Tile Games

The early PCs that came from IBM -- remember the Juniors? -- had a set of games to urge people to learn to use a mouse. Remember Free Cell and Minesweeper?

The other day reading Tony Hillerman, there's a reference to Free Cell as a puzzle, and it has finally dawned on me what he means: it's not a solitaire, all the tiles present are in view, and the object is only to sort them out in the kind of rules that solitaire uses.

There's a game put out by Yahoo that's similar, but the tiles in each round are marked with letters. Its name is Text Twist and it's fun in the same way that Free Cell is fun, in that the total object is to locate all the words in this small set of tiles.

These are not games of chance. But as puzzles, they're pretty good.

Beauty Has Weight

There's a little gasteria named Frosty; I consider it one of my cactus plants. It came from Burk's Nursery more than ten years ago. Plants like that live a long time, even when treated with loving neglect. It lives outside most of the year -- and once lived outside for two solid years in a row. It bloomed as it usually does, late in the Fall, first putting forth a long long slender stalk that went sideways from its shelf towards sunshine.

Its flowers are like haworthia flowers, like little trumpets, but they are a beautiful rosy pink color with tiny areas of white and green that highlight each one. When I moved it to the dining room table, the stalk was a little more than two feet long, the bottommost buds had bloomed already, and the end of the stalk had about six inches or more of buds. As they bloomed, it lay down in a graceful curve until the buds just about rested on the table. These flowers aren't very big, it was a pretty place to sit and look at them on and off.

Now, the blooming is done, and the long long stalk has risen with a graceful curve still, til the very end is almost a foot off the table. The tiny tiny flowers had that much weight.

Winter Protection Is Here

The greens from the house went outside to be laid over a bed of bulbs and a rosebush, and the snow did fall, and fall, and fall. It's not cold, though. We're barely under freezing. I like walking the dog a lot better in days like this, even if we have to carry the shovel with us to make the path we walk on. So the wonderful protection of heaps of snow that would protect all those poppies is sure to be gone long before they no longer need it.

There's nothing much sticking up over the snow.

Those poppies were still heaped together and happy up til they got their blanket. Even the sweet peas were still there, still green, or greenish.

Some poppies are really tall, standing five feet and blazing at the onlooker even if they're all the way across the garden. I know a poppy bed with crambe at its other end. I grow dwarf poppies that stand about two and half feet tall, and bloom very profusely, that I bought bareroot from Bluestone some years ago. They've been so reliable I don't worry about them. But these horned poppies that were expected to be annuals are the ones I'm watching. For one thing, I've never seen them bloom, and I had expected them to be relatively thin little guys like the annual California poppy that seeds itself. Instead, their leaves are longer than my hand and a beautiful color of blue-green. They look great in a little vase when I cut them, and if they had water, they'd persist in the vase for weeks.

Some kinds of things are called horned because they have spurs on their stems. I so wish that these guys will survive to show me what they're going to look like.

Peonies I'm not worried about. They have discreetly withdrawn long since, and they won't poke their red tips out for months. Snow, no snow, it's not gonna discourage peonies. One year, I discouraged some by putting new composted mulch on them too deeply; so they don't flower if they become too deeply covered. But they seem to be a bit like bulbs, they can rearrange their depth for themselves if they have to.

Bulbs? This may be a funny year for them, because I believe I saw the tips of tulips just the day or two before the snow fell. If they get up too far, and then have a bad hot and cold time, they'll be twisty looking and warped. But those are ones I put in last fall, a couple hundred of them, and they don't have any sense yet of the weather they're in. The older ones never peeped.