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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 #429
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. “E” and “T” and both in the right place. Nice start!
Line 2: And… I am so smart, yes?
It was a good guess – and I was very lucky. Not the first time I’ve gotten the wordle in 2, but this is why I went with “merit”:
- “E” ends up in a lot of words in the second place, but often together with another “E” or an “A”. “EE”, “EA”. “A” had already been ruled out. “EI” is rare (and the weird exceptions are famous!) I didn’t want to double the “E”, for the sake of playing letters, so trying to think of words with “E” and ending with “T” that might have to have another vowel that was not “A” kind of became the challenge.
- There are a fair number of words which start “RE” but I figured that it was unlikely that they were going to have something like “repot”.
- “Depot” was actually Wordle #279, so I wasn’t going to play it again.
- I suspect that since Merrick Garland has been in the news recently, the word “merit” is of somewhat easier recall in my brain at the moment. I know… I’m probably more weird than smart! 🙂
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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Wordle #428
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: Wow! This worked very well – four letters already!
Line 2: Except that there are a TON of words that use these four letters in different permutations.
Line 3: Look! Finally one of those four letters in the correct place – but no idea on the magic 5th letter.
Line 4: Umm… This is still going to be tricky. Two slots left and there is still at least “caste”, “haste”, and “waste” that could be played.
Line 5: If I were playing in hard mode, I would not be able to play this word because it deviates from what we already know. However, I’m playing it to play “C”, “H”, and “W” as possibilities.
Line 6: And the winner is… “Waste”!
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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Wordle #427
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 and it does pretty well here – “T” at the end, and “E” and “A” present, but somewhere else.
Line 2: So, I go for simply moving the “E” and “A” over a space, and it works! The “R” is a bonus – now how many more 5 letter words end “REAT”?
Line 3: This actually took me a moment, as I didn’t immediately think of a second “T”, but all in all, this was a pretty quick one.
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future – AI Art Edition
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Two things that I have been hearing a fair amount about recently are Fr. Seraphim Rose and AI art – the DALL-E 2 text to image generator, in particular, seems to be getting some attention. In short, these programs take text that is entered in and look for images on the internet that are tagged or described as such, then use the artificial intelligence to try to create an image that matches the cue of the entered text. The images are often pretty impressive.
Therefore, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised to see in the Orthodox Christianity reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/OrthodoxChristianity/) that someone (user: thomaesthetics) had used one of these AI art generators to create Orthodox “inspired” art. He posted six images created by the MidJourney program, and I share the results with you because they are pretty impressive.
prompt: “God’s presence at Divine Liturgy” 
prompt: “Cyberpunk Orthodox Church” 
prompt: “Holy Eucharist” 
prompt: “Futuristic Eastern Orthodox Icon” 
prompt: “Orthodox worshippers at liturgy” 
prompt: “Holy sacrament of the Orthodox Church” The comments on Reddit range from “rarefied” to “bizarre”, but there are more positive reactions than negative. It seems like one of the themes on the negative comments tends to be the lack of small details – it feels less human, for example, when there is no detail to the faces. I think the other criticism is somewhere along the lines of when one wants to see what happens by entering “sacred” things into a type of technology which certainly often raises a lot of questions, the results may or may not be something like looking for answers from a Ouija board.
Personally, I ind them to be quite impressive. I don’t believe that the machine “found God” – after all, it’s a machine and is not sentient. I certainly don’t think the images are holy – I can only imagine the disaster of AI-generated iconography! However, they are, at the very least, interesting. More than that, though, I think they kind of capture an aggregate spirit… Little details aside, the first one, for instance, certainly seems to visually portray some of what we talk about when we speak of the importance of Church.
I find it interesting, too, that two of these six specifically deal with futuristic themes. Mind you, this is probably a failing on my part, but I have never read Fr. Seraphim Rose’s book Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future. However, as someone who lived in the 20th century, an American, and as someone who seemed to be keenly aware of modern trends (and spoke to this), it seems like he uses the book to help modern Orthodox Christians prepare for defending themselves against the “modern spirituality” – heresy and false teachings, if you will. He uses teachings from the Church Fathers to do so, and in a Church that is steeped in history and tradition, this is the right thing to do,
However, I also believe that by naming the book as such, rather than “Orthodoxy and New Age Religions” or similarly, he also saw Orthodoxy as the true religion of the future. This is important. It is important because as Orthodox Christians, our faith needs to be integral our actions and direct our thoughts. Not only this, but we have to believe that it is relevant to life in the future as well. I don’t suppose that the Divine Liturgy will ever look like the “Steampunk Orthodox Church” but believing that Orthodoxy is still important in a technological age is crucial, and I think that there’s something about this image that touches on that.
