CE Wills

    Hey, everyone. Carley took this cool picture of an odd mushroom on a stump. As I said the other day, we have a variety of mushrooms here at the green retreat. I suppose the white dots on the right are some sort of mold or fungi but that is not my chosen field of study.     Here is a pink and red example that has been chomped on by ants, I guess. Sometimes I see squirrels eating mushrooms but this doesn't look like their work. The Cherokee Indians watched what animals ate so they could learn what was safe for human consumption. Seems kind of humble for humans to acknowledge the superior knowledge of the creatures of the wild. For that matter, every person, every tree, every rock can teach us something if we are inclined to listen or observe.     Hey, if you want a free download of wallpapers from the Rage game, click on the link to your right labeled Rage.com. You'll get a kick out of the video of the upcoming game as well. I was surpris...

     Hey, everyone. We have had an abundance of rain lately, at the green retreat. When this happens and our creek gets a decent amount of water in it, we always start seeing more animals. This morning we had a fox drift across the back yard within 10 feet of our glass doors. The picture quality is poor because you just have time to blindly grab a camera and point it in the critter's general direction and fire. Speaking of firing, can you believe that folks around here sometimes kill a fox or a coon merely for the purpose of hanging his tail on the antenna of their truck? I hate to be critical but I find this a bit barbaric.      I know that your typical fox would be surprised if I mentioned this practice to him. I can see the fox looking at me with incredulity and saying, "On your antenna? You can't be serious!"     Back to the subject of animal sightings and rain. When the rains come you will see an abundance of deer if you are ...

    Hey, everyone, out there in the ether. I hope you are having a nice day. It has rained a bit here this morning but there is always something to see if you prowl around.     I thought I'd throw out a few pictures today. Pic #1 is just a wildflower with odd little yellow tips. I wish you could see it on the big screen. Pic #2 is a big mushroom that is the size of a salad plate. This place is freakish for mushrooms. We have purple, orange, pink, all colors. Pic #3 is some treeshrooms (my word). These are growing on the big oak I mentioned in my post titled Oak Wine. Pic #4 is a neat rock. More on that in a moment. Pic #5 is the same mushroom as in #2, just a different day. Funny how they change color from day to day.     Now I'll go back to the neat rock photo. When kids are real small, they have a sense of wonder that is pretty cool. It doesn't take a lot to please them or to give them a bit of fun. Their idea of treasure is different...

    Hey, everyone. I'm really excited about an app I bought this morning for 99 cents. It's called Video Time Machine and it's really special. Here's the recipe.      You have a spinning wheel on the right of the screen. You can choose a year, all the way back to 1860, and all the way up to 2011. Beside it is another selector wheel where you select a category from the following. Ads, Games, Sports, News, TV, Music, Movies or All. Of course I immediately go back to the 60's. I start watching stuff like The Beatles at Yankee Stadium. I change around to different decades and cool old commercials. I watched Dick Cavett as he interviewed the brilliant Chess Master, Bobby Fischer. I watched Howard Cosell interview John Lennon on Monday Night Football. I watched things I didn't remember seeing and things that are etched in my memory. I watched Elvis sing Angel to a captivating young lady (Anne Helm as Holly) in the 1962 movie titled Follow That Dream. ...

    Hey, everyone. It's quite late again and as I sit here in my study I can see a novel on the shelf across the room. The title is Pete Rose, My Prison Without Bars. It was written by Pete Rose and Rick Hill. It concerns the baseball star's problems with gambling and being forever banned from the sport.      Years before this was written, I went to Atlanta to see the Braves, one Sunday in July. Being Sunday, it was a day game. Being July in Atlanta, in the enclosed bowl of old Fulton County Stadium, the heat and humidity were unbelievable. Toss in the smell of stale beer spilled on concrete and you have a recipe for an afternoon that could have been better. Of course, I was in my 30's at the time so I fared okay. The Phillies were in town. They had an aging superstar with them. Pete Rose was no longer a Cinncinatti Red but there was a big crowd on hand. Many of them were probably like me, they wanted to see the 'Hit King' play before he retired. ...

