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Sunday Gratitude – 18.X.2026
Hi everyone! Glad to be back here. I’m still struggling with a lot, and there’s a lot that’s really overwhelming. However, I’m going to give it a shot as far as gratitude here.
Most importantly, probably, is that my son had a surgery on his ear a couple of weeks back, and everything went really, really well. Yes, he had the same surgery back in February on the other ear, and it went really well, but there’s still a good bit of nervousness attached to all these things.
Secondly, I recently took part in the Serbian Orthodox Choral Association’s annual choir festival. Because it was only a week after the surgery, I wasn’t going to go, but then there were people who had signed up who either couldn’t go or couldn’t sing, and I was asked if there might be some way that I could go. I managed to get things arranged, and I went. It was an amazing trip, and I hope to write about it separately. Most of us who went ended up driving, including the people I rode with, but everything went off without a hitch, there were no accidents or incidents with the driving, and the event was a lot of fun. I am very grateful for that, and for getting to see the city and experience the city a little.
If any of you are interested, our choir’s performance can be found here (our group starts at 45:15):
The weather has gotten cooler, and I’m grateful for that (St. Louis at over 90F was quite a shock to the system). This just seems to be one of those patches that is especially rough, so I’d appreciate your prayers for me and my kids.
Thank you ever so much for following; you are amazing!
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Gratitude
A lot of stuff is happening “behind the scenes” in my life, and this may never actually be a good place to get into these stories. Nevertheless, I’ve been feeling quite overwhelmed and until some of these issues are a little more settled, I don’t think that there’s much of a chance of being able to sit back and recuperate a little.
In any case, I started mowing the grass yesterday, a task that has been entirely mine pretty much all of this year. I don’t mind it per se, it gets me out and moving, but it takes awhile to do. The lot is about 1/3 of an acre, and the house sits on part of it, and there is some parts that are landscaped, but with the push mower, it usually takes me an hour to do the front and an hour to do the back.
I was about ten minutes into mowing the front when I nearly jumped out of my skin as I felt somebody place a hand on my shoulder. It was our neighbor, a man with grown kids, who has occasionally mowed our grass knowing that it’s tough with the little kids. He said to me, “Put that away, I’ll mow the grass. You’ve already got too much to do.” And with that, he was going over to get his riding mower.
I started crying. I don’t know how to express my gratitude. I worked on the patio and cleaning the garage – it was a blessing.
Once he was done with the riding mower, he came over with his push mower to get the bits and pieces that are really not capable of being mowed with the riding mower. He’s never done that before, and it just floored me. I am speechless, grateful for his kindness from the bottom of my heart.
(Seriously, the whole family is great; I’ve had the chance to get to know the daughter and son-in-law over the summer and it’s been a godsend.)
So I just wanted to make a quick post here about it, just as a reminder to give thanks in all circumstances, and that this is the type of action that binds us together as human. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
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Wordle #469
Never played Wordle? Check out my Wordle strategy page!
Wordle explanations are posted a day late to ensure that no one accidentally sees the solution before playing.
Line 1: I’m giving “baste” another shot here, and it gives me two vowels – the “E” in the right place, and the “A” belonging somewhere else.
Line 2: Is this another “A” word? Nope. I got the “L” though, even if not in the correct place.
Line 3: “A” in the middle, and now I know the word has to start with “L”.
Line 4: Being as I couldn’t imagine another consonant following an “L” (the word isn’t “llama” after all, I figured that the second letter pretty much had to be a vowel, and probably “E”. From that point, the only thing I could think of was “leave”, and it worked! 🙂
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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Wordle #468
Never played Wordle? Check out my Wordle strategy page!
Wordle explanations are posted a day late to ensure that no one accidentally sees the solution before playing.
Line 1: Back to “beast” and all I get for my trouble is an “S” in the incorrect spot!
Line 2: Yay! “S” and “OR”
Line 3: Of course, there are still a number of words that fit the description!
Line 4: “Scorn” – At least the “W” had already been eliminated, otherwise, with my luck, I’m sure I would have needed another line!
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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Wordle #467
Never played Wordle? Check out my Wordle strategy page!
Wordle explanations are posted a day late to ensure that no one accidentally sees the solution before playing.
Line 1: “Baste”. “A” and “S”, but neither in the correct spot.
Line 2: At least I guessed the correct positions for the “S” and the “A”!
Line 3: Add the “L” but not in the right place.
Line 4: Is “spald” a word? Wordle thinks so, but it’s not the answer!