When I was looking into the Orthodox Church all those years ago, it was important even then (2001-ish) that there were online resources about Orthodox Christianity, and there were communities forming where one could find other Orthodox Christians to talk to. There’s a lot that is less than ideal with “internet Orthodoxy”, but it’s still critically important to improving the accessibility of the Orthodox Church, especially in places where Orthodox Christians are a tiny minority.
The traditions of the Church are incredibly important, but it is imperative that Orthodoxy is not just lived behind the cloistered walls of a monastery where there is little difference as to what century it is, but also everywhere else, and into the future, so to speak. I would argue that this art represents part of that.
I won’t belabor the point too much, I also posit that it helps stimulate the imagination – I don’t think an icon will ever resemble the AI “futuristic” rendering here, but there is something very intriguing about the picture “Futuristic Eastern Orthodox Icon”. On one hand, I like the borders to the picture – I really like the (real) “storytelling” icons that do that. On the other, even though it’s not an icon, the image reminds me a little bit of Gustav Dore’s illustration in Dante’s Paradiso, seen here:
Orthodoxy needs to belong to the imagination, as much as it does to history and today’s reality.
Anyway, I figured I would share these images with you. I also found out that AI-created images cannot be copyrighted in the United States, as they lack “human authorship“. What do you think?
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Wordle #426
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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. “S” is the only help I’m getting here, and it’s not even in the right place.
Line 2: Good news: “S” begins the word. Bad news: nothing else except eliminating letters.
Line 3: More letter elimination, though now it’s certain that “U” is the vowel.
Line 4: The “U” isn’t in the right place, but getting the “H” is finally a little progress. I probably should have gone with “sling” or “slung” as thee second choice (as it would fit in as an alternate to “fling”).
Line 5: If I move the “U” to the 4th place, I need to have three consonants together. With the letters left, “SHR” is the only thing I can think of. Since “B” was already played, so, “shrug” it is. Finally!
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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Wordle #425
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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. “A” is correct, but “T” is is the wrong place.
Line 2: Got the “T” correct, and also the “N” as good measure to add to the “A”
Line 3: Do you think there’s any chance that it’ll be another “TW” word? Doubtful, but I’ll try “twang” anyway… and it worked!
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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Wordle #424
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. “E” and “T”, not in the right place, but we’ll take what we can get, won’t we?
Line 2: I guessed right for the placement of “T” and the “E” and got the “I” as a bonus!
Line 3: Now to eliminate what could go between the “T” and the “I” – and it’s not “R” either.
Line 4: “TW” – yes, indeed it is! 🙂
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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Seasons of August
When I was a kid, August in Chicago was hot and muggy; the noticeably earlier sundowns the only small mitigation to the uncomfortable stickiness and the sweltering suns’ rays hitting, being absorbed by, and radiating back off the asphalt and concrete. It was always excellent time to escape the city for awhile and go visit where the corn grows high.
School never started before Labor Day; anything otherwise would be sacrilege. In a time where very few classrooms had air conditioning, starting earlier was plainly a stupid idea.
August then became generically part of the summer; another month to work through, though if one took the time to notice, a time of of the year’s harvest starting to mature and cascading petunias.
August then became generically part of the summer; another month to work through, though if one took the time to notice, a time of high corn and cascading petunias before the nights started to take some chill.
Augusts in Wisconsin don’t seem to have the same mugginess as those of my childhood, yet they still don’t have the nocturnal chill of September. The stillness of the humid days is intermittently interrupted by crazy storms that tend to knock the power out, but the blazing harshness of July is gone.
As a homeschooler, I probably should not be so happy that my kids will be starting the school year soon. I love having them home, I love the looseness and flexibility of the schedule, but at the same time, I’m ready to go back to the structure of the school year. Saying this in August is probably sacrilege – or at least sacrilege to my children – but it is where I am now in the seasons of August.
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Wordle #423
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. Only the “E”, but it’s in the wrong place. Could this be a repeat of yesterday?
Line 2: Sure kind of seems like it…
Line 3: I didn’t like using the double “E”, but with the “E” not being in the final spot, an awful lot of words are eliminated, and there don’t tend to be a lot of “OE” or “UE” words. I got the “R”, though.
Line 4: Could this be it? No. And no additional letters either. I’m kind of clueless here.
Line 5: Remember what I said about “UE” words being rare? Well… there are a few!
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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Wordle #422
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. Only the “E”, but it’s in the wrong place.
Line 2: Apparently, just eliminating letters and trying to figure out where the “E” belongs.
Line 3: Sometimes this just gets frustrating…
Line 4: Being as I still have the “R”, I think, “Well, maybe it’s a word that ends in “ER”. After all, that’s probably more common than words starting with “E” with the collection of letters left. I looked down at the letters, and saw “POK” together and thought “That’ll work”. I was absolutely shocked that it was actually the word!
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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Breath of Hallelujah 