    Hey, everyone. This is a picture of a bloom on a Rose of Sharon, which we have, here at the green retreat. The bush, or tree, stands almost 8 feet tall and is full of blooms. It gladdens the heart to see it. I'm also glad to see you guys today.     Since I'm off today and my wife is working, I've worked outside a lot. I burned some boxes, picked up tree limbs, sawed up some limbs and mowed. When I cranked the mower, the noise spooked three deer. They were in the thick woods in front of the house. There was a momma and two babies. The smallest fawns I've ever seen. They would have laid in the hollow of my forearm, easily. They were spotted, of course, and the smallest would walk a few steps on his 'jelly legs' and fall down. They wandered away into the woods. When you find yourself really tiring of the long drive and the harsh winters, you see a sight like this and feel like life is not so bad, here at the green retreat.     I'm CE Wills...

    Hey, everyone. It's a stormy night and I'm up late. I'm sipping a bit of red wine as I begin this latest blog post.     Just as an aside, there is an app on the App store that you can download for free. This app will enable you to watch concerts that will be held in London every night during July. The name of the app is I-Tunes Festival, London. I have to admit that most of the groups are too modern for me to be familiar with them, but that doesn't mean they won't be any good. They are probably very famous for those whose music tastes are arrayed in the present century. The main reason I got the app was because of the very first act on July 1st. Paul Simon, the terrific songwriter and musician leads off these concerts and I fully intend to watch him.     I should mention another cool app that is available. It's titled Science 360 For I-Pad. This app is very highly rated and the reason is simple. It's free and it's good. Here's the rec...

    Hey, everyone. At a time when there are few really original concepts in games, d-Capitatrix HD is quite innovative. The graphics are exceptional, the game sounds are very good and the game play is challenging. It is, perhaps, a bit too challenging for me.Here's the recipe.     In the future, when robots are more prevalent, there is a robot who gets jealous of the later-model robots. She steals their heads and hides them in different rooms which can only be accessed by wormholes. You can move these 'holes in space' to enter different areas and the loose head rolls from side to side by the I-Pad's gyroscope control. So, you roll the head through the correct wormholes until you collect the 3 power supplies needed to power your robot. Then you place the head on the robot.     Whoever did the voice-overs and was the model for the robot's walk deserves a raise. It is a fun and unique game, well worth the paltry sum of 99  cents. As you ...

    Hey, everyone. Let me start by thanking Steve for his comment on yesterday's post about the U.S. Open. Feel free to comment at any time.     This evening I saw an article on Google News about the new policy for web addresses.  This stuff is not my forte but I find it very interesting. ICANN, the Internet Governing Corporation, has changed their policy about domain names. In the past they only issued 22 different suffixes. (Stuff like .com and .org) Now they are going to expand that to include nearly every word in every language. For instance, if I wanted to brag on a favorite character from one of my novels, I could have a site that ended with .Centaur.     Here's the wild part. Some of these web addresses are going to cost a whopping $185,000. It is clear to me that there is a segment of society that has a level of wealth and privilege of which I have no comprehension. To have a business and be able to write something like this of...

   Hey, everyone. I've been watching the US Open Golf Championship today. The youngster from Northern Ireland,Rory McIlroy won easily with play that was in many ways historic. For instance, he was the youngest player to win the open since Bobby Jones back in 1923. He finished an awesome 16 under with his nearest competitor 8 shots back.     While many may have hoped for a bit of a meltdown due to his problems finishing the Masters, Rory was rock solid throughout. When he walked up the 18th fairway, it seemed that he had aged 5 years compared to the cherubic lad that had started the day. He will be a formidable opponent indeed for the foreseeable future.     If one considers the sizable purse and massive potential of endorsement deals, Rory probably made many millions of dollars this weekend. But that would be the wrong way to look at things. It was far more than a weekend's work. The work started with Rory as a little kid. It consisted of many s...

    Hey, everyone. There's several sales on for IOS games this weekend but I want to talk about a few free games that we've been playing here at the green retreat. 1. 4 Elements HD . This is a puzzle game with a twist or two. This game has match-three stuff and hidden object searches. Then, at times you must find the differences between two cards. This game has extremely crisp graphics and animations. Hence the HD in the title. Plus, the game has great depth. By this I mean that you can play this thing for a long time. Someone has worked their butt off on this thing. Your mission is to travel from world to world and unlock the secrets of the 4 elements of earth, wind, fire and water. My wife got this free game today and has played it for at least 4 hours. She insists that she will buy it as soon as she plays all the way through the free version. The full version is a bit pricey at $4.99 but it is extremely well done.  Even a puzzle hater like myself can like this ga...

