CE Wills

    Hey, everyone. It's 35 degrees and snowing, here at the green retreat. I just came back from a walk in the woods. Our creek was overflowing its banks due to the heavy rain of the last 4 days. There was some sleet falling during my walk. Due to the temperature, the snow and sleet were melting, so the roads are fine.     We have a wet-weather spring on the back of our place. In other words, it only flows when there has been a lot of rain. I was 'tickled' (Southern for happy) to see this spring was gurgling away, an abundant flow of clean, clear water. Funny how you don't appreciate water until you have to do without it. Then, all of a sudden, you understand that it is the source of life and truly a blessing from God.      I was just looking around on the book stores. I'm talking about the on-line stores, like I-Books and Kindle. I am somewhat frustrated, as I've said before, with the high prices of e-books. They creep upward constantly. They are now up to an

    Hey, everyone. I thought it might be a good time for a bit of an update on the riveting game called Shadowgun. Consider this your spoiler alert and tune out if you want to.     Once you get past the dreaded Driller, things get better but you are certainly not out of the woods. You will want to make sure you keep a full clip in your gun as you stroll through the realm of the evil and crazy Dr. Simon. But hey, you're John Slade, the Shadowgun, and wherever you set your foot is the place to which your authority extends.      I love the way that some of the barriers disintegrate under the impact of bullets. I didn't learn this at my mother's knee but I darn sure know it now. I have learned that there are certain places it is good to plan on using the rocket launcher. Keep your stock of those filled. There are these transporter guys who are aggressive punks. The only way they respect you is if you kill them, so that's the way I roll. As you know by now, their strategy

    Hey, everyone. Yesterday was rather odd for me. For some reason, everything I ate tasted delicious. Therefore, I ate a lot of food. There are some days I don't care if I eat or not.     I remember a time, years ago, when I went 28 days without eating anything. That's another story and an interesting story. Perhaps someday, I'll tell you about it.     Today is a beautiful day here in the mountains. It is 60 degrees, very unusual for late November. We just came back from a stroll in the woods. We found the tracks of a huge doe, probably the largest that I have ever seen. They were so big that I wondered if they were made by an elk. Perhaps it was a doe with an appetite like mine.      There is supposed to be a big rain coming to the South. We need every drop we can get after all the years of low rainfall. Of course, we are on well water here at the green retreat. The big rain will be good for the well, I'm sure. The other day I took a sample of water from the creek

    Hey, everyone. I've had a busy day. We trekked out to a point of civilization. (Actually we drove, but it doesn't sound as cool.) Anyway, we went out to eat at a town about 60 miles away. I ate some Bourbon Street Chicken, among other things. I don't believe this particular chicken was ever on Bourbon Street but it tasted good nonetheless. It was spicy and tender. I had a salad with it which had all the usual stuff, plus boiled eggs and other things too numerous to mention. I had ranch dressing on it. I also ate potatoes, mac and cheese and a bowl of orange sherbert for dessert.       I was curious to see if Black Friday was as crazy as anticipated. It wasn't that bad. I did ask a sales clerk if they had been busy and she said it had been crazy very early that morning. I had noticed on line that Wal-Mart was supposed to have X-Box 360 for $139 and Rage, the game, for X-Box, for $30. So I asked a guy at the store where they were. He laughed at my naivete. "Dude

    Hey, everyone. It's a crisp morning here at the green retreat. I am one of the unfortunate few who have to work today but I thought I'd blog a bit for those who are not working. Here is a recipe for some cookies you might enjoy. They are called many things, from Snow Day Cookies to Cow-pile Cookies, to Rice Krispy Cookies. Here's the recipe. 2 cups of sugar 4 tablespoons of cocoa .5 stick of butter or margarine .5 cup of milk .5 cup of peanut butter    Boil above ingredients for 1 minute, then add rice krispies. Stir well. Spoon onto wax paper and allow to set up. Be advised that these things will at times set up correctly and at times they will not. I don't know if it is the humidity or what. When they 'do' right they are delicious and have zero calories. This is Carley's recipe, other than the lie at the end.    Hey, those of you who are IOS gamers, this is a great time to stuff your I-Pad or I-phone, I-Pod with choice games for choice prices

