Skip to main content

Mother Nature's Son

    Hey, everyone. It's a cold morning here at the green retreat. The temperature went down to around 17 degrees F this morning with a couple of inches of snow. Carley and I took a stroll in the woods just now and took a few pics. Funny how a place can seem so alive when the leaves are out and a bit dismal in the winter. Now I am drinking hot chocolate with marshmallows, and blogging while my toes thaw out. Wish I were at the beach.
    The tree pictured above has been abused by a pileated woodpecker. We have a few beaver around the creek but this doesn't appear to be their work. The woodpeckers can send chunks of wood flying.
     As you can see, our creek did not freeze overnight. I think that most of the animals had taken the day off. They have better sense than humans and stay at home when the weather is bad. We did find some rabbit tracks, however.
    We had 40 MPH winds last night and a big limb fell on the edge of the roof. No damage, but it can make you jump out of your skin to hear a big crash in the middle of the night. The roads were a sheet of ice when I came home last night, with some areas having a few inches of snow tossed on top of the ice. I was pretty stressed after a 25 mile drive at low speeds, on mountain roads. Creeks to slide into, cliffs, deer crossing the road, wrecks, fallen trees and icy up and down grades make for a leisurely cruise, especially after a hard day at work.
    Last night I downloaded the new game by Gameloft called Urban Crime. It is a knock-off of Grand Theft Auto and it is free. There are numerous in-app purchases that would seem to hinder your advancement, but I just played it for free, trying to see if I liked it. It seems to be a little easier, or more forgiving, than GTA or the Gangstar games. I enjoyed it. It should be pretty deep since it has almost half a gig of data. It doesn't have quite as cool a dialogue with the streetwalkers and other citizens as GTA but it is worth a try. Let me say that I was a bit irritated when the game started communicating with me when I turned my I-Pad back on. It did this by a banner at the top of my screen, while I was still on my home page. I guess it is no big deal but I went to Settings, Notifications, Urban Crime and then took the alert off. I don't like the fact that many games are including a line of code that will do this alert stuff without your permission. I don't know that Apple would have allowed this when Steve was running the show. I have all that stuff selected to 'off' on my I-Pad. Some of these games talk back and forth to 'somewhere' and keep up with what you play, I guess. It seems a bit invasive, to me, and I think that it can cause you to have more battery usage. That said, it is still a decent game and you can turn the alerts off. It just pays to check that stuff every once in a while. Also, for the new I-Pad persons among you, go to Settings, Safari, Clear cookies and Data, to keep your I-Pad speedy. Get rid of the dead weight, as it were.
    There is a new game out called 480 B.C., if you want to try it. It is free and the graphics are exceptional. I can't say what the gameplay is like because I have scarcely touched it.
    The last few days I have been exasperated with my action games and their difficulty level on 'easy', so I have been playing other genres, like a physics puzzler called Snoticles. It is free and quite fun. It is similar to Angry Birds, but a bit more user friendly. You throw boogers at these black, spiky creatures with red hats, hoping to destroy them all. In answer to your question, yes, I am serious. I am also playing A Monster Ate My Homework and Tiny Defense. Both of these games are free, fun and well done. In the monster game you have to knock these monsters off a platform, into a pond, without dumping your homework into the water. There is considerably less frustration with this game than with Modern Combat 3.
    By the way, I saw on the web site called Slide To Play that Shadowgun was coming out with a separate version for multi-player. It is already out for Android, with an IOS version soon to follow. I never play multi-player, except here at the house on local WI-FI, but it will be tempting to buy this one when it comes out.
     I have rambled on, just a bit, so I will take my leave from you now and pursue my gaming and weather watching, here at the author's green retreat.
   I'm CE Wills. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Egg Art

     Hey, everyone. One of the odd customs in America is the Easter Egg Hunt. Here at the Green Retreat, we do a hunt every Spring. I just ran across some of the pictures from this years hunt and it is obvious that an artist had sneaked into our midst. The orange egg is a rendering of one of the Angry Birds of gaming lore. If I were a bird and had to pass an egg that size, I would be angry too. Ha, ha.      We typically will dye about 10 dozen eggs and people get quite creative with their quotes and colors, as you can see. Many of the eggs are a bit risque for these pages. After having a few laughs, we hide the eggs. All of them are never found, which is cool. It is amusing to see old men (me) and all ages of folks, walking around with a basket on their arm. Some of the hiding spots are dastardly. Like eggs hidden in the guttering downspouts and ten foot up a tree. The kids are perhaps the most devious at hiding the colorful orbs, goi...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more