Less Hustle More Coffee

Ahhhhh how good it is to sit and sip coffee and blog. The payroll is over for the week and now the concentration shifts as always to taxes. I do still have a few payroll things left over for today though – cutting manual checks for those new hires with no direct deposits until their pay cards are assigned, and stuffing our Nashville plant’s checks, but then onward to taxes. It’s Month End and Quarter End now that I’ve closed the last payroll of the month so I’ll be doing the monthly paid withholding taxes and then I will file the withholding returns for all states, our reconciliation report, and then our unemployment returns for all states. Then I can breathe easy again until January. January is going to be a wild card all the way around. I’ll be gone for about a week in a surprise moment when Katy has the baby. So I’ll be planning to get those 45 to 50 hours in at other times during the month which means working weekends and/or extremely long days to be able to get the work done. This is ever present in my mind as the time approaches. We normally hibernate during January. So I think February will become my new hibernation month. No one plan AnYthInG for Feb 2021!

This week the sleep has been good. George put a ring in his nose that is meant to help snoring. I think he may be using nose strips as well. It has cut down the sound to a tenth of what it was. He feels so bad. I hate to tell him that it’s the snoring – sometimes it’s not. But often it is what keeps me from sleep and waking me up. I’ve encouraged him to seek a sleep center and get study done. Someone at work told me now that they give you the equipment to do the study at home and they have a monitor that sends them the information ongoing. He seems to think he doesn’t need it. I chuckled inside when he said it, because yes he does. I know he has sleep apnea because there’s time I want to punch him to wake him up when he pauses to breathe. It’s not good for your heart or brain to not get the proper oxygen during sleep. He says he does not feel bad during the day but I can tell a difference in that he needs to go to bed earlier and gets tired quicker and often gets sleepy mid day or while driving.

I got the picture in that I ordered from Amazon that came over from China on a slow boat (lol). It was NOT any quality at all to it and not as expected.

This was the pic. But it was rolled up on a canvas and not on a canvas board like this. And it was a horrible screen print job. So I’ll not be using that. I’m returning it so it’ll go back on a slow boat from the US. I noticed it had a disclaimer that said “some colors may be muted” or something like that and I thought that was probably a disclaimer for a defect, making it seem like it is ok because they mentioned it. LOL. Well no, it’s not ok. It’s not pretty like the picture so it’s not worthy of hanging it on my wall. The purpose was to have something pretty on the wall not some muted imitation of beauty that looks like ants made a home on it and drove their little cars around on it making race tracks grooves all around it. lol

So enhhhhhhhhh – strike out! I do want something with those colors though. I will wait and go to hobby lobby and the price has to be right.

IOS 14 Decorating the Home Screen with Widgets

I’ve been so excited this week to upgrade to the IOS 14.

Here is my screen update – well that is screen 1. These are the ones I use most on a quick whim.

Free Background – Snag it if you Want it!

Here is the background I created in Canva if you wanted to steal it. I like it as it’s kindof a muted fall color. At first I thought it was too busy as a background but it grew on me as I added my widgets.

Now a lot of people change out their app covers. Such as these examples which someone else made on Canva free for others to use.

I was going to do that too as that is just as cool as my neighbor’s homegrown cucumbers! But – there is a few flaws with that.

A Few Flaws with using the App Covers (A different Photo on each App)

1. You use the Short Cut screen to set it up and so when you click on it – it will go to the Short Cut Screen before it jumps to the app so there’s a delay. Yeah it’s a second delay but it’s annoying to have it go to a screen before it brings up the camera or facebook or whatever app it is. For me that’s annoying.
2. When the next season arrives or you want a different look you have to go through decorating your app covers again or just live with the wrong colors.
3. It takes a little minute to set them up – easy -but you probably need to watch the YouTube before you do it. And to do that every time you change your “theme” will be a bit time consuming in an already busy world. However, it looks really cool.

Here is my page 2 (swiping from right to left) on my iPhone.

There are stackable widgets called “smart stack” that change at various times of the day. It will display news, photos, itunes, and other things throughout the day. I also have a photos widget (above) that shows various photos (that I’ve selected as favorites). I love it. I’ll probably still change things around some. You can set some widgets as a Quote. You can use the Reminders app and create other lists as well and even use it to list a quote.

This is my screen on the left side – when I swipe from left to right. The upper part I put a stackable widget and I allowed the suggestion widget which is the most used apps. Or probably the most recent apps b/c some of those I’ve not used often! Then I have the regular widgets below that I’d already set up as just a “daily review” (traffic, weather, news, Bible verse, # visitors on wordpress and so forth).

So exciting stuff. If you have an iphone and are wanting to decorate your phone here’s my advice below.

Advice for Decorating Home Screen with IOS 14 on iPhone

1. Make sure your update has downloaded.
2. Google some examples of what others have done so you can get some ideas as to what you CAN do.
3. Pick a theme color you like and have in mind what colors you want to work with.
4. Find a background along the colors of your decided theme and set it as your wallpaper on your Home Screen. Backgrounds are everywhere. Use a photo, take one yourself, make one on Canva app, find one on Google Images – lots of options. Textures and designs are good. But apple has a couple of new ones and you can just use theirs.
5. An extra tid bit on backgrounds: Some like a combination of light and dark so they can put the dark apps on the lighter section and the lighter apps on the darker section.
6. Download the Color Widgets app and the Widgetsmith App as those give you the best options for setting up some cool widgets on your screens in various sizes, fonts, and colors.
7. Use YouTube to look up how to set your home page in IOS 14 and you will see numerous instructions on how to add various widgets such as the ones I mentioned in #6 above. Google will work too if you like the written instructions instead of seeing it. You can also see YouTubes about setting up the app covers if you want to go that far. Also there are other updates that came with IOS 14 – you can YouTube those too. I’m finding YouTube so valuable as far as How To’s and All Abouts!

Gotta go to work and get started on my punch list there, but hope you have a great day! Hope you found today’s entry helpful if you have the iPhone and it’s update. It’s fun to create and especially something you use every day. I love to decorate my world! What kind of phone of phone do you have? iPhone? Have you done the update? If you don’t have an iPhone, why do you like the one you have. I’m an Apple gal now. But I like hearing others views on their favorites! Let me know!