Fredagsfrustration ~ Store Bededag

I dag er det fredag i fjerde uge i påsken. Tidligere var det Store Bededag. Men det er det jo netop ikke længere. Suk. Jeg savner i den grad det åndehul i foråret den dag gav.
     I år er det igen en ganske almindelig hverdag. Ugleungerne og Skribenten er væk hjemmefra, arbejde og uddannelse kalder.

Jeg savner Store Bededag!

Store Bededag var en fridag, der betød meget for mig. Det var så at sige en "gratis" fridag. Butikkerne var lukkede, så vi kunne ikke tage på indkøb. Vi fik ikke gæster, vi skulle ikke i kirke. Kort sagt, vi havde bare fri, og der var ingen, der forventede noget af os, ingenting vi skulle.
Det savner jeg i den grad ... den her lette, boblende frie fornemmelse, når dagen ender af "Tænk, det er kun lørdag i morgen!"

Jeg bliver altså ikke mere produktiv af at savne den!

Today is Friday in the 4th week of  Easter. Until now it was a holiday, Common (or great) prayer day, but again this year it is just another Friday. The Owlets and the Writer are off to jobs and training.

I miss this holiday. It was a breathing space in the busy spring, the period for exams, digging, doing ...

It was so to say a "free" holiday. Nobody expected anything from us, the shops were closed, so no shopping, we were not having any guests, we were not supposed to go to church (this was a Protestant prayer day only 😉). Not a thing in the calendar, and when the day ended, I always have had this light, bubbly feeling: Tomorrow is only Saturday! This feeling - of a week with two Saturdays - I am sorely going to miss in years to come.

I really do not think that this feeling of frustration and loss will make me a better, more industrious citizen!



Men stadivkæ:
Når Store bededag nu falder på 1. maj er det rødbededag.

Derfor måtte jeg, der ellers ikke bryder mig særligt om rødbeder, bestemt så en stribe af dem i dag. For at det hele ikke skulle blive for rødt, valgte jeg en bolchestribet sort.

God rødbededag.

- o O o -

A Danish pun, that led to MotherOwl sowing beetroots.
And yes the beetroots are supposed to be striped inside, like a candy cane. 

A-Z Challenge ~ Stats

 ⚠ Warning! This post contains the answer to today's Wordle ⚠
⚠ Proceed at your own risk ⚠

I did it!

I posted an A-Z post every day of April except Sundays

This year again I choose an easy way out. Each day I solved the Wordle of the day, using as starter a word beginning with the letter of the day.

As the alternative badges, as supplied by Lissa suggest travel I chose travel-related words as starter words, and for most of the posts I succeeded in adding a few words pertaining to my chosen starter word and telling a tale from my many travels.

One of the funny things about Wordle is solving it - or not - and the number of guesses you use for this, it lend itself perfectly to statistics.

Stats ~ Wordling
Looking through my earlier Wordle stats tells me that out of  26 Wordles I typically solve it in:
4 guesses 9 times,
5 guesses 6 times,
6 guesses 5 times, 
3 guesses 3 times, 
and fail 3 times.
Or an average of 4.8 guesses. How was April 2026 compared to this?

I solved 25 of the 26 relevant Wordles at an average of 4,8 guesses. My distribution of guesses can be seen in this grid:

I had the same average number of guesses, but fewer fails and fours and more fives and sixes.
I do not know if this means anything other than starter words not belonging to my usual batch pushes the number of guesses upwards, and some luck led to fewer fails. Let's leave well alone.

Stats ~ Blogging and visiting
I know there'll be a dedicated reflections post for this later on, but I'll do a bit now, when my mind is still on the challenge.

Blogs visited:
I visited - or should I say tried to visit - all the 144 participating blogs on the master list. I did not comment on all of them. I repeat, again modified, from former years' Stats post:

In past year I spent far too much time trying to comment on blogs that required a log in, wading through posts not touching on the A-Z at all or where I had to "fight" to get to the posts ... to the detriment of my visiting blogs that were interesting or were following the guidelines. This year I was not going to revisit non-participants, those requiring a large amount of blogging gymnastics, or those where I did not like the graphics or contents.

Why did I then have such a tough time again this year?

Non-participants:
Again too many blogs were not participating. Of the 144 bloggers signed up 20 did either not exist, had supplied broken links, or did not participate. This is 13.8 % of the blog. Even worse than last year.

I do not know what, if anything, can be done about this. We sign a disclaimer where we agree to this:

Blog Link *
Please make sure the link works and leads to your blog, not a specific post or area where you create your posts. Thanks! It must go to a PUBLIC blog where anyone doing the challenge may COMMENT WITHOUT LOGGING IN, SIGNING UP, or SUBSCRIBING.