Line 5: “Scald”. Makes much more sense than “spald”. 🙂
Forgive me for missing Wordle #465. I thought I did it & was surprised to see that my streak went down to 1 here. Sorry. Life is crazy right now!
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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Meaning in the Face of Nothingness
Despite being somewhat of a political junkie for most of my life, I had never heard of Giorgia Meloni before this week. Why should I? She’s an Italian politician and, sure, I can name a couple of the recent Prime Ministers of Italy, but that’s about it. Even when I lived in Europe, I never paid very especial attention to Italian politics. Following foreign politics is ridiculously difficult, because one almost has to have a good amount of cultural understanding for it, and even after living in Germany, there’s still a lot about their politics that I don’t understand. (It’s also why I am very patient with friends who aren’t American when it comes to their understanding of American politics – they are trying to understand what is going on through the prism of news reporting, and we know how clear that makes things!)
In any case, Giorgia Meloni is poised to become the first female Prime Minister of Italy. Again, this is interesting, but not something that I necessarily would have paid much attention to. However, as news of her party’s success in Italian elections has shocked many, a video of her speaking not so long ago caught my attention, and I’m going to share it here. It’s worth the two minutes and fourteen seconds:
I’m not here to delve into the politics of Meloni or her personal life or anything else. However, she’s absolutely correct when she talks about fighting against the larger zeitgeist of nothingness, the idea that humans are just cogs that are players being used to enrich the elite few. She talks about the stripping away of identity – “Italian, Christian, woman, mother” – as a way to depersonify people – “Citizen X, Gender X, Parent 1, Parent 2”.
Two of the most fundamental questions that people wrestle with are “Who am I?” and “What am I doing here?”. Some would argue that these questions are why God or religion was “invented”; others who believe in God find their identities in relationship to Him. Some people are loathe to be defined by their jobs, others can’t escape it – Queen Elizabeth II was certainly queen even in the most private moments with friends and family; it’s not like when she went back to friends and family, all of a sudden she was “Lizzy from the Block”. I kid, of course, but the much more common manifestation of this is when children are born; these little people who are born from women change their identities to mother.
Meloni is absolutely right when she talks about the erasure of identity. The transgender movement, for example, goes far beyond trying to make the world a place where “trans” people are more accepted; by blurring the lines between male and female, by encouraging “allies” to alter language to accommodate the movement, by pillorying those who do not quietly accept these things, the goal becomes that not of allowing for transgender people to have their own identity, but, ultimately, to strip the common person of this critical piece of his or her identity.
The same goes for the push to replace “mother” and “father” with the idea of parental units, “parent 1” and “parent 2”. Some of this started coming into vogue around the time that my eldest child was born. In certain situations, those terms may be fitting, I don’t know. In the vast majority, they are not. They are actually downright insulting to an awful lot of people, but , as it turns out, we see that there is more importance put on some people feeling insulted than with others.
I expect very little from politicians in general, but I wish Meloni well. At the very least, it seems like she’s got some common sense, which is saying something for a politician. It is rare to see someone like her speak to the things that are so fundamental with such passion. As a politician, she comes at them from a totally different angle, but in watching her, I am reminded of the same type of call to remember one’s meaning in life from Jordan Peterson, that we are not just merely accidents of existence, but that each one of our lives has inherent value and individual identity, even if it is quite “ordinary”. Never forget, ordinary does not mean unimportant. Each one of us will have a different story, and part of our purpose here on this earth is to take our unique talents and build what we can with that. That which comprises our identity is precious, it is worth fighting for and defending, particularly in the face of the zeitgeist of nothingness.
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Wordle #466
Never played Wordle? Check out my Wordle strategy page!
Wordle explanations are posted a day late to ensure that no one accidentally sees the solution before playing.
Line 1: “Baste”. Only an “S”, and in the wrong place
Line 2: Used the alternate for “fling”, but same result as line #1
Line 3: At least I got another letter – the “R” – but the “S” still isn’t in the right place (and neither is the “R”)
Line 4: So now we’ve established that there’s a “U” in the word, and that “S” has been particularly slippery to place.
Line 5: Now that we know that the “S” has to be in the second position, it goes on to follow that there isn’t a consonant before it – there are only a couple of words like “psalm” and it’s obvious that this word is not one of those. So… if we guess that the first letter is a vowel, it has to be “U”. It also stands to reason that there’s a second vowel, which would probably also have to be “U”. This means the word is “usury”, right?