    Hey, everyone! Just got home from my day out on the town. I went to see Green Lantern. Then I stopped at Wal-Mart on the way home and searched for one of those cool green lantern rings but they did not have one with a suitable level of super powers. I did embarrass my wife. On the auto-sliding doors at the entrance, I stood in them and acted like I was holding them open with my Green Lantern force. She walked quickly toward the back of the store. I bought a less than adequate case for my Deuce, which is my new cool word for my I-Pad 2. This case is made by Incipio. There is no clip for the top of the device and if you hold it wrong the tablet will slide out of it and hit the ground. The case will be returned for a refund, I assure you.      Excuse me, I had an elderly moment and forgot that this was a movie review. Here's the recipe for Green Lantern.      This movie is very good. My wife liked it better than X-Men. I liked X-Men a...

    I don't wish to glorify stupidity but since Father's Day is just around the corner, I'll tell you a story about a funny old guy, my friend's father.     It was the summer of 1969. On a warm summer night, about 2 o'clock in the morning, 4 friends sat drinking beer in a remote area. We were all teens and pretty buzzed. Just laughing and cutting up.  Four young guys without many redeeming characteristics.         So, my three mates and I were bemoaning the boredom of living in a small southern town. You've probably heard it yourself, the whole "This town is dead" routine. At length someone said, "Heck, we should just go to Florida and live." This idea was accepted with enthusiasm. Visions of beaches (and women), clubs (and women), parties (and women) must have filled our heads. This seemed kind of epic at the time because at that time people really didn't travel that much. Nowadays, Spring Break is an annual rite of pas...

    Hey, everyone. You may be like me and have a lot of fond memories about comic books. This genre is perhaps the earliest form of escape reading in many young lives. I remember stuff like Turok, Son Of Stone. Earlier today, a picture of a grotto on my PC reminded me of an old Batman comic where he battled a guy called Clayface. I was very young when Marvel Comics burst on the scene with Jack Kirby on illustrations and Stan Lee as the storyteller. Until that time DC and Dell ruled the roost. Marvel was a little less stuffy and a trifle cool and quickly grabbed a nice segment of the market. I had the Spiderman series from the start, as well as most of the other newcomers.        At one time I had about 10 or 12 subscriptions to titles like The Atom, Green Lantern, The Flash and Batman . Like everything else, when I'm into it, I'm absorbed with it. But all this is just a little background for my idea.      I'd like to...

    Hey, everyone. I just finished a novel by Lee Child called Killing Floor . It is the first novel in the Jack Reacher series. Mr. Child just became the sixth author to sell over a million e-books. Pretty awesome milestone, when you think about it.     The milestone is well deserved. I would list this particular book as 4 stars out of 5. I have bought several more books in the series already. Here's the recipe.     Jack Reacher is an ex-army guy who just wants to live free and 'stay off the grid'. He has no car, no credit cards and just rambles around the good ole USA. This is cool until he drops into a little town in Georgia and gets blamed for a guy's murder. Then he gets sent up to the closest prison for the weekend until things can be sorted out for his indictment or release. That's bad enough, but while incarcerated he is almost murdered and it appears that a guard set it up at the behest of the local Sheriff. So, conspiracy is rampa...

    Hey, everyone. I worked hard today. I mowed the yard, used the weedeater, killed a big scorpion, swept the decks and walks, carried out the garbage and did 3 loads of clothes. Then I put on my swimming trunks and sat on the deck to grab a tan. It was sunny, but off to the west I could see thunderstorms cruising down a ridge as they made their way south.      I was listening to my I-Pod with one ear-bud only. As I relaxed, a lizard came out from a crack in the deck boards. He began to sun himself, which they dearly love to do. This was a blue tailed lizard. When he found a good sunny spot he flicked his tail back and forth several times. It was as though he were sweeping a spot which I had missed during my chores. Almost immediately he went into a sun-induced stupor.     I went inside and got a beverage. When I came back he had not moved, even though I sat about three feet away. I watched a gnat hover around his head. No response. A...

