Bye Bye Picnik

January 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Picnik has announced that it is closing its doors in April. Boo hiss!

Wait, did you just ask me what Picnik was?

If you’re a blogger, you probably already know this, but Picnik is an online photo editing site. You can upload your photos, do all sorts of edits from basic stuff to adding text, frames, borders, stickers and more, then save the edited photo to your computer. I’ve been using it a lot for some of my blog graphics because it’s super easy to use, and offers quite a bit, even in the free version.

But that’s all changing in a few short months.

Picnik will be moving their services to Google+, where it’s already available in limited form. Not all of the editing capabilities are there, and the biggest downside to doing it on G+ is that no only do you need a G+ account to use it, but there is no ability to save the edited photos to your desktop. They’re all saved on your G+ profile. I do not like that at all, as I would like to upload things directly to my blog.

Pretty much anyone who’s ever used Picnik is upset about this change, and discussion has already turned to what the alternatives are.

This older post from Daily Gyan includes Picnik, but also 9 other alternatives.

Chris Perillo lists is favorite alternatives.

You can check out what Susan thinks of some of the alternatives over at Between Naps on the Porch.

Mashable has something to say about this as well.

And this whole post was inspired by Centsational Girl’s post on some alternatives she found and some tutorials.

As for me, I’ve already started searching for the best one for me. I’ve played around a bit, and so far I like Pixlr best. I do need to learn the whole layers thing, though. For those who have never used layers, it’s not really user friendly for a beginner to figure out on their own, but I think I had a breakthrough the other night, hence my latest header:

The one thing I’m not keen on in Pixlr is that the effects and the edits are two different parts of the site, so I’d have to make my edits, save them, then upload the photo to effects to do any of that stuff. It’s a bit much.

I’ve been thinking about springing for Photoshop Elements. I had it a few years ago, but never really figured it out too well. I do know that there are lots of tutorials available for it, and any Photoshop tutorials should mostly apply to Elements. I can’t use Gimp of Paint.net because they aren’t available for the Mac, but those are excellent alternatives to Photoshop if that’s the direction you want to go in.

Maybe this is one of those silver lining things on the clouds moving in on Picnik. I might actually learn some photo editing skills.

What about you? What will you be using when Picnik as we know it is gone forever?

Filed Under: On the Internet, Photos

Four-Eyes

January 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I’m trying to avoid packing right now so of course I have a bunch of post ideas floating in my head that don’t have to do with moving.

I recently bought some new prescription sunglasses that I absolutely love. Unfortunately, they did not come with their own case, and they don’t fit into the case for my regular glasses.

I started searching for a case that would fit both pairs of glasses, since that would be more convenient than fumbling with two different cases every time I want to change from my glasses to sunglasses or vice versa. I wasn’t finding anything I liked.

Then I decided to just look for a case for my sunglasses. I gave up on being able to cart the two pairs around together and figured I’d have more luck. But do you know how hard it is to find a glasses case that will fit a big pair of sunglasses?

On a whim, one night I decided to check out Etsy. And what do you know – I found exactly what I was looking for, only way cuter than I ever imagined! And bonus – it fits both pairs of glasses and a cleaning cloth.

If you’re ever looking for something and you’re not having any luck in the stores, check out Etsy. Seriously, it’s worth it. Not only will you find what you are looking for, but it will be handcrafted and you will be supporting small business.

Filed Under: I Like Things

Moving Is Exhausting

January 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

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Mister and I have been busy packing everything away and getting ready to schlep it all across this great country of ours. The picture above is the back half of our living room. The bookcases are empty, over a dozen boxes of book are piled up in the garage, and we started in on the kitchen last night.

By the way, books are heavy. I’m glad that we’ll have my young, strong nephew coming to help us load it all into the truck.

We took all the decorations down from the tops of the cabinets last night. What a huge difference that made in making the place look packed up! Today we’re going to pack up all the low-priority items in the kitchen. We have a ton of kitchen stuff, and we can do without a lot of it for the next few weeks.

Few weeks. We have less than a month to go – 28 days to be exact! And I have just 3 short weeks of work left.

Next weekend, we have a friend coming to visit us from California before we take off for the east coast, so the guest room needs to stay intact for the time being. But we did take out pretty much all the decor and furniture, so all that’s left in there is the bed and a nightstand. As soon as she leaves, that stuff gets disassembled.

We’ve spent a lot of our free time packing (when we weren’t being sick – both of us got some sort of fast-acting plague over the past week), and there’s lots more to be done. Not to mention a few craft projects that I need to finish up before packing up my crafty supplies. It’s gonna be a busy and exhausting few weeks!

Filed Under: House

Weekend Photo

January 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

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Come on, Mom! Let’s play!

Filed Under: Dog, Photos

Pack All The Things

January 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Over the holidays, I had a ton of time off so Mister and I used that to our advantage to start organizing, decluttering, and packing. Our Leaving Las Vegas date is just under 6 weeks away, and we still have a lot to do, but we’ve also made a lot of progress.

A lot of the issues that I’ve had with clutter is that when we moved in together, I had a very hard time integrating our stuff. At first, a lot of my stuff was in boxes in the garage because I moved into Mister’s one bedroom apartment, and I felt weird moving in and declaring all of his stuff as ours. Then, when we moved house, I finally got to open those boxes, but the storage situation in this house kind of sucks, and things just got shoved wherever they could be put away. Not the most effective solution. I still clung tightly to that “mine” and “yours” attitude regarding our stuff, and in some ways, I think Mister did too. Either way, we just dealt with a lot of stuff by not dealing with it.

Now we come to where we are packing to move cross country, and we have to decide if we really want to move this stuff. We’ve already made multiple trips to donation centers and thrown a lot of stuff away. We still have a ways to go, but this decluttering feels good.

We’ve also made decisions about some furniture. I brought into the household a bunch of modular cabinets. Some of them you’ve seen before (here and here), but they haven’t had a proper purpose since Mister and I moved in together. They’ve just been extra places to shove stuff. So, they go. We’ll have to find some more storage, but it will be more effective and something that we both like, since neither one of us is really fond of the blonde wood.

We also made the decision to get rid of our desks. Remember when I showed you my desk? Mister and I both have the same desk – a slick glass desk with an extra shelf on it. It’s never been my favorite, but Mister insisted that with two desks in a small room, glass would be better because it would visually open things up. It’s a great theory, until you start piling lots of crap on your desk. Then it doesn’t matter what it’s made out of, the room just ends up looking cluttered and small. So we talked about it, and rather than risk moving two glass desks that we’re not fond of, we’re going to do something like this:


One long desk, and rather than the sweet $1 cabinets that John and Sherry used, we’ll use stair newel posts as supports, and use furniture we already have and love for storage underneath, like my aqua file cabinet and other small items like that. Then we won’t have our backs to each other, we’ll have a surface space that we can get better use out of, and we can use the wall behind us for bookshelves and have ourselves a proper looking office rather than a clutter cave.

So that’s where we’re at right now. Office and garage are partially decluttered, plans to declutter furniture right before we leave are in place, and we still have a ton of packing to do. I guess you all know what I’ll be doing for the next 6 weekends!

Filed Under: House