CE Wills

    Hey, everyone. My wife was sitting on the deck yesterday evening, playing games on her IPod Touch. She started hearing a hawk's strident cry, or so she thought. After locating the sound she saw a mockingbird imitating a hawk's cry. He was scaring a bunch of squirrels, who are deathly afraid of hawks. The squirrels were squawking in anger and when they would subside the mockingbird would cry out like a hawk again. Most amusing. I didn't know birds had a sense of humor.     We bought a game for the IPad yesterday. It's very popular at the moment. I think it's overrated because you really don't do much. It's called Super Mega Worm and you control a worm that is trying to eat all the humans on earth, to prevent pollution. The price is 99 cents so you are not out a lot of money if you hate it.     Hey, maybe they should come up with a game that has mockingbirds tormenting squirrels.     CE Wills

    Hey, everyone. It's a beautiful morning here on the mountain. It's 56 degrees and a nice blue sky. Reminds me of a morning in Trinidad, Colorado after a big storm. That was in July.     I wanted to tell you gamers about a site called You Tube Plants vs. Zombies Channel. I suppose it's an official site for that game, which you know I really like. There's a fun video from their fan convention. I'd recommend it to anyone, really.     I'm getting a real lesson in geography here on the blog. As you know from previous posts, Google allows us to see the number of hits from different nations, although not anything specific about the folks. (Again, I have no desire to intrude on anyone's privacy.) So, I noticed the other night that I had a visitor from Burundi, which is very cool. It's my first viewer from the African continent and I dug out my encyclopedia and read about this East African nation. It was very interesting and as I went to sleep that night I

    Hey, everyone. I thought I'd share my recipe for cheeseburgers. I like to add some spice to the meat so I add several things. 1. salt 2. pepper 3. Cajun spice 4.Heinz 57, just a little 5.Greek spice, (Cavender's) 6.ketchup, just a little 7.mix the meat, pat out the patties, then after grilling on one side, put Montreal steak spice on them before you put the cheese on. 8. serve with a dill spear and an ice cold beer, maybe a few chips. 9. take a nap From the green retreat. CE Wills

    Hey, everyone. Just went for a walk in the woods. The general lack of rain is making for dull fall colors. The prettiest trees right now are the birches, which are a pale orange. They are short, scrawny trees but are very nice in the fall. One variety of these is the paper birch. They have bark that peels back of its own accord and looks remarkably like paper. You would like them.     During our walk we found some fresh scat, very fresh. It was probably from a pretty large animal and most likely not an animal who eats plants and berries. It was deposited at the entrance of a thicket of mountain laurel.     I thought I'd talk about a few apps for the Apple devices. By the way, I understand that the Iphone went on sale in China this weekend so hello and welcome to all you folks from China who have wandered onto the blog.     Oregon Trail is a game that has nice graphics. You travel across America during wild-west days in a covered wagon, making decisions about hunting, interac

    Here at our place we have these odd bugs that look very much like a stick with legs. They are whoppin' big things, 6 to 8 inches long. They're called stick bugs. They'll give you quite a start if you feel something on your head and feel around up there and contact one of them. They like to ride piggy-back on each other and I don't know why that is. I'm not crazy about them.     Last night I told you about the army of raccoons that ran away as I came home. Evidently they returned later because I found two tiny footprints on the dust of my car. I was relieved that they didn't write "Wash me".     Today I was changing the filter on my water system. My well is good despite the dry weather but I have iron water that requires a pretty good filter, a 5 micron. This takes out the sediment and makes your toilets look more civilized. Anyway, as I was doing this I heard a tremendous crash. It sounded like it was quite a way off so I didn't investigate,

    Hey, everyone. I came home after dark tonight and saw an odd sight. Raccoons were running all over the place, like a jail break from a prison. They were running in funny zig-zag paths as though trying to dodge bullets. Quite funny looking, really. They may be looking for water off the air conditioner due to the severity of the dry weather. I didn't realize that several coons would congregate like that. There were at least 4 of the little guys. It's hard to believe that folks hunt and kill them just for their tails. I know that raccoons are tremendous fighters and will whip a dog, sometimes several dogs, in a heartbeat. One night after grilling steaks I woke up in the middle of the night and caught a coon trying to get in the grill. I chose not to contest his right to do so.     One never knows what can be seen at this place, the green retreat. Goodnight from CE Wills

    Not so long ago I saw an odd sight, here on the mountain. I was driving along, not far from home, in daytime hours. A car was approaching me and was in it's proper lane to do so. Something seemed very wrong about it and I squinted my eyes trying to figure out what was odd. As it got closer I saw that the guy was driving his car in reverse, one arm thrown across the seat-back. He waved as he passed me by, as most folks do up here. I was a little blown away.     A few days later I had the opportunity to ask a local person about this. They laughed and said, "That's old so-and-so, all his forward gears are out of his transmission so he has to drive to the grocery store in reverse."      This incident, while minor, and amusing, serves to add just a little more color to the green retreat. It's always surprising and rarely dull.     On the subject of video games for the i-devices: I bought Nin Jump yesterday. I had been trying it out with a free version. It was on

