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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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Thank you very much!
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Another quick note
Life sometimes is more than a little overwhelming.
I have a crazy-long list of stuff I have to get done in the next week or so, and at the same time, I’m not feeling great. And the dishwasher is acting funny. And the drains all seem to be draining slowly…
I’ve got stuff I’ve started on but haven’t finished. I haven’t forgotten about posting more than Wordle – it’s just that my time is getting devoured by other things at the moment.
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Wordle #430
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. I am seriously beginning to hate the lone, misplaced “E”.
Line 2: More letter elimination, but still that misplaced “E”.
Line 3: Okay, now we are getting somewhere. I know “money” was a previous solution (Wordle #337), but even if the word is not the solution, maybe I can get some more leads, and to that, playing this worked.
Line 4: “V” is a tricky letter. It isn’t all that common, but it does have this tendency to show up regularly enough that it shouldn’t be forgotten. It’s one of the six not in any of my base words (Q, X, J, Z, V, & K) but of these six, is probably the most common to be played. Playing the “V” works out here, but I still don’t have the “N” in the right place.
Line 5: This is actually a common trick in Wordle… Looking at “oven”, it makes one think of the word, but that adding a consonant to it would still sound the same, such as with the word “coven”. However, since we already knew that there is no “C”, going through the alphabet gives us “woven”, which doesn’t sound similar at all. I have had this “trick” of the Wordle writer(s) trip me up in the past, but today wasn’t too bad.
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
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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
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. “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
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. “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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