phlox

Phlox is a cool word. 
Ph instead of f
x
one syllable
rhymes with rocks and fox
similar to a curse word

This is a wild phlox, but it is in my yard. It is "Blue Moon." 
From Wikipedia: Phlox divaricata, the wild blue phlox, woodland phlox, or wild sweet william, native to forests and fields in eastern North America. I should smell it tomorrow. 


When they arrived a few were flowering and today they are all flowering. 


Today's light helped distinguish the purples from the blues but everything was still gorgeous. 


Behind my house is a retaining wall. Behind the retaining wall is a fence. Behind that is a short hill. This is perfect for rolling a ball down because it is grassy and the fence stops the ball. Calvin and his mom came to play there today so we went out to say hi. I asked Calvin his favorite color and he said red. I told him he was going to love my tree. Such a polite boy to humor me. 


Ukrainians thwarted a cyberattack by Russian-backed hackers aimed at the electrical grid. The hackers are tied to Russia's military intelligence agency. It is a new version of malware used to shut down electricity in Ukraine in 2016. This is after last week's successful interception by Microsoft, which stopped cyberattacks in Ukraine, the US, and the EU. 


A Russian railway has been damaged in an explosion near the border. The track, and only the track,  was destroyed. Maybe the Ukrainians carried out their first covert attack on Russian soil. Maybe it just blew up for no reason, or two sailers were smoking cigarettes in the wrong area?


The Russian Orthodox Church, typically closed aligned with Putin, is going rogue. The Patriarch, Kirill, is widely seen as supporting the war, but more than 280 Russian Orthodox clergy in Ukraine, Russia, and elsewhere have signed an open letter calling for "the cessation of the fratricidal war." Some Russian Orthodox clergy no longer use 
Kirill's name. The Russian Orthodox priest Reverend Ioann Burdin spoke out last month against the invasion. He was fined $445. 

A senior member of the FSB intelligence agency, Sergey Beseda, was sent to prison for intelligence failures relating to Ukraine. Around 150 agents have been fired.