Skip to main content

I Hate It When I'm Right, Sometimes

     Hey, everyone. I wish you a good morning. It is frosty and cool here at the green retreat. Speaking of weather.. A year or so ago, I mentioned the fact that we had different types of trees that seemed to be dying out. Dogwoods, pin oaks, sourwoods etc. I said that I thought that entire climate zones were sliding north and I wondered how long it would be before the pines that are prevalent in middle and southern Georgia would be the dominate trees in the current hardwood country. Last night I was reading an article on the Washington Post that mentioned that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has reshaped its map for planting vegetation and now shows marked slides of zones to the north in most spots. When you become intimate with the environment, as we have here, you notice more readily the things that are going on with Mother Nature. They are gradual, sure, but I have noticed these things over the last ten years.
     On a less serious level, Carley wanted me to pass along a quick note for the puzzlers among you. It is about a game that seems to be a new genre on the app store. The game is Globs and has been popular on PC for a while. In fact, they claim that 70 million people have played it. There is a free version which is add supported and you can pay a modest 99 cents to be add-free. There are several copy-cats out there already. Here's the recipe for game-play.
     There is a board, with several colors of globs on it. (Hence the name) You have a few globs of a single color that are joined together in their ethnicity. You gaze at the surrounding globs and determine which color has more globs which touch your own position. We'll say it is purple. So you look at the bottom of the board and choose the colored ball for purple, which changes those purple balls which are in contact with your little patch, to a like color. Let's say that your patch is red. As you repeat the process your red patch spreads across the board, similar to the way in which white people took over the United States from the Native Americans a few hundred years ago. Oops, didn't mean to get political. Ha, ha.
    Globs only allows you 25 moves to spread your globness to all the other colors on the board. There are a multitude of levels and Carley calls it 4 stars out of 5. As a non-puzzler, I call it mildly irritating, unlike global warming, which is pretty scary. Sorry, I became political again.
    From the author's green retreat, CE and Carley Wills.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Biscuit

    Hey, everyone. What a relief that Christmas is over, huh? I don't think it was meant to be the way it is.     I started thinking about the so-called good 'ole days today. My wife says that at her house, they would take a left-over biscuit and shine their shoes before church. I one-upped her by saying, "Oh, yeah? I ate the biscuit when everyone got finished with it. And I was grateful for it." Truly, though, you can and people did, shine their shoes with a biscuit. Hey, they were greasy little buggers.     Speaking of greasy little buggers, I remember when everyone had wells and were very conservative about water, particularly those of us who had to crank a handle up and down to get a bucket of water. There was no daily bath. (No showers in those days, mate.) About twice a week we took a bath and here's the recipe: The oldest kid took a bath first, then the next oldest etc. You can see why younger siblings hated the older. Bathing in the...

The White Chicken Mystery

    The other night I happened to come home very late. It was the middle of the night and I was driving up a steep mountain road. Near the top I saw something white in my headlights. It was standing in the other lane, standing very still. It was a large white chicken. It was probably a rooster because I thought I could see his comb as I whizzed by at my customary pace. He never moved a muscle. This is weird, don't you think?      After a couple of days to consider this phenomenon, I have come up with some plausible answers for his bizarre behavior. 1. He was conflicted whether or not he should cross the road. 2. He was feeling cocky and decided to play chicken with the traffic. 3.He was being hen-pecked at home and had decided to end it all. 4. Someone had egged him on to do it. 5. He had just watched the movie Fantastic Four and decided to try to stop a truck the way that Ben Grimm did on the bridge. 6. He had driven himself crazy wondering if ...

The Sweet Run

   Hey, everyone. I have been playing quite a bit of games this weekend, as well as painting my house. Late last night I got on a sweet run on Nova 3 , the sci-fi shooter game. It's one of those games that has excellent graphics and feels like you have to advance inch by bloody inch. In a word, it is a pain in the butt.     For instance, I have been stuck on a Volterite spaceship for a month, wandering corridors over and over again like a lost puppy.     I finally cruised over to You Tube and watched a video walkthrough of the level. I eventually noticed that the guy picked up a piece of crystal from the floor in a dark corner of a 'solarium'. So, I went back to the game and at length came back to that area and picked up a crystal shard. Cool, right? I went on my way rejoicing in my heart. I had wild visions of advancing effortlessly through the remainder of this derelict ship and moving on to other exciting levels. Maybe I'd get to go to a dese...