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Sunday Gratitude – 5.IV.2026
To those celebrating today – Christ is Risen! – Happy Easter!
And then there are the “weird” ones here who are still waiting another week, among which I count myself. There have been a lot of services already – yesterday, I think I was in church for nearly four hours. I’ve really struggled this Lent; from the beginning, I felt less ready for it than most years and this year… wow. For the greater part of Lent, I believed that the Orthodox were also going to be celebrating Pascha today, and it was only looking at the calendar more carefully a couple of weeks ago when I realized that no, there’s a one-week difference. I don’t know. I wasn’t expecting to spend so much time in church this weekend, but I was at vigil last night, and I certainly had the feeling of moving from the darkness into the light, and by the time the service was over, there was an air of hopefulness and joy there. For that I am grateful. (My brain did fight against this on the way home, though. *sigh*)
I am grateful for the more spring-like weather, and the opportunity to be outside. I’m also grateful for my neighbor who invites me to come walking with her.
I am grateful for friends who take the time to talk even in the rain.
I am grateful for making it home in a storm the other day; I wasn’t expecting it, then all of a sudden, I was driving down this country highway with lightning flashes all around. I don’t think that they were very close, as there was only a tiny bit of thunder, but what a show! The next day, driving down those same roads, I could actually see how high the water is, and I’m grateful that there were no issues with low-lying stretches of road or the bridges.
Time to take the Christmas wreath down! I am thankful to have had a little bit of time to be outside with my kids, and I’m thankful that they have places around that they can enjoy riding their bikes through, and that they’ve been fine with this “exploring”.
I am thankful for the joy of singing.
I am thankful for the things that are showing signs of life (and even blooming) even after a very cold winter and long periods of neglect.
I am grateful for the opportunity to have been in contact with a number of people on this day, in the joy of Easter.
I am grateful for yet another sign that I’m not alone through the hard stuff.
Thank you so much for being here! Christ is Risen!
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Sunday Gratitude – 29.III.2026
I really hate it when it seems like I blink and yet another week has passed. Somehow so much of this time ends up feeling like a blur, and it seems like all that is left is a growing list of things that should have been done long ago, but haven’t been done yet.
In the meantime, though, I’ve been trying not to lose a sense of gratitude, and to also try to make the most of the days at hand. We’ve had a couple of days that have hit 70F, which has been amazing, and especially as the days are getting longer, it would be terrible if we didn’t do something to take advantage of the warmer weather. My younger son had a day off of school a couple of weeks back, and the two of us went out on our bikes and rode ten miles together, and it was amazing. He also started taking pictures with my camera that afternoon, so I’ll be sharing a few of those in this post.
A couple of weeks after the real birthday, my youngest, in kindergarten, had her first real birthday party. It was a bowling alley affair, and, per the terms of the contract, was less than two hours long, but for a group of 5 and 6 year olds, it was fine. I was completely stressed out over this for at least a week for a number of reasons, but it turned out really, really good. Even the weather held out, kind of… It started raining about the time that the party started, and it was still raining as people left. Had we started a couple of hours later, everybody would have been going home in sleet, because we had a blizzard come through the next day. The kids were thrilled to get the day off of school, and despite the crazy wind, we never lost power. The next day, our dear neighbor made a path for our car using a snowblower.
I’m grateful that even though I managed to break a spoke on the one bike (a different one than before), this happened in a place where I could ride to a place where I could leave the bike for a couple of days, and which was very close to the bike shop. On the night that this happened, I was also able to get a ride back home with one of the ladies from church. I’d never talked to her before, and she’s incredibly sweet, and lives just a couple of streets over from where I live.
I’m grateful for the amazing time I had at St. Haralambos in Niles a couple of weeks back. Not only were some very dear “real life” friends there, I finally got to meet Fr. Andrew Damick in person. We have been online acquaintances (friends) for over 20 years, and it seemed like high time to meet him in person. He actually recognized me by sight as well, which is crazy because it’s been a looong time since I posted any photos of myself that he might come across. 🙂 That was a lot of fun, though.
Breezy days and kites! I am grateful, as well, for the opportunity to visit an old friend and just enjoy sitting on the front step, having a conversation in the sunshine.
