Medley’s Best Apps in the Universe

I might have an unnatural love for my iPhone. But if loving it is wrong, I don’t wanna be right. This thing is just awesome. It’s my office, my entertainment, my portable reference desk and my library. Oh yeah, it’s also a phone.'
The first smart phone I had was supplied by my work and it was a Palm Treo. I loved that gadget too … until the next thing came out. Then I loved my Blackberry for several years. Finally along came my iPhone. I can’t imagine loving another more than this phone, but alas it will probably one day happen. My electronic midlife crisis will inevitably lead me to a newer, younger, faster love. But until then, I’m enjoying all my iPhone 4S has to offer.
There are hundred’s of thousands of apps in the App Store and it’s hard to sift through all of them or even know what to look for. Honestly, every once in a while I’ll pick up one of those $10 app review magazines at Barnes & Noble and flip through it while sitting in their incredibly uncomfortable café chairs just to see what’s cookin’. I am certainly not going to BUY one of those magazines because it will be outdated by the time I make it through the door. Besides that, I’ll probably only actually use one or two of those apps. Still it’s a good way to see what you might be interested and it may lead you to other good apps in your search.
Here are a few I have found especially useful to me. Most of these were 99 cents or $1.99. I know lots of people only use the free apps but all of these were worth paying for to me.
TuneIn Radio:
I use this almost every day. When I’m on the road, I lose my regular radio station for KSMU around Lebanon. With this  app, I can stream it right into my super awesome car and it comes in crystal clear. Plus if I miss Morning Addition for some reason, I can tune in to Talkeetna Alaska or Seattle, WA or somewhere else on the West Coast and catch the first two hours. It’s fun listing to the morning news of places I’ve been or might like to be. There is also a record feature and if you step away from the car, it picks right back up where you left off. It does use data to stream, but I’ve listened as much as I’ve wanted to and not hit my AT&T quota yet. At home, it uses WiFi, so that cost me nothing. You can set presets or favorites of the stations you like to listen to the most. I especially like one called Coffee And The Muse for when I’m writing upstairs. There are just so many options!
iBookshelf:
I tested out several free versions of bookshelves for my phone and this was my favorite. I can use the phone’s camera to scan in the barcode of books in my library at home and it finds them and adds them to my bookshelf on my phone. What that means is when I’m out and about at used bookstores, I have my entire booklist at the ready so I don’t buy books twice! I can also look to see which one’s I’m missing from a series. There have been a few books it couldn’t find but that’s no problem, you can search by author or just snap a photo with your phone and enter it in. I have all of my paranormal library collection entered into it. I still have to work on the upstairs library, but I plan to get them all entered in soon. I have a stack of six books I had bought twice before I got this app. It will pay for itself pretty quickly and it’s super easy to use and flip through to review your collection. You can also export the list to an Excel file for your computer!
Words With Friends:
I know you’ve heard of this one and probably have it. It is a fun and addictive Scrabble game you play with … well, you’re friends. It’s totally worth paying the $1.99 to get rid of the ads by the way.Super easy to use and you can send messages while you play if you want to congratulate or rant about a word played.
Angry Birds:
A super fun killer of time and ambition. I played four hours of it once at a family gathering. I sort of burned out after that but it’s fun while you are waiting for a doctor’s appointment or for your oil to get changed. They have new seasonal versions from time to time that make it fresh and new.
Amazon:
I have Amazon Prime ($79 for free shipping for a year and lots of other things like free streaming of movies and tv which we can’t use out here in the Big Cedars due to our incompetent internet speed). The nice thing about it is you can make Wish Lists of things you are maybe considering purchasing and if you check back from time to time the prices change and you can pick stuff up super cheap. I was looking for Season Four and Five of Supernatural and they were $44.00 each at Walmart. I put them on the list, checked back for a few weeks and got them both for $14.99 each. The day after Thanksgiving I got True Blood Season 2 for $9.99 and they are all shipped right to my house! Very handy!
Reader Apps: Nook, Kobo,Kindle
All three of these apps are good. I have a slight preference to the Nook app since I also have a color Nook tablet but the other two apps are just as good for buying, downloading and reading books on your iPhone.I don’t use the iBook app. I just never tried it.
Camera+
I really like this camera app because it has easy uploading directly to Facebook, lots of easy editing features and border options.
MovieNight
This is great for searching for movies at your local theaters and finding times and reviews. Very, very handy when I’m downtown and wondering what’s on.
MyPathFinder
This is the Silver Dollar City app and has show times AND the SDC MAP on it! Much easier than carrying around their big paper map and you are looking at your phone every ten seconds anyway right?
WhiteNoise
I like this for tuning out everyone at lunchtime so I can read or write. You can listen to the ocean, train tracks, birds, lots of cool stuff instead of the incredibly distracting conversation of the obnoxious persons beside you.
Facebook:
I might be a little addicted to Facebook. Okay, a lot addicted. But it sure is fun sharing your every random thought and catching up with friends. Actually, there are a few people I Iike better on Facebook than in real life. That’s probably wrong, but true. The Facebook app is constantly changing but it’s easy to use and share what’s going on in your life.
I have lots and lots of other apps on my phone taking up space that just need to be deleted because these are the best. Of course you never know until you try them, and I do love the thrill of the app hunt.

