Wordle 543 – Solved in three steps

Wordle and POTD Mashup

I have a morning routine while I sip my coffee. First I write up the entry for the daily New Ipswich Historical Society newsletter. Then I move on to tackle the daily Wordle game. When this gets posted, my unbroken winning streak is 50 game, which is a far cry from my all time streak of 136 games. I’m attempting to break that record. I’ve been crushed before and the pressure builds with each game.

The Strategy

According to the New York Times, the most common starting word in Wordle is ADIEU which conveniently contains almost all the vowels. However I start with SLATE which is the starting word for the WORDLE-BOT, a software program that solves the same program. After the game is complete, the WORDLE-BOT analyzes the game giving suggestions for better words and showing how I did compared to the rest of the players. When you are serious about the streak, you will take any advice you can find.

Those Stupid Colored Blocks

You see them on social media sites. After the game is complete, you can copy a graphic of playing board to bore friends and family without spoilers. Green squares a match of location and letter, yellow are a match of a letter with wrong location and white is a miss. Because posting this is so easy it gets overdone. I like to see how folks fared on the same game, but the blocks are boring. If only there was more creative way to do this.

POTD of a number of things

I credit my cousin for this idea. Instead of the blocks, one morning she had a photo of four tomatoes. I followed her direction, featuring six glasses of beer, four candles etc. Isn’t this fun? Since this is my daily routine, why not make it the Picture of the Day or #POTD. I have a deep catalog of photos to draw on and I’m certain most of them are more interesting than 30 colored blocks. Lets get started with Game 543 which I solved in three steps. I’m featuring three cactus flowers.

POTD – Three Cacti Flowers

When I learned that I could grow high altitude cold hardy cactus in New Hampshire I constructed a sandbox and ordered some cold hardy high altitude from Intermountain Cactus located in Kaysville, Utah. I planted several varieties in the early 2000s and I’m happy to report that they are still alive, surviving our winters. They bloom in June. The only downside is that they are so slow growing that weeds keep choking them out. Weeding them is a painful process since those spines penetrate leather gloves.