In many ways, I feel pulled very, very, very thin. There have been a lot of good things, to be sure, but there have been a number of very, very frustrating things as well. I don’t know; at this point, I’m not sure that I’ll ever have things “figured out”, but there’s a path to go forward on, and that’s the way through this all. Forgive me again for the blog silence – I truly am grateful for you.
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Happy Birthday Arvo Pärt!
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Now, technically Pärt’s birthday was yesterday, but I suppose even if one is Estonian, as Arvo Pärt is, September 11 is a memorable day, if not in a good way. It’s not quite the Ides of March, but in recent history, I don’t know that another date is quite so notorious.
On the other hand, Pärt turned 87 yesterday, and he had many, many birthdays before the events of 11 September 2001 made the date notorious.
In any case, Arvo Pärt is a musical composer, and actually one of the most performed living composers out there right now. I may still never have heard of him except that he is also an Orthodox Christian, and just a couple of years before I became Orthodox, he released Kanon Pokajanen, which is a magnificent sacred work – and Orthodox. Therefore, it seems like when I was first becoming Orthodox, I heard about this all the time, and eventually, I purchased a copy.
I like Pärt’s music because he’s managed to be modern and to have his own style without being ugly, vulgar, or just plain weird. Unfortunately, Pärt uses a lot of silence to accentuate the instrumentation, and it’s a very powerful tool, but it’s hard for me, at this point in my life, to be able to sit back in a dark room with headphones and just take it all in. I hope that in the future, I’ll have more time for more deep listening of music.
However, as coincidence would have it, as I was looking through some of Part’s music yesterday, I found an arrangement of “Variations for the Healing of Arinuschka” by the incredibly talented musician Josh Turner (who usually plays pop) and I wanted to share it here:
Mr. Pärt, happy birthday, and may God grant you many years!
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Wordle #449
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” did pretty well here, but nothing in the correct position.
Line 2: Again, nothing in the correct spot, which is curious.
Line 3: I was having trouble thinking of stuff, and while I shouldn’t have put the “A” in position #2 again, it did help nail down where the “T” and the “B” are.
Line 4: It still took a few minutes to think of “tibia”. There aren’t very many words that start “TIB” and even when I figured that it had to be the way the word starts (having eliminated “E”, “O”, and “U” – and with “A” being incorrect there) it finally took me going through letter combinations and coming up with the second “I”, and then it was obvious! Phew!
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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Wordle #448
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: Still hanging on to using “baste”. “T” is good, all others are a no-go.
Line 2: Sometimes it’s fun to see which foreign words get accepted. I managed to find “O”, but not in the right spot.
Line 3: I like to work in “R” and “H” and even “L” fairly quickly, because they can be indicative of consonant blends. No “R” or “H” today, but I’ve knocked out a lot of words by eliminating them.
Line 4: “Lofty” is the only thing that I can think of that doesn’t have the “F” to begin the word. (It’s pretty much a given that it can’t end the word with that “T” there, and using “O” as the vowel which couldn’t be in the 3rd spot…)
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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9-11-01 + 21
I was 22 when the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001 took place. It’s hard to believe that soon, more of my life will have taken place after this date than before. Twenty-one also tends to be a “milestone” year; in the United States, it’s the age that a person is legally allowed to purchase and consume alcohol – unless you’re on a military base. It also means my first blog will soon be celebrating its 21st birthday – one of the first topics I remember reading about was people’s recollections about their experiences that day, because like few other things, there was a sense of shared experience.
I remember where I was on 11 September 2001. I remember where I was on 11 September 2002. I remember where I was on 11 September 2007. However it happened to turn out, those first six anniversaries were all experienced abroad. The day certainly changed my life, not that I was lining up at the nearest recruiting station to join the military, but that I felt that I was being called to something, and as much as I liked my job and circle of friends and life was pretty stable, even just the week before, God had been laying the underpinnings to be able to hear that call and be able to go.
I keep kind of dreading thinking about what I should write on the occasion of the anniversary of 9/11, because I really have nothing new, and it’s not like in the meantime we’ve achieved world peace or even become a more virtuous society. If anything, it seems just the opposite. On the other hand, to forget is terrible too, not only does it write off the lives lost that day, but all who suffered and died in its name in the ensuing years.