    Hey everyone. Published a short story on Smashwords today. It's about a blogger who finds a woman standing on his front porch. He's never seen her before but she says she knows him because she's been following his blog. He finds the situation interesting, especially when he finds out she's come all the way from Russia. Hey, it's free, so why not give it a try? It's very short and should just about last for your morning commute on the subway. The story is a little similar to my novel, KGB Retirement Program. I hope you like it. Here's the link. http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/24722

    Hey everyone. I was standing at the kitchen window this morning, pouring a cup of coffee. A red fox came trotting by scarcely twenty feet away from the house. He was oddly colored, all brown except for a big swath of red fur on his throat. He sure was scrawny looking. I think he was after the squirrels that hang around this place. At any rate he was snuffling along in the dead leaves and soon passed out of sight. I don't know where these animals are getting water. Our creek is dried up completely. I suspect that they get their water from a farm pond some where.     We've been trying out some new games for the Ipad. Battle Bears, Doodle Jump, Gears, Minigore, Fragger, Peggle, Tornado, Buganoids, and Flight Control, to name a few. My wife really likes Peggle and reached 13,000,000 points on it. It's $2.99 on the app store. She likes Fragger, which is a game where you throw grenades at these little guys and blow them up. It's 99 cents. In Battle Bears you have these o

    Hey, everyone. My wife and I got out of the woods for a while today. We dined out and then went to a movie. We saw a movie called The American , with George Clooney. I had read some reviews on it a few weeks ago. The reviews were negative and guess what? They were wrong. We both liked it. Both of us gave it a 4 stars out of 5. It was really good. George Clooney plays an assassin who's dissatisfied with his work. He has several people who want to kill him and he has no idea who he can trust. As an added worry he falls in love with a rather lovely prostitute who may or may not be a friend.     There was very little music with the movie and I found this quite relaxing as it enabled me to focus more fully on the plot. It seemed like the movie intentionally turned away from the use of a formula which is used to reap the maximum dollars. I can identify with this because it is my style as well.(as a writer)   For all you Ipad folks, I have a couple of web sites you might like. Just

    Hey again, everyone. Just being a little lazy today. I sat on the deck and drank coffee. Not much going on with the animal kingdom today. Then I came inside and sat down at the keyboard and played a few songs.     I have a pretty nice Yamaha keyboard and I was playing out of an old "fake book" this morning. The first song I played was San Francisco, a beautiful song from the sixties which is commonly associated with the hippie movement of that time. I was actually in that area at that time, visiting a town called Freemont, some 25 miles away, on one of my hitch-hiking trips. I was, at that time, a long-haired freaky person myself.      Next, I played another song from that era, Unchained Melody . It's also very lovely and I do it quite well, most days. I can't sing the high parts like the dude from the Righteous Brothers, of course. But who can? If you don't have these two songs on your Ipod you should check them out.     I finished with Don't Know Much

    Hey, everyone. My wife showed me a cool spider here in the woods the other day. She says it's commonly called a writing spider. It weaves a thick web in zigzags that look very much like writing on one of the old tablets from grade school. It would really scare me if I could actually read a message written by them. That would be Stephen King territory.     On a similar note, we have spiders here in the woods that build a web in a tunnel shape that really looks neat. Overall, though, I've grown to hate spiders since we've lived here. You walk through so many webs that you begin to get irritated. There have been days when I have killed 20 or more spiders. Bugs are bad here also, lest you think that the green retreat sounds idyllic. Sometimes gnats try to fly into your eyes when you walk in the woods, which is a stone drag.     Then there are other days when it's just gorgeous, like today. The temperature was in the seventies, with the leaves colorful and a nice breez

    Our leaves are changing rapidly this year. Partly, I think, from the dry weather and partly from the normal fall change. The yellow leaves of poplars and the red of the sourwoods is dominant at the moment. The sourwoods can be used to make sourwood honey, by the way.     I really should be out cutting my winter's supply of firewood. I usually cut it in the summer so it can dry out. If you don't it tends to be harder to light and burn. The chain saw vibration is not good for the nerves in your hands and I'm concerned about my ability to play music. That is as good an excuse as any for my tardiness.     Just returned from a trip to the city. Traffic was a bummer and people were stressed. I stopped at Books-A-Ridiculous and looked at James Lee Burke's latest novel. The price? $25.99, in hardcover. The book is still there because I think that is a bit much. I've noticed the price of e-books creeping up for bestsellers. Some are up around $15 now. Marketing people

Hey, everyone. Once upon a time I recommended an app for you I-Pad, I-Phone, I-Touch people. It's called Stanza and it's my favorite book download tool. I'd like to talk about it a little more, now that the months have rolled by.     There's a tab on the app named Get Books. When you go there it gives you a list to choose from that includes several stores where all the books are free. As I browsed on these sites I found one called Munsey's which has a sub-genre called Pulp Fiction. These short novels were very popular in the era of WW2, I suppose. That's a bit before my time but I've come to appreciate their style.     It seems that the publishers of that day flew in the face of convention by producing a bunch of books that were more for the common man and woman. Fingerbowl types of readers turned up their noses at the coarse fare to be sure, but the main requirement that these publishers wanted from a writer was the ability to start a tale quickly and to