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Sunday Gratitude – 2.VIII.2026
Boy, has it been busy the last couple of weeks! More appointments than I could shake a stick at, and a couple of weekend events as well. I’m very grateful that things pretty much went off without a hitch, and appointments were met, things a t home have been pretty quiet, and events were enjoyable.
One of the events that I went to last Sunday was German Fest in Milwaukee. I had toyed with the idea of biking the 16 or so miles up to church, and then continuing on the eight from church to the fest, but I’m happy that I didn’t do that. Instead, I put my bike in the car and drove up to church, changed quickly afterwards in the bathroom, then biked the 8 up to German Fest. I had never biked along the Lakefront Path before, and it was really beautiful, albeit busy with people, making it impossible to go very fast. For me, one of the draws is that I get to see people I know, and so that was really fun. (I just wish my German dress still fit me.)
I biked the 8 miles back to the car, and at the end I was tired, and I was grateful I didn’t have 16 more to go, but I didn’t feel terrible either. Last year, I parked in a place where it was a four mile ride from my car to the fest, and on the way back, I felt like I was dying. However, I probably hadn’t even been on a bike in at least 2-3 years before then. And now, well, between the Thursday afternoon before German Fest and the following Friday afternoon, I biked over fifty miles, and it was challenging, but fun. 🙂 I’m grateful for the opportunity to be working on my health.
Silly thing, but my older son was looking for 32 gigabyte SD cards for something. I figured that that was easy enough; as long as I can remember, those things aren’t wildly expensive. Imagine my shock when I walked into Best Buy to get one, and they all seemed to be over $45. Insane. I told him to hold off on buying one, and though I often have miscellaneous extra memory cards and such around, there was nothing that would help him in this instance. Mind you, though, that I haven’t purchased any of these in at least 3 years. The next day, he and his sister went to the gym, and I decided to check out WalMart. Wouldn’t you know, but the price was almost as bad. However, there were two associates who came up right by me, one of them holding a plastic case. Wouldn’t you know, but there were two 32GB SD cards in it. They seemed to be confused about where they wanted to put the item, as it had originally come from the outdoor section, as these two were marketed for trail cams. Nobody is looking for SD cards in the outdoor section! I’m sure this is why this was marked down to $8.50. I proceeded to ask if I could buy it, and they were happy to oblige me, as that also meant that they didn’t have to find a place to put them in the case. I am very grateful I didn’t have to shell out three times as much for the same item.
After German Fest, I went over to my church’s church picnic. That was fun, too. The location is great, and it’s nice to hang out with good people. Summer days are beautiful like that.
Speaking of summer days, we finally got some rain. I don’t think it rained at all in July until the 27th and it was kind of sad seeing everybody’s lawns turning brown. I had mowed right around the last week of June, and I had meant to a couple of weeks after that, and I actually started to, but after about 10 minutes of mowing, I twisted my ankle and it hurt too much to keep going. By the next day already, I didn’t know if it was safe to mow, but it was interesting to see how those strips that I did mow turned very, very brown, and I’m grateful I didn’t cut the whole lawn and have it looking like that.
On the weather front, we had strong storms that came through on the 27th. Friends of mine in Milwaukee had power knocked out, but here, thankfully, we kept power, there was no hail, etc. Unfortunately, this was not the case in all of Wisconsin, and the town of Menasha, in particular, got hit badly. My kids and I signed up for an event months ago that takes place in this area; once I heard that there was a tornado, I checked back to see if the event had been cancelled. It didn’t seem to be, so we drove up to the area and just happened to end up on the street here that this man is driving on in the first 3 minutes of the video here.
How did I end up in Menasha? Well, our first destination was in a small town called Combined Locks. The driving on the interstate had been miserable due to rain, and at a certain point, I couldn’t take it any more, and looked for the first exit off, knowing I could come up the western side of Lake Winnebago to get to where I wanted to go. It just happens that Menasha is pretty much on the western side of the tip of Lake Winnebago, so by getting off the interstate, it pretty much meant going through Menasha. It was weird, too, because at first, I just noticed that there were a lot of tree branches and stuff on the sides of the road, and it kind of dawned on me that that must have been a result of the storm. I did not know that within about 15 minutes, we’d be driving through a disaster zone like this. The crazy thing is, though, that once I got through Menasha, my destination was about six miles down the road, and over there, things looked completely normal. For as bad as the tornado was though, it’s amazing that not a single person was killed – certainly something to be grateful for.
The event that the little kids and I went to was a bike ride/music festival called “Bike to the Beat“. The event took place on Saturday, but the four of us made a little mini-vacation out of it, and it was an awful lot of fun. The drive up was absolutely horrendous, lasting 4 hours when 2.5 is more normal. It rained the whole time and there were accidents and road construction in the Milwaukee area. I was so incredibly grateful both to get off the interstate and to actually arrive at the hotel.
