A good day – although, without tennis, it did stretch out a bit. Michaela and I got across to the garden this morning with my new walking machine. That was a real achievement. I was pleased to discover, in the conversation as we walked along, that she and her husband were keenly supporting the Romanian girl tennis player, eliminated in the quarter finals. I would have followed her too, had she progressed further, for Michaela’s and Daniela’s sake.

 

Knitting has progressed well. There are 11 or 12 rounds of the yoke remaining. The new, slightly larger, needle does help quite a bit, but the experience still isn’t quite the happy one I remember. I think the problem – that word is too heavy. I think the reason is DK yarn, as contrasted with jumper weight.

 

Wordle: we have a real Wordle special today. My two starter words gave me four brown tiles: effectively, an anagram. I’m no good at anagrams, but I stuck gamely to the principal enunciated yesterday and finally found a qualifying word. My four brown tiles were transformed into four greens – but the fifth letter was wrong. I thought of another possible letter – also wrong. And another – wrong again. I was running out of plausible letters to try by this time, but found one that at least made a pronounceable word and tried that on the sixth line. And it was right.

 

Alexander and Ketki both got stuck in the same mud, but Alexander guessed right on his third guess and Ketki was able to start guessing on the second line (not third, like me and Alexander): so both of them scored five. Mark’s starter gave him green tiles at the end of the word where the difficulty was, so he was able to score three. We haven’t heard from Thomas yet.

 

Hbqueen (comment yesterday): I use TRAIN and HOUSE for starters. I think maybe I got them from you. I use HOUSE instead of MOUSE because, if either T or S turn out to be in the target word, it will be useful from the beginning to know if either might be followed by H.