    Hey, everyone. I re-watched an older movie this evening called Some Kind Of Wonderful . If you must watch a teen movie about coming of age and dating, this has to be one of the best. Here's the recipe.     Eric Stolz plays the role of Keith Nelson who is about to graduate High School. His dad is obsessed with the idea of Keith going to college; Keith doesn't care for the idea. No, Keith is almost obsessed with Amanda Jones, played by Lea Thompson, who is out of his league. Or so he thinks. Keith is a guy that works as an auto mechanic during his non-school hours and manages to be a pretty darn good artist as well. In my opinion he is in anybody's league.       His best friend certainly thinks so. His best friend happens to be a tom-boy named Watts. She is a drummer and a feisty little chick who is madly in love with Keith. Keith has no clue. Watts is played by a little cutie named Mary Stuart Masterson. Frankly, she steals the...

    Hey, everyone. I went to see Super 8 today. This is the Steven Spielberg film about a group of kids who get involved in a close encounter of the worst kind. I felt like it was okay but not great.  I won't give a review at this time. I will say that if you are going out this weekend, go to see X-Men instead of Super 8.      The flower at the top of the page is a tiger lily, which grows wild around here. I forget what sort of bush the butterfly is on. I find butterflies very interesting, don't you? It's almost impossible to be sad if you are watching a butterfly. Seeing a butterfly flitting about in the sun causes a reaction inside. It's like you just want to laugh out loud. I doubt there is enough money on earth to persuade me to harm one of them. We planted several butterfly bushes, which draw flocks of butterflies, but they died. It is a tough place to grow things here. The hardwoods dominate life to a certain extent. The PH of the soil must no...

     Hey, everyone. I was just thinking about writers. Funny breed of guy or gal. What got me onto that subject was the fact that I was sitting here looking at my shelves full of books. Fat books, skinny books. 30,000 words to 130,000 words.     It crossed my mind just how few authors could carry a really big book. Not physically carry but to carry a story for that long. Lots of people write them. They stretch them out by putting in filler, details and a healthy dose of boredom. There's an art to that, sure. Robert Parker, the great detective writer, used dialogue more than anything, but I've read all his books.     But I was talking about the really big blockbusters like Tom Clancy during his prime or Wilbur Smith or James Clavell with his Shogun or Noble House . That one was 1200 pages that seemed like a few brief moments. At any given time there may be 15 or 20 people on planet earth who can really carry  a monster like that. M...

    Hello. I'm Carley, CE's wife.  My husband hates puzzle games so he asked me to make a list of my favorite games. So here goes. 1. Scrabble . I hesitated to buy this game, wondering how they could possibly port it to an I-Pad and make it fun. Now I play it almost everyday and have devoted hundreds of hours to it. A great stress reliever. I bought it on sale for 99 cents. If you buy it now, it will cost you a bit more. 2. Unblock Me. This is not about regularity. It's about removing blocks from a square by getting other blocks out of your way. It's fun and the first 400 levels are free. The full version is only 99 cents. 3. Pebble Jump. Free. In this offering, you jump pebbles over one another, leaving only one pebble in the designated hole. My husband thinks it is like Chinese Checkers but it is not. A nice strategy game. 4. Topple! Free. There are two Topples in the store. You want the one without the mean face on the icon. In this game you drop letters to...

    Hey, everyone. There was a time when I watched quite a bit of network news on TV. Dan Rather and folks like that. As the years went by and commercials became more numerous and odious I quit watching news. The right wing has since got their own news channel and most other news sources are left wingers. Seems like, in my dimmest memories, there was a time when news people prided themselves on objectivity. Perhaps I was just naive. I prefer to get just the news and put my own slant on it, thanks.    A couple of years ago I started reading Google News on my PC and really liked it. I find it extremely cool to actually choose the types of things that interest me. I leave the guilt-trip type of news for others to read. I don't like to read or watch news that centers on the tragedies of life, so that I feel more depressed than I was when I started. I read more sports, tech, I-Pad, e-book and Kindle news. I'm very interested in weather, also.     My ...

    Hey everyone. Well, it is first class, in more ways than one. Call it 5 stars out of 5, call it two thumbs up and waving around like a sub out of water. Call it whatever you like, but don't call it one you didn't see. X-Men: First Class is one of those films that leave you walking out while doing addition. "Let me see. On rare occasions you find a film with wonderful special effects and it will make $400,000,000. Then you might find another flick that has a great storyline which is well acted. It will make $400,000,000. Finally, you find that movie which has all that, perhaps 10-15 times in a decade, and it makes big dinero. I think this blockbuster may net a billion dollars worldwide.     Yeah, it's that good. Yeah, it's better than Thor. Here's the recipe. The year is 1962 and the cold war is at its height.  The Soviets are in the process of installing missiles in Cuba. As a guy who lived through this time as a young boy and remembers seeing ...

