't post about apps without including this! If you have an iPad you are probably well aware that Instagram is not yet optimized for iPad. Instead of having to hit the 2x button and viewing grainy Instas, I love checking in with my friends pics on Padgram. You will still need to post any pictures from the iPhone app - Instagram doesn't allow any 3rd party services to post pics. Highly recommend this over any other Instagram viewer. Many others charge you to search by hashtag - boo! Padgram includes this feature in the free version.  They offer an upgrade for $2.99, but I haven't found any reason to upgrade.

What are your favorite photo apps for your phone?

Ninety one.

Yesterday was my Grandpa Jim's 91st birthday. Ninety one years old. It's something beautiful and unbelievable and sad and happy all at once.

Quite a bit has happened in the past year of his life. Much of our focus and worry had been on my Grandma Ruth because she is so very thin and doesn't make too much sense in our conversations. Her dementia is very noticeable when she speaks. Not that we had forgotten about Grandpa, but he had become quiet and keeps to himself. He always says he is doing just fine!

After the Holidays, Grandpa fell out of bed pretty hard and needed to go to a rehabilitation facility. After this fall, he was unable to return to the assisted living center. His new home is the memory care unit at the Nursing Home. While we've loved all his nurses and caregivers, these are by far the best. They know every quirk and are good with the details of his daily activities - now that he is unwilling (or unable... not sure) to share these things with us. Grandma had a pacemaker installed in March and followed Jim into the memory care unit after that procedure. It's nice to have them in the same hallway.

For his birthday we brought him a cupcake and some Fannie May candies - he can't resist sweets. I made a few low-key scrapbook pages with recent pictures to hang on his wall. The common room can be overwhelming, so we decided to head outside. It was such a beautiful night - 75 with the sun still shining. He wanted me to scratch his back. He really enjoyed the Fannie May candies.

It's hard to watch your grandparents age. For my Grandma, it has been a slow slide into dementia. I still see flashes of the Grandma I knew growing up, but with each visit there's more dementia and less Grandma. With my Grandpa, it seems as if it happened overnight. Sometime in the winter of his 88th year, he stopped speaking. He is a very smart man who holds a degree in Engineering from the University of Illinois. I think he just doesn't want to say the wrong thing, so he says nothing at all. I used to love having conversations with him. I will cherish those conversations forever.

Happy birthday, Grandpa. I love you.

Nashville trip recap