Line 6: Nope. Of course not. “Usurp!”
Forgive me for missing Wordle #465. I thought I did it & was surprised to see that my streak went down to 1 here. Sorry. Life is crazy right now!
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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Wordle #464
Never played Wordle? Check out my Wordle strategy page!
Wordle explanations are posted a day late to ensure that no one accidentally sees the solution before playing.
Line 1: I went back to “beast”, and I got two letters, both in the correct places. Woot! 🙂
Line 2: I didn’t like using the double “S” here, but I figured that there was a fair chance there would be a double “S”. I didn’t win on that bet, but I eliminated another vowel, which helps.
Line 3: The addition of the “R” is good, and I’m going to assume now that the middle letter is “I” because I can’t think of any 5-letter words that start “BRYS”.
Line 4: “Brisk”! Another quick (but fun) wordle!
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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Wordle #463
Never played Wordle? Check out my Wordle strategy page!
Wordle explanations are posted a day late to ensure that no one accidentally sees the solution before playing.
Line 1: “Baste” gave me two letters, but in the wrong positions, “A” and “T”
Line 2: Moving the “A” and the “T”, eliminating more letters, that sort of thing.
Line 3: Aha! The “T” is in the correct place, and I know where the “A” must go now… Hmm… a word that begins with “A” and ends with “T” and doesn’t use any of the eliminated letters…
Line 4: …”Admit”. Truthfully, it was half a guess, but it was a pretty fun puzzle! 🙂
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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Holoviak’s is Going Out of Business
As someone who once upon a time was interested in becoming Orthodox, after visiting an Orthodox Church for the first time, I made myself familiar with the Church’s bookstore. Back in the old days, at least at this OCA parish, it was impossible to spend much time there without seeing the name “Holoviak” over and over and over.
Holoviak’s Church Supply, Inc. is a church supply store that was once a big name in supplying Orthodox churches. Liturgical supplies? Check! Icons? Check! Books? Check! Especially for the Orthodox, whose numbers are so small in the US, having someplace that carried the things specific to Orthodoxy was almost unheard of, and so the few places that did had much more of a monopoly on the market.
Even when I worked at one of the large bookstore chains, which was around the time I was getting interested in Orthodoxy, there were some books that were available through the major channels, but a lot of specifically Orthodox books really were only available through the church bookstores, because places like Holoviak worked with the publisher, and churches bought from Holoviak. To find some of these books on one’s own would mean calling or writing some tiny press somewhere…
Amazon changed a lot of that. People looked, more and more, for books online. Amazon has the size to be able to hold small quantities of “niche” books in their warehouses, ready for quick shipment nonetheless, so it was important that even the smallest publisher issue their books proper ISBNs.
But more than that, as so many businesses are online now, a lot of the “middle men” are not as needed. Why order from Holoviak when you can just as easily order from the place that originally made the items? Sure, it’s not always easier, but a lot of times it is.
I really don’t know what the story is – I also know that it seems like there are a lot fewer of these church supply stores – or even Christian bookstores – around. Many family owned businesses are run by older members of the family who want to retire and have no one to hand the business off to. Back in the day, someone who had eight kids probably had at least one who would be interested in continuing on; these days, with small families, it seems like it’s less and less the case.
That being said, there are more and more places springing up that create and carry Orthodox wares in the US. It’s neat to see. However, a lot of these are small places, and even just have their niche within the Orthodox community. This is actually part of the reason that I created an Orthodox Shopping page on this blog, to serve as a resource for people hoping to find things, and connect Orthodox people who have something to sell with people who might be looking to buy.
I would love help in this project – please leave a comment if you have any suggestions for places I should include!
In the meantime, there is a sadness to seeing Holoviak go; according to the website, there’s still a number of things that are for sale.
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Wordle #462
Never played Wordle? Check out my Wordle strategy page!
Wordle explanations are posted a day late to ensure that no one accidentally sees the solution before playing.
Line 1: I went back to “baste” today, and was pretty lucky here – “T” and “E” already correct, and “A” present, but in the wrong place.
Line 2: I guessed that the word may end “ATE” so I moved the “A” to the third position. Furthermore, I guessed that there may be a consonant blend to begin the word, and went for one with an “R”, which paid off!
Line 3: “Grate” Awesome! Truthfully, I think this is one of the quickest wordles I’ve ever solved; I don’t think it took more than 2 minutes!
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
If you enjoy my posts, please consider:
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