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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.

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