I didn’t mean to go so many days without blogging. The good news is the reason I haven’t blogged is because I have barely touched my computer in days because I’ve been so busy painting and hanging light fixtures and working like crazy on our new house. I finally started taking some photos with my real camera this week so starting tomorrow I will be blogging with some of the changes. I took some full room shots of our den/study which is the one room that is more or less finished for now. I need to go through and edit those, though, so first I am just going to show you some of the smaller details like some of the doors painted, shelves in our kitchen and the new sconces in our family room because I am still waiting on a few more small things to finish up in that main kitchen/family room space before I photograph the full shots and show you the full space before and afters. And I also will do a post on painting kitchen cabinets (I used a different approach as well as different paint for my cabinets than I did for Jason’s and will do the pros and cons of each) and then of course I still have the photos of my parent’s kitchen and Jason’s kitchen too to finish going through and editing. And we also made great progress on Lillie and Lola’s bedroom this week. It took me two nights and one afternoon of painting to get all of the dark trim nice and white and then we had a wonderful lady come put up the wallpaper on their back wall yesterday morning. It is so fun and colorful. Way out of my normal comfort zone but the girls absolutely love it so it was worth it. I just need to hang some curtains and do a few other projects and then I can photograph it. Then it’s on to either the dining room or powder room. I haven’t decided yet. I am planning on taking the night off from painting tonight, though, so I can spend it getting a bunch of blog posts ready for the coming week!

Now, onto the Samsung Galaxy Note 8.  A lovely woman from Staples contacted us a couple of months ago about doing a product review. I was a little unsure at first because we try to not do a whole lot of reviews but I actually was quite interested in trying this out so I decided to go for it! It arrived the day we moved in to our new house so I left it safe in it’s box for the first week or two just so that there was no chance it would get lost or broken in all of the crazy shuffle. Then once we got settled in I opened it up. It is such a great little tablet! I LOVE the size of it! It’s got a much bigger sizes screen than my iPhone so it’s a million times easier to browse the web and catch up on e-mails but because it’s smaller than an iPad it’s a lot easier to carry around and store in little spots. I also love the way it looks.

I love the keyboard too! It has a full keyboard with all the numbers too which I like so much better than switching back and forth between the letters and numbers. Samsung has pretty much thought of everything on this tablet! It actually has something called “Smart Stay” that will keep the screen on as long as you are looking at it. You don’t need to set a timer. It also has great handwriting recognition and can turn the words that you write out with the S Pen into text that can be added into e-mails or notes. The S Pen comes with the tablet and has a great little slot it fits into you don’t have to worry about losing it when you are using it (which is a nice little feature for absent-minded people like myself!)

There are a million more things it can do but I haven’t had time to even begin to check them all out. I have been loving using it though for browsing the internet and Lillie can navigate her way around on it in two seconds – she has been loving looking at all of the Halloween costumes on the Chasing Fireflies site and trying to decide what she is going to be and she’s also taken it upon herself to help Jamie find the perfect costume for Evie’s first Halloween. =)

Here are a few more details about the Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0

• 8.0″ TFT Display WXGA (1280 x 800)
• 16GB On-Board Memory
• Processor: 1.6GHz Quad-Core
• Android™ 4.1, Jelly Bean
• 2GB RAM
• microSD™ Card Slot (Up to 64GB)
• Wi-Fi®, 802.11 a/b/g/n, (2.4Ghz + 5.0 Ghz) – Channel Bonding
• Camera 5MP Rear + 1.3 MP Front
• GPS with Glonass
• Bluetooth® 4.0 (LE)
• Supports USB 2.0 Connectivity (with an adapter sold separately)
• Built-in Infrared Blaster (Smart Remote)
• Built-in Stereo Speakers
• Antenna (Integrated)
• IF Connector: 11 Pin
• Multi Window, Air View, S-Note with Web Viewer, WatchON
• 0.3″H x 8.3″W x 5.3″D, 0.73 lbs.

Applications
Pre-loaded:
Alarm, AllShare™ Play, Awesome Note, Calculator, Camera, ChatOn,
Contacts, Dropbox, Email, Flipboard, Gallery, Game Hub, Gmail™, Google+,
Google+, Messenger, Group Cast, Internet, Kindle, Latitude, Maps, Music
Hub, Music Player, My Files, Navigation, Paper Artist, Places, Play
Books, Play Magazine, Play Movies, Play Music,Play Store, Polaris
Office, Samsung Cares, S-Cloud, S-Voice,Smart Remote, Talk, Video
Player, Voice Search, WatchON, World Clock, and YouTube™.



I want to say thank you so much to Staples for providing me one of these! We love it! 

I hope you all have a fabulous Saturday! I’ll be back next with some previews of some of the details we’ve been working on at our new house!