     Hey, everyone. Back during the summer I had some time off and we put in a little putt-putt course here at the green retreat. If you saw it, you would shake your head or laugh but it was fun. We dug nine holes throughout the woods. Then I placed some of the plastic caps for PVC piping down in the holes. I did this because I like the sound of a golf ball as it falls in the hole. Then I went to Lowes and bought several bags of sand for sand traps, which we arranged in an artistic manner around certain holes. Ha, ha. There were plenty of hazards other than the sand, believe me. Tree roots, leaves, mushrooms, the list is endless. But all this is not the reason for this post.     Not long after we put in the 'course', we noticed that an animal was stealing our holes. The plastic caps would be gone. We found some of them as much as 50 feet away from their hole. Others we have never found. I am confident that the local squirrels took them, because they are not nice people. I medi

    Hey, everyone. I rarely get any comments on the blog. I did have one on the last blog and clicked the box to publish it. It showed published but has not appeared as yet. My point is, I appreciate your comments, I am not great as a tech person and I'm sorry if you comment and don't see it. I am checking into why this happened. Have a nice week.     CE Wills. P.S. I found the above-mentioned comment. It was published at the end of another post about shadowgun for some reason. I guess the computer saw shadowgun in the title of that post and directed it there. Sorry. The title of the post was To Kill A Lobster (Shadowgun).

      Hey, everyone. Let's talk about the game called Shadowgun, the I-Pad game with which I have a love-hate relationship. Most of you who made it past the evil Cyber Lobster are doubtless locked in a death struggle with the Driller at the end of level 4. At this point you have been in the cave for a long time. The Driller breaks through the rock wall and chases you through the tunnel as you try to shoot out the green lights which slows the Driller down. If you are slick enough to shoot out all the lights and emerge from the cave, a rolling door crashes on the Driller and crushes his aggravating carcass. I have tried and failed to beat the Driller at least 250 times. I hate the Driller to the heights and depths my soul can reach. I hate it like a plague. I hate it with intensity of feeling. I hate it like a rich man hates taxes. Excuse me, I got carried away.       We had a big dinner here at the green retreat and my friend Trevor was here today. He is my gaming consultant. I tol

    Hey, everyone. It is a cool, cloudy, foggy morning in the mountains. Quite typical for November, really. I've been experimenting with streaming my I-Pad games to my TV. I bought a multi-player map pack from Nova 2 for local Wi-Fi. ($1.99) I don't really play on-line but I thought we could play here at the house. One of the maps has you battling on the beach. You know I'm a beach guy. The second is these frozen, floating platforms. You can run up anti-grav ramps which launch you to the next platform, which is really bizarre. I can imagine if you had 10 players all jumping around, shooting at each other with advanced weaponry. I especially like looking down through a glass platform on your enemy as he walks below you, unaware that you are stalking him. It reminds me of working in power plants. We had floors made of steel grates. If you saw a guy on a floor below you, you could dump a bucket of water on him. If he were 3 floors lower, the water would get pretty nasty befo

     Hey, everyone. The rather odd photos you see above were taken last night. We had a long power outage. This place gets black as pitch when the power is out. Luckily, I had split some oak chunks and stacked a quantity of it on the hearth. I started a fire and believe it or not, it brightened the place up. (You wouldn't know it from the pics.) I also lit an old kerosene lamp that Carley keeps on the dresser.       My wife was in bed so I tended the fire, drank iced tea and watched the flames. My I-Padster was fully charged and I played a lot of games, most notably the terrific shooter called Rainbow Six. I also played a freebie called Bullet Time, which seems pretty good after a limited time of playing it. After I fought many bad guys, I started reading, again on the I-Pad, and Abe Lincoln probably would have liked the back-lit screen better than reading by firelight. I read several free samples, trying to decide on which one to buy for my next read. One was a book about Rafael