It’s surprising how much emotion regarding that day is still buried in my heart. A couple of years ago, a young man who was a teenager at the time started talking to me about 9/11 as a “truther”. I started crying; he had been 2 at the time that it happened – he has no real memory of the event or the aftermath – but regardless of what you believe, the memories of people jumping out of the windows in the World Trade Center, or the ambulances lined up at the ground, then rendered forever inoperable by debris and ash can’t be un-remembered.
I think the only 9/11 ceremony I ever attended was in 2007, in Moscow, of all places. It was at the Orthodox Church in America’s Representation Church of St. Catherine the Great Martyr. I happened to be in Moscow at the time, and it was recommended to me by my future husband that I contact the priest there, since the priest had been a friend of his family’s for many years. I did, and this priest told me that there would be this commemoration, and that I was welcome to come, so I did.
St. Catherine – OCA Representation Church in Moscow 
Other side of St. Catherine The church itself is fairly small, and odd in the sense that the main entrances are from the sides. What I didn’t realize was that besides all the VIPs showing up for this event, including the US Ambassador to Russia, there was a bit of a media circus as multiple news organizations were there to cover this. The result made it feel much less like a memorial!
I’m not saying that anyone was blatantly disrespectful here, but between the VIPs and the guys who are moving around for the best camera angle and sound, the atmosphere was relatively circus-like.
After the church service, everyone moved over to the courtyard, where there was a small program over by this memorial bell. And while it is nowhere on the scale of the Russian 9/11 memorial in New Jersey, it seemed to accentuate the fact that at that time, at least, the remembrance of 9/11 was happening at least as much in Moscow as it was in the US. (I was actually stunned to see how much there was!)
On the plaque: This Memorial Bell Tower was built in memory of the Innocent Victims of the terrorist attack on the United States of America on 9/11/01. May their memory be eternal! If anything, 9/11 drove home for me that I am an American. Sure, there’s the good, the bad, and the ugly, but one of the interesting things about travelling, studying, living, and working abroad is seeing what “American” means to others. I’m not a German who grew up in Germany because all my ancestors back a thousand years or more lived and died in the same place. Some people along the way picked up and said, “We are looking for opportunity and freedom,” and I am the heir to that. It makes being American different, and that, of course, draws the hatred of some. Regardless of America’s sins, each one of us either has to choose to be proud of the heritage and work to continue it, or be ashamed and work to tear it down. There’s a lot of tearing down going on at the moment, from the highest ranks, it seems, but I always hope to be one who lives to build up.
P.S. There is ONE song that I feel does something to capture 9/11, and that is “There are no Words” by Kitty Donohoe. She has a version of this as well, but almost immediately, Noel Paul Stookey (of Peter, Paul, and Mary fame) did a cover which was phenomenal. I lost my copy of it, and searched for over a decade for it before finding it again. However, FINALLY, he’s got a live recording of it on YouTube, and I share that with you now:
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Wordle #447
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: Still hanging on to using “baste”. “E” correct; “T” in the wrong place. The letters are so common, it’s not a lot to go on.
Line 2: I figured if “T” wasn’t in position #4, it was fairly likely to begin the word, and we see here that it does, and while more letters have been eliminated, there are still a lot of 5-letter words that begin with “T” and end with “E”.
Line 3: So now we work on eliminating more letters as possibilities…
Line 4: “Thyme” seems like it would be a great Wordle solution, so I’m a little surprised that the “Y” is incorrect…
Line 5: Therefore, it’s “theme” – yay!
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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I’m like a bird…
…I keep flying into windows
About a week ago, I was sitting in the living room of my house with Middle Daughter, and, all of a sudden, we heard a very distinctive “thunk”.
We both knew what that meant – once again, some little bird had come crashing into our front windows.
It doesn’t actually make any sense; the house I live in has a little bit of an overhang in the front; it kind of gives the illusion that the top floor is wider than ground level, but it also creates a little bit of a front “patio”. Many say that the birds mistake the reflections off windows for the real thing, but it hardly makes sense here; not only do the birds have to fly between the posts and under the overhang, it’s not like we have a big picture window – the window section itself is comprised of four vertical panel windows.
Yet somehow, this set of four windows is a bit of a bird magnet. When we hear that thunk, we know that some other poor bird has headed straight into them. They always seem to be these little brown birds, and a couple of them have actually died on impact.
In any case, on this day, we went over to the window to look out, and there was the little bird, lying on its side, the wing under it looking as if it were not quite in the right place. At first, it almost seemed as if it might be dead, but it had its eyes open, and it was obviously still breathing.
After a few minutes, the little bird got to its feet, and stood there another couple of minutes, like the bird in the picture here. It stood incredibly still, dazed from the hit, eyes not completely “with it” and beak partially open.
I looked a little bit into what would need to be done if the bird needed more help, but it then hopped to a more hidden spot about a foot away, stayed there a couple additional minutes, then, I assume, flew off. Once the bird was standing, it didn’t look like anything was wrong with its wing, but I’m sure the bird was very sore for a couple of days after this.
It is amazing to me that these little creatures that can fly on the wind with ease, can travel hundreds of miles in groups, and are pretty adept at avoiding predators can be fooled by a set of windows that are obviously not the sky.
At the same time, at the moment I feel like I am a lot like the little bird, having “hit a window”, and working on the part of getting back up and keeping going. It’s what they are programmed in their genetics to do. For us, it’s easy to talk about giving up when we do “hit the windows” (or a wall) but even if we do need a little bit of time to regroup, it’s important to get up and keep going as much as possible.
Yesterday, I was sitting in the living room again, and once again, I heard the familiar “thunk”. Lord have mercy. Luckily, the bird did not hit with as much force, and it didn’t even look like the bird went through the stage of laying on its side, so I felt like I could go outside and get a couple of pictures without disturbing it too badly. (Thank goodness for a decent zoom!) In the picture above, the bird’s eyes aren’t open completely, but its beak is kind of open… Still stunned, but recovering. Just a couple of minutes later, the bird was gone, because that’s what these little birds know to do.
I could add in Nelly Furtado’s “I’m Like A Bird” here, which is kind of the easy thing, but instead, I’ll share Jim Croce’s “The Hard Way Every Time”.
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Wordle #446
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: Still hanging on to using “baste”. “A” and “S”, but not in the correct placement. Considering all the 5-letter-words with those letters, this might be a big challenge!
Line 2: “A” is correct, but the “S” still needs to find the right position.
Line 3: Oh, boy… If I go “hard mode”, I can only change that one letter, and there are, technically, a good number of letters this could be. Should I play a word solely to figure out the mystery letter, or guess one at a time?
Line 4: Looking at the options, and knowing that Wordle generally does not play 4-letter words that are merely plurals, I figured “class” was a better choice to guess than say, “claws”. If this hadn’t have worked, I would have gone for a letter eliminator word, but thankfully, it did work!
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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Wordle #445
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” again. An “E” in the wrong position; not much to go on.
Line 2: Not much help here; I should have remembered to move the “E”!
Line 3: Why not go for something kind of strange? The position of “E” would make an “O” or a “U” in the word kind of odd.
Line 4: It was a good guess, but one of the few I could think of at the time where “L” was neither in the 2nd position, nor “R” at the end.
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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Wordle #444
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” again. “A” is good; “T” needs to be moved
Line 2: No new letters
Line 3: Finally, we know where the “T” is! On to figuring out more letters!
Line 4: One new letter, but in the wrong place.
Line 5: But of course, I would pick the other word that fits 4 of the 5 slots!
Line 6: Phew, indeed! I knew I’d get it though. There are ones that make me more nervous to get to six!
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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Wordle #443
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: No luck with “baste” here.
Line 2: And no luck with “fling”.
Line 3: You’re getting to see 3 of the 4 base words here… The “H” and the “P” are correct
Line 4: “W” seemed to be the only consonant left that could go before an “H”. The only (normal) vowel left seemed to be “O”, so considering these things, I played “whoop” and solved the puzzle! 🙂
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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Breath of Hallelujah 