Thirty Thankful Things

Last week at church, Pastor Gary asked us to come up with something to be thankful for every day in November. Seemed like a pretty easy task, yet I'm only just now getting around to really thinking about it. So here is my list of large and small things I'm thankful for. These are not necessarily in order of importance but more in the random order of my confused and often cluttered mind. One more I just thought of when I found the above photo on Google images ... Words With Friends and all the folks who play with me :)

1. Organization
2. Extended Family
3. Health
4. A wonderful home
5. Nice pets
6. Bryon
7. Grace
8. A school for Grace that is five minutes from my house
9. A great job that gives me lots of freedom
10. A really great job for Bryon
11. 30 acres of mostly peace and quiet in the woods
12. Farm animals that entertain us and feed us
13. The outdoors
14. The indoors
15. A toasty warm pellet stove on cold nights
16. Awesome technology like the iPhone, the Nook Color, my laptop and the iPad I hope to have one day
17. The internet
18. Books. Lots and lots of books
19. Fans of my blog
20. Food
21. Our garden
22. The grid
23. Awesome friends
24. Free time even though it seems scarce
25. Enough money to do most of the things we want to do
26. Small town life
27. Chocolate
28. People with a sense of humor
29.Vacation days
30. Sleeping in late

Team Sports - Day 17 of 31 Days of Blogging

I am not competitive. Except with Bryon. I really like to beat him. Unfortunately, it rarely happens. If you remember, I am a former English teacher. Do not proofread my posts and correct them and I'll try to resist doing the same to yours. I don't like that.

As a former English teacher you would think I would be really, really good at Words with Friends and Scrabble. I know a lot of impressive words and I'm a pretty good speller. Before Grace was born, Bryon and I played somewhere around 200 games of Scrabble. I won three. I'm pretty sure he let me win at least two of those.

The problem isn't that I'm a poor wordsmith it's that I'm not competitive. Or strategic. I'm impatient. I'll look at the board for a few minutes, rearrange letters and then finally just plop something down. Bryon refuses to play a word for less than a double digit score. He utilizes the double and triple scoring tiles to the utmost advantage. He's a player. I'm a plopper.

He doesn't just beat me. He crushes me. I told him he's lucky I'm a good loser because most people couldn't tolerate that level of defeat.

I've just never been very competitive. Even when I was younger, my brother always wanted to play games and I didn't. Stratego was his game of choice. I hated Stratego. I just didn't have the imagination or the patience for it and he crushed me at it when we did play. Now he plays hours and hours of World of Warcraft online. Another game that requires lots of imagination.

Even in physical sports I'm not competitive. Sure it's fun to win, but if not ... well even the losers get ice cream most of the time. I tried playing junior high volleyball but when a few girls played every positition I just didn't see the point of practicing and killing myself and never touching the ball. Same in basketball. It was a lot of running up and down the court but very little actually playing on my part. I didn't have to. A couple of girls pretty much played the entire game. I was just filling out the team.

I did like playing softball. I volunteered to be the catcher because I figured that was my best chance of seeing some action during the entire game. Besides that, no one else wanted to do it. They were all afraid of Mickie's pitch. The game was slow pitch. Mickie was not slow. She threw a screaming softball.

Since high school, I played a little coed softball with Bryon on a couple of teams and we played sand volleyball but other than that, I just don't dig it. I don't even really like sports on tv. Thankfully Bryon isn't a big sports guy either. He does love him some Huskers football and we usually Husker up around her on fall Saturday game days but I usually only last about ten minutes watching the games. I can't stand the suspense. In a good book, I've often flipped to the last few pages to make sure the good guys win and all ends well before continuing on. In televised football, unless it's recorded, you can't do that. So I tune in for a few minutes when Bryon whoops and hollers and get the highlights from him when it's over.

Grace has been playing soccer for the past six seasons (two a year) and this season is probably her last. She didn't really even want to play this time but I signed her up. We are going to get her into basketball this winter at the First Baptist Church's Upward Basketball program. I think she'll be good at it and if she likes it she can play basketball at Niangua. Niangua doesn't have soccer and there's no way we are driving her all over the place to play a game she doesn't even really want to play.

Her coach at school said she's very athletic and competitive and might be the most athletic kid in the lower grades. I see her competitive side when she plays games at home with us or her Nana. She doesn't like to lose. She gets that from her Daddy. She hasn't been all that aggressive at soccer but if she finds a sport she really likes, I think she's definitely got the potential.

Of course if she becomes a professional women's basketball player or something someday, I'll never be able to go to her games because I won't be able to stand the suspense.

I'll have to wait for the highlight reel.