    Hey, everyone. Another exciting day here at the green retreat. My high point thus far was killing a gnat. We have these gnats that love to bite your face. They are almost invisible because they are tiny. The best way to kill them is to lurk at the glass doors during the early morning or late evening, where you can see them against the light. I suppose that they are attempting to get back to their crypt before the sun gets high. I hate these voracious critters. Their bites make your face itch. They particularly like to bite the area of my brows. Someday I may work up the nerve to follow one of them back to their crypt and drive a spike through the whole place. Sorry, Halloween is over and Thanksgiving is here... I am so thankful that I killed this stupid gnat that has been biting me.       In non-gnat news, I see that police are reopening the Natalie Wood case. She drowned off the coast of California many moons ago. Evidently the Captain of Natalie's yacht has been saying some

    Hey, everyone. A few days ago I dropped by Best Buy and looked at their impressive display of E-Readers.  They had an entire aisle, both sides, devoted to the devices. There were multiple Kindles, Nooks and many others that I had never heard of. I was surprised to see that the vast majority of them were 7 inch screens. I guess this is what analysts think is the coming thing. Maybe folks want to stick them in a purse or book bag. Best Buy had a display model for each of them, hooked up and ready to try out. I turned every one of them on and checked them for responsiveness, crispness of display and all that. The device with the best display was one that I had never heard of and I have forgotten the name of it.      This is going to sound dumb but I really liked the packaging for the Kindles. It made me think about people, as most things do. Isn't it funny how important appearance is for things, and for people too? Not that the Kindle is anything other than a top-notch device. Bu

    Hey, everyone. I have been watching for the advent of the Jurassic Park game for IOS systems. I loved the movie and I had seen some videos of the game. So I planned to buy it. Just a few minutes ago, it went live on the store, which is good. It's $6.99 which is normal for a premium game. I was about to buy it and saw that it was 'only' around 340 MB which is a good-sized file but is fairly small for one of the big, deep, graphically rich games which I am used to buying. (Like 9MM or Modern Combat). Then I started to look closely at the description of the game on the app store. 1) It only runs on I-Pad 2. This is fine with me because I have an I-Pad 2 and I understand that on advanced games of a certain type the A-5 chip is necessary. 2) Get this. It states that this is Episode 1 of 4. So, it would appear that for the entire game we will have to fork over about $28 plus tax. Hey, I am not criticizing Telltale Games. It is their game and they seem to be up front about i

     Hey, everyone. We ventured out to civilization yesterday. We ate at a cafeteria. I was going to go to a movie but the film I wanted to see was already gone. I had thought about seeing the Johnny Depp film called The Rum Diaries but I suppose if 'you snooze, you lose'. It seems to be a bad time for good movies right now. I did watch a good older movie on TV last night. The flick was Wild Things . This has Kevin Bacon, Bill Murray, Matt Dillon, and Neve Campbell. Here's the recipe.     Matt Dillon plays the role of Sam Lombardo, a high school guidance counselor who is accused of forcing his attentions on two of his students. That would certainly be a story but that is barely the start. If I tell you much about it, I may ruin it for you. The situation is complicated. One of the girls involved is wealthy. Her mother ( Theresa Russel as Sandra Van Ryan) and the defendant have a history. A dangerous, crooked cop, played by Kevin Bacon, intends to fulfill his own agenda by

    Hey, everyone out there in the ether. There's a lot of sales going on this weekend for I-Pad games. I just bought a game called Scribblenauts Remix . It is normally about $5, which seems a bit pricey. Today it is a cool 99 cents. A lot of games try to say that they are different or innovative and I think this one is. The graphics are nice and crisp and the game play is thought provoking. Here's the recipe. You have this little dude named Maxwell. He encounters situations as he travels from place to place and tries to collect stars. Your mission, should you  choose to accept it, is to create the tools necessary for the dude to overcome obstacles.     For instance, on one level I decided that I need a winged horse to fly me over an obstacle. So I tapped the pencil icon. This brought my keyboard to the screen. I typed in Pegasus and sure enough, this cool winged horse appears and whisks me to safety. Then I collect my gold star and move on to the next level.      On another