     Hey, everyone. I know it's an odd title. There is a lady I know who has a lot of trouble with her feet. She heard about a form of treatment that entails using two cans of beans, (really, two cans of anything will do) as a massage tool. What people are doing is this. They keep two cans of beans in the freezer all day. When they get home from work they sit down in a chair and take their shoes and socks off. Then they lay the cans on the floor, turned on their sides. They proceed to put their feet on the cans and roll them gently back and forth underfoot. Yeah, I know. It's really strange. Don't get the impression that I am advocating this. I merely found it interesting.     I've heard that certain areas of the feet have nerve endings that effect different parts of the body. Many years ago I injured my back at work and they sent me to a therapy place where I underwent massages. Certainly I had back massages, but much of the therapy was on my feet. I...

    Hey, everyone. It's been a hectic day for me and I didn't manage to squeeze in the X-Men flick. A friend called me and told me about it. She said that it was awesome with eye-popping special effects and a bit more of an emotional feel to the script. She said she cried twice during the show. So action plus character buildup, equals a smash hit? We'll see.     This evening, late, I did manage to watch a DVD of one of my favorite actors, Nicholas Cage. The movie was Bangkok Dangerous and it's a remake of a 1999 movie. I've seen them both now and Nicholas Cage's version is far better. Here's the recipe.     Nicholas plays a hit man, a very successful one. Success is a relative term, I suppose. The nature of his work precludes involvement with other people, so he is lonely, unfulfilled and a bit dissatisfied. He goes to Bangkok on an assignment that smacks of retirement. Four hits in the local area for big dinero. The problem is, not only d...

   Hey, everyone. If you're like me, you appreciate free games. I don't mind buying them, but it's nice to try the free version first. Here's a few freebies that I've tried lately. 1. Operation Wow HD. This is like an arcade game from the 1980's. It's a shooter game in which this array of bad guys run past your position. To kill them you merely tap them with your finger. When you do, you hear a shot and a bullet hole appears in their anatomy. There are a lot of soldiers as well as helicopters and other miscreants. One neat thing about it, there are harmless civilians who you must not harm. People like nurses with patients and others. It surprises me when a duck or piggie comes walking past. You get rewards for shooting some of these animals. The game is easy, to start with at least, but it can get frantic really fast. One has to wonder how soldiers are able to refrain from shooting innocent bystanders in the frantic pace of actual combat.    There is an ex...

    Hey, everyone. I thought I'd do a listing of ways that you can quit writing novels. Should you ever want to. 1. Buy an I-Pad. The tablet is a great productivity killer. You spend more time with it than TV, if you can believe that. It is a monster for entertainment. Hey, why write when I can have fun? 2. Start a blog. I started this blog as a casual thing. Now, after 15 months and 256 posts, I've found that it consumes a lot of time. But hey, I like it. As you age you need to develop interests and hobbies. Plus, it's less work than writing books. 3. Work full time. I've found that working a job interferes somewhat with fun and hobbies. They expect you to be there and do things. Barbaric. 4. Hate typing. If you hate typing, this will certainly impact your novel production. 5. Try to deal with E-Pub Check. Mind reading is not my strong suit. 6. Become a web-searching, touch screen tapping, netflix and Baggage watching, sit on the deck and listen to music, track ...

    Hey, everyone. Back during the 1980's I lived in Kansas for several years. I was working a contract job out there. I had a new Subaru, four wheel drive car. We liked to drive to Kansas City or Wichita, go to a mall, normal family stuff. Our kids were young and looking back, Carley and I were just kids ourselves.     One weekend we were cruising out I-35 toward Wichita. It had been really dry for a while. The landscape is extremely flat, as you know. The wind blows perpetually, usually 30 miles an hour, maybe only 20 at night. It's not all that unusual to see tractor trailers laid on their side. Kansas is surely an elemental place to live.     On this particular day we saw rolling clouds of smoke that were beginning to obscure the sun. We could see the smoke for 20 miles before we got to it. We came to a roadblock. There were fewer cars on the road in those years and this was certainly true of this remote place between Topeka and Wichita...