Wannaskan Almanac

    I wouldn't normally think of going to Paris in winter. But our granddaughter had convinced her father to take her to Paris to celebrate her twelfth birthday. It didn’