   Hey, everyone. I watched a good movie tonight on the Starz channel. It is called An American Affair. The story takes place in Washington D.C. in 1963. Cameron Bright stars as Adam Stafford, a teenager who has a terrible crush on his neighbor. The lady is wonderfully portrayed by Gretchen Mol, who plays an artist and a (sort-of) nut. She is divorced and her own son is dead. Perhaps for this reason she doesn't really seem to mind Adam stalking her. That is not the right word, really, but he is a bit obsessed with the hot blond lady next door. I mean, he reads her mail, peeks in her windows, photographs her without her knowledge, things like that.     Perhaps she feels sorry for the guy. She hires him to clean up her back yard and the two seem to get along fine. I know what you are thinking. The story is far different than your typical older/younger hanky-panky. This lady, Catherine Caswell, and her ex-husband were mixed up with the CIA. A creepy agent played by the skilled Jame

    Hey, everyone.Those of us who are playing games on our Padsters and Podsters and Phones have plenty to amuse ourselves with. Let's start with those puzzlers who lurk in our midst. 1) Think Ahead . This is a numbers game with vertical and horizontal rows of numbers. It starts with a greeting. "Welcome, human. Let's play a game." If you pick a number from the horizontal row that gives you 10 points, the computer can pick any number from the vertical row that intersects with your row. In this case, I just picked a 10 and 'he' was able to pick a 15. I should have thought ahead. My wife likes this game but I loathe puzzles. It is free. 2) Smoody . In this physics puzzler, you have a cute little guy that you try to roll into a black hole. To do so you have to cut ropes that prevent him from traveling freely. There are a lot of levels and my guess is that if you liked Cut The Rope , you'll like this. It is free. 3) Fruited 2 . This match 3 puzzler is fun.

    Hey, everyone. Just been watching the mess up at Penn State. I guess I don't understand why they fired Paterno. There was an alleged crime which he had nothing to do with. Joe did not see the alleged crime take place. When told about it, he reported it to his superiors and he winds up getting in trouble for it. I must be missing something here.     From experience I can state that once you get a certain age, it is hard to be the sharpest knife in the drawer. Everything gets more difficult. When you are under the microscope like famous people are, you will never get it right. What must it be like to have a million people second-guessing your every decision? After a lifetime of having concerned alumni play Monday morning quarterback and try to tell you which play you should have called in Saturday's game, now you reach the end of your career and have the media people try, judge and convict you for something you had no control over.      I've had people like NRC analyze

    Hey, everyone. I have always been fascinated by animals. I have, however, quit going to the zoo. I used to go pretty regularly. One day I noticed how the animals would get behind any small projection of rock or vegetation, however minute an amount of cover it might be, trying to get just a smidgen of privacy. Being stared at all the time would literally drive some animals, or people, over the edge.       One of the needs of creatures the world over is to simply have a moment to themselves. Many times I have sat in a public place and felt sorry for an attractive woman who drew the insolent stares of nearby males. I try to make it a point, at times, just to look the other way. Just as a matter of good manners, you know? Is it possible that beauty can be a curse?      But the point of this post is to talk about the proliferation of cameras, hidden and otherwise. Several years ago, I saw an article that stated that the average Londoner, on his trip to work, appeared on no less than 6

     Hey, everyone.Carley and I have hung around the house today and we performed mundane duties. For instance, we raked leaves. What a huge job that is here at the green retreat. It is good exercise, however. I thought I would show you a short video of how bare the woods are now. In the valley there are still plenty of leaves, but there are not a lot of them here in the mountains.      My problem is that I really stink at any thing concerning photography so my video is turned sideways. Funny.     Hey. Try an app called 7 Billion by National Geographic, which deals with climate change and the number of humans on earth reaching the total of ...7 billion. Then try a cute little freebie game called Running Wild , which is free for today. It is a running type of game, with a puzzle style. Not my type of game but it is pretty cute. Carley likes it.    Today I finally tried something which I have been intending to do for months. I started playing multiplayer with the I-Pad on local Wi-Fi