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.