The team visits all blogs at least once I know. Could they maybe in some way mark those "defective" ones on the master list so as not to waste loads of time for all the rest of us?

Read and commented:
I expanded on the list I made after the theme-reveals. I visited all the blogs I had not yet visited during the theme reveal, and marked them using the same system either Green for interesting, Yellow for maybe interesting (or interesting with bad graphics), or Red for not interesting. 
After a few days I had:
   7 in  Green 
 26 in  Yellow  only a few because of bad graphics
111 in  Red  of these also the 20 with no A-Z, double entries, or broken links.

Of the Green and Yellow ones and a fe w Red ones too, I have commented on 35 or maybe some more as my comment would sometimes just disappear. I had this happening mostly on blogs on Substacks, WordPress, and some in an unknown format. Some blogs where I have commented more than once still only count once in my stats.

As STATS is actually a five letter word, I tried to solve today's Wordle with STATS as a starter - same as last year.

Wordle 1.777 4/6
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Earning me yet an unclaimed Greens Only badge

And the solution - with badge:

A-Z Challenge ~ Z for Zones

This year again I choose an easy way out. Each day I'm going to solve the Wordle of the day, using as starter a word beginning with the letter of the day. I plan to post the A-Z post around noon every day of April.

As the alternative badges, as supplied by Lissa suggest travel I'll prefer travel-related words as starter words, and if at all possible, I'll avoid words containing the same letter more than once.

I'll maybe add a few words about my chosen starter word if fancy takes me and I have time and energy for it, else I'll just post the solution - or not in the case that I did not solve it.

Today my starting word is Zones.
The average today is 5.3 guesses out of 6, or very challenging. I am below average again today.

Wordle 1.776 4/6
⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Zones - When travelling you tend to forget that borders are more than the international ones we normally know and have to show our passport when crossing. Many countries have intern borders, partitioning the country into zones. And you have to have permission to leave or enter these zones, just the same as borders. We ran across this in Sudan. We were seven of us staying in a small village some hours' walk from Loa - which is situated between Juba and Nimule (This is a partia re-tell).


    The people in the village had lots of fun putting us to all sorts of jobs we couldn't really manage, like cleaning grain, grinding sesame seeds, weaving baskets, making bricks, or washing clothes. Then, when we were messing around the women, laughing and teasing, pushed us away and, gesticulating and talking loudly, showed how to do it. Even though we did our best, the results were not good to put it mildly, and there was much laughter.

At 6 pm the sun set and it got dark in less than ten minutes. After eating everybody gathered in a big hut and shucked corn off the cobs while people sang, talked and laughed. There was alwaus laughter, and we were annoyed at not being able to understand anything.

One evening, while we were shucking corn, the police arrived. They said that white people were not allowed in the native zones after sunset, and drove us to a "town" nearby. There weren't many more houses than in the village, but they were square and two-storey, They dropped us off at a cheap hotel. We were told to report to the police the next morning. It seemed very deserted. There we had to sleep and stay for a few days before the transport could talke us back to Juba again. We probably should have just given them some money - aka. bribed them, but we weren't that clever.

And now for today's Wordle:

A-Z Challenge ~ Y for Youth

 ⚠ Warning! This post contains the answer to today's Wordle ⚠
⚠ Proceed at your own risk ⚠

This year again I choose an easy way out. Each day I'm going to solve the Wordle of the day, using as starter a word beginning with the letter of the day. I plan to post the A-Z post around noon every day of April.

As the alternative badges, as supplied by Lissa suggest travel I'll prefer travel-related words as starter words, and if at all possible, I'll avoid words containing the same letter more than once.

I'll maybe add a few words about my chosen starter word if fancy takes me and I have time and energy for it, else I'll just post the solution - or not in the case that I did not solve it.

Today my starting word is Youth.
The average today is 5.3 guesses out of 6, or very challenging.. I am sligthly below average today - and being below average is a good thing when solving a Wordle.

Wordle 1.775 5/6
⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜
🟨⬜⬜🟨⬜
⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜
⬜🟨🟨⬜🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Youth - Just because I ravelled so much in my youth. I have visited many European countries, a bit of Africa and Asia, as I told of under L for Lands.I think that travelling extensively in your youth is one of the best thing you can do.

And now for today's Wordle:

Månedens farve ~ Maj ~ Colour of the Month

Hello! If you're here for my A-Z post for W, please scroll down a bit.

Månedens farve for maj er  ~  The Colour of the Month for May is