-
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!
If you enjoy my posts, please consider:
- Giving this post a “like”
- Sharing this post
- Subscribing to the blog
- Pledging monetary support
- Subscribing to my YouTube or Anchor.fm channels
- Patronizing the links that support this blog: Lilla Rose | Amazon
Thank you very much!
-
Wordle #406
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. Not a whole lot to go on, but the “F” is still appreciated.
Line 2: Normally, I don’t like to use words that don’t give me a maximum of new letters, but for the life of me, I couldn’t think of anything with a single “F” – where the “F” doesn’t start the word – that doesn’t have any “A”, “E”, or “T”. Therefore, I guessed a double “F” and thankfully, it worked out.
Line 3: Just changed out the first two letters
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
-
Wordle #405
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. Good start; 3 letters, & the “T” is in the right place.
Line 2: Moved the “S” to the first spot, but it’s still not in the right place. “P” is a nice addition.
Line 3: With 4/5 letters, this is mostly an unscrambling exercise. The number of possibilities is greatly limited being as “S” is neither in position 1 or 4. “Upset” is my guess (was there anything else?) and it worked.
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
-
Man of God has been released on DVD and Blu-Ray
The author of this blog is an “Amazon Affiliate”. Purchases made through the Amazon links in this post may earn the author a commission though at no additional cost to you.
I went to see the movie Man of God back in March and thought it was phenomenal. It’s not very often at all that a movie about people within the Eastern Orthodox Church is made, and for a movie like this to get any sort of theatrical release in the US is nothing short of amazing. As a short recap, the movie is about the man who would come to be known as St. Nektarios, a man who was wronged and much maligned by certain others in his lifetime, but continued on with his life serving God in humility and patience nonetheless.
However, I know not everyone was able to see it with as limited of a release as it had (two Tuesdays, if I remember correctly), and some of us would certainly like to see it again and share it with others. In this case, we are in luck; the movie was made available for purchase on the 26th. If you’d like to purchase it now from Amazon, my affiliate link is here: https://amzn.to/3PMQXQF .
(Also, if watching the movie through Amazon is you thing, that option is also available.)
-
Wordle #404
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. Nice to get “ST”, though in the incorrect places
Line 2: Moving “ST” together to the beginning worked out well; nice to get “O” as well.
Line 3: There are a lot of “STO” words, though considerably fewer without the “E” or “A”. Stomp or stoic perhaps? “Stomp” it is!
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
-
Wordle #403
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 “T” is in the solution, but in a different position
Line 2: Chose a word with new letters except for the “T”; moved the “T” from the end to the beginning. Not really happy with the result
Line 3: For some reason, this puzzle was stumping me a bit. “Rotor” isn’t necessarily a great choice with the two “R”s and two “O”s, but surprisingly enough, it does turn out that there are two “O”s.
Line 4: “Lotto”? No?
Line 5: Must be “Motto”.
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
-
Video: On Good Intentions and Being Lukewarm
New video – I’m still an incredible newbie when it comes to this!
-
Wordle #402
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, but not a single letter.
Line 2: When I first started playing Wordle, I watched a video of a guy who used the words “tubes”, “wordy”, “champ” and “fling” to get as many letters as possible used. The strategy isn’t bad, but as I’ve played, I’ve modified it a bit. Wordle rarely makes 4-letter words plural, so by changing my starter word from “tubes” to “beast”, not only do I have a better chance of getting the “S” in the correct place, I’ve also exchanged the “U” for the “A”. The switch for this, then, is to change “champ” to “chump”, which I do here.
Line 3: Wow. The thing that made this work in 3 was the “H”. The letter “H” generally doesn’t hang out by itself unless it starts the word, which we already know it does not. Therefore, trying to find another consonant to pair it with (basically “GH” or “CH”) and not use “A” or “E” took me a few minutes of thinking. I entered in “cinch”, not necessarily expecting it to be the solution, but was pleasantly surprised when I saw that it was. From 0 to 5 in three moves – amazing!
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
-
Wordle #401
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” is in the solution, but in a different position
Line 2: Chose a word with new letters except for the “E”; moved the “E” to the end. “E” is now in the correct position.
Line 3: Went for a word with four new letters, using the “O” as the vowel, ending with “E”. Very happy to get the “L” and the “O”
Line 4: Considering what was still left for consonants and vowels, I pondered something that might be another consonant to start the word, but as soon as I thought of “elope” I figured it was worth trying.
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
-
Wordle #400
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” is in the solution, but in a different position
Line 2: Chose a word with new letters except for the “E”; moved the “E” to the end. “R” is new, but in the incorrect position.
Line 3: This may be a result of doing the puzzle before 6am on very little sleep, but I thought to myself “Let me think of a word that starts with “E” that has an “R” in it… The word that I actually was grasping for was “ephod” (which I loved to play on Words with Friends) but at that hour of darkness and brain haze, I thought to myself, “Ephor it is, by golly!” Only after playing it, I realized that I had no idea what it was, or why it was accepted by Wordle. However, it did give me correct placement of the “R” and additionally, the letters “O” and “P”.
Line 4: By this time, I guessed that this was a word ending in “ER”. I also guessed that the “O” had to be in position two… Let’s try something that starts “PO” and ends “ER” – Yay! there’s an easy word that fits!
Line 5: “Poker” is not the answer, so logically, it really had to be “power”!
Did you get this Wordle? Tell me about it in the comments!
Happy Gaming!
-
Inspired Design
This isn’t a new video, but I only recently saw it for the first time.
Dancing robots, oh my! I have enough of a science background to understand a little bit about how incredibly difficult it is to get robots to dance. They have to be built to be capable of this type of movement – and robots are not known for being graceful on their feet – but then they have to be either very specifically programmed for the routine, have incredibly advanced artificial intelligence programming to keep them from making mistakes like running into each other, or some combination of the two. With these particular robots, I suspect it is the latter, because not only do they do the dance routine (which could be pure programming), but they “acknowledge” each other and get into sync with each other (which lends to the idea of machine “decision making”).
These are very advanced, very expensive machines that a huge team of scientists have worked on for years upon years. What is striking – and even more so if one digs into some of Boston Dynamics’ other videos to see the evolution of these designs – is how much these incredible robots mimic the forms of nature, namely a human male, a dog, and an ostrich.
For those who are strictly evolutionists, there is the idea that all forms of life on this planet developed over millions of years through minute changes in living organisms at the cellular level. Not only is the complexity of systems in animals something that makes me give long pause to this theory, but also the fact that we generally observe systems devolve into entropy rather than improve themselves on their own.
Given this, when I see dancing robots which take the form of living things, it makes me see the actual living things as the blueprint, the inspired design if you will, that which is created by God, and the robots as the copies, which, as advanced as they are, are still not human (or even animal). These are wonders of technology, but the wonders of God’s creation is even greater.
To God be all glory!
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