BIke to the Beat was amazing, even apart from a couple of wrinkles in the day, and I am grateful that there were no mechanical issues with the bikes, we had all the tools, I didn’t forget any pedals or anything, etc. More than that though, the kids enjoyed the hotel a lot and we took a little detour through Manitowoc on the way back, and it was really a good trip. I’m the type of person who is always trying to anticipate what might go wrong in order to avoid any pitfalls, and when things go off with no major issues, I am grateful.
I’m grateful, too, that after far too long, I got to video chat with a dear friend. I’m grateful, too that through everything, the friendship holds.
Wow, it’s been a full couple of weeks! Thank you all for your patience with me! I am certainly grateful for all of you!
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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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Wordle #442
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: Starting with “baste” again, and the word has “T” and “E”, but in different places.
Line 2: More letters, but still all in the incorrect spaces
Line 3: This really wasn’t my top game, obviously “I” and “N” are in the same places, but I was so tired, I didn’t even notice that until after I had played the word.
Line 4: What in the world is “niter”? (Niter definition) At the very least, letters are finally in the correct position, which leaves only one word…
Line 5: “Inter” – and of course, it took me a minute to realize it as it is as a word in its own right – as in “he was interred at Riverview Cemetery” – rather than the prefix that heads so many of our tech terms now. Yes, I was really tired when I did this.
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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Wordle #441
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: Starting with “baste” again. No luck here.
Line 2: On to the next base word. “G” and “L”, but not starting the word, because “L” isn’t in the second place.
Line 3: My next guess is to move the “L” to the 4th position and turn it into an “LY” word. “Godly” fits the bill, and all three of the correct letters are now in the right places.
Line 4: I would have rather have had something that didn’t have the double “L”, but being as I had used “A”, “E”, “I”, and “O” and none of those vowels are in the puzzle, I figured that the vowel had to be “U”, and “gully” was the only thing that came to mind. Thankfully, it was the correct word!
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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Wordle #440
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: Using “baste’ again. Only letter here is “A” but in the wrong position
Line 2: Playing “champ”, as it kind of belongs to the “base words”. It does really, really well here. 🙂
Line 3: Third time’s the “charm”, isn’t it?
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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Wordle #439
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 changed up one of my base words to make it more common to get an ending “E”. Unfortunately, it didn’t help here, because none of the letters are in this word!
Line 2: So, where I changed up one base word, I thought to myself, “Why not do that again?”. This was slightly better, in that we can see that there’s an “I” in the word.
Line 3: Considering that an “I” would most likely be in one of the three middle spots, I thought maybe an “oi” combination would be appropriate. “GR” seems to be the most likely blend with the unused letters.
Line 4: It’s quite curious that there is “I” and “N” and “G” in the word, but “ING” doesn’t end the word. What is even more curious is that the “N” and the “G” are now in the correct spots, but the “I” is not. Therefore the “I” has to start or end the word. It’s more likely, in general, that “I” will start the word, but as I look at this, I can think of one major exception…
Line 5: Bingo! “Fungi”
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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Every New Beginning…
…comes from some other beginning’s end
So sing the band Semisonic, and I could do a music memory post on it, but I’d be sidetracked from just wanting to keep it short.
It’s the beginning of the Liturgical Year in the Orthodox Church. As we know with all these things, the beginning of the year comes always with the end of the old one, new pages to fill, so to speak, and a putting away of the book that has been written.
It’s been a day like that today.
I actually saw the band Semisonic perform when this song was quite popular; the venue had horrible acoustics, and most of the people were not familiar with most of their music. It was kind of hilarious; once this song played, a lot of people headed for the exits, not really aware that it wasn’t the end of their set – however, even as the next two songs played, it didn’t stop people from leaving.
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Wordle #438
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: One of my typical start words. Oh, boy, back to the lone “E” in the incorrect place. Maybe I need to find a different starting word that ends in “E”
Line 2: Yay! “E” and “I” – still lots of opportunities out there but this helps a good bit.Most of the time, I like to avoid the double letters, but here, I figured there was a good chance of two “E”s being in the word, but I was wrong. At least this possibility is eliminated.Most of the time, I like to avoid the double letters, but here, I figured there was a good chance of two “E”s being in the word, but I was wrong. At least this possibility is eliminated.
Line 3: Another letter, yay! 🙂
Line 4: I was contemplating finding a word that started with “P”, but “G” was my other strong contender. With “gripe”, I get to try both of them.
Line 5: Another “Z” word! At least this time I got it!
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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Breath of Hallelujah 