Anne and I at Sand Dune Arch

“I am a Jedi, like my father before me.” A Jedi at playing Solitaire that is. My Dad plays Solitaire on his PC, while I play it on my phone. Either way, it is a solitary pursuit, but also a pleasure that we have in common. I’ve had to throttle the phone App that I use though, cutting off its access to the Internet. I prohibit it from using any part of my data plan. If granted access it would only download annoying ads that I don’t want to watch. Likewise, I’ve turned off its use of the phone’s speaker, because occasionally this naughty App circumvents my will and plays an ad. It has figured out how to do this in two ways. First, if wi-fi is on and I enter the game, then it uses wi-fi to download and play ads. I’m usually pretty careful about this and turn wi-fi off, before entering the game. Its other method is when the App is occasionally upgraded. Each upgrade is accompanied with a new ad. This is how yesterday, the game finagled an ad. It also introduced a new future ad generating feature. Previously, I could choose to play a new game or replay the old one. I rarely chose the later option, but I did occasionally. The new feature that was added to this list was to choose to play an “easy” game. This option was seeded with three free games, which I played and handedly won, but I was left feeling somehow cheated, as if the deck had been stacked in my favor, which it had. I never even thought about buying more easy games, by watching an ad. I’ve gone back to the way that I have always played this game and have somehow earned another three free easy games. So far, I have not had any inclination to play them. I like messing with this App almost as much as playing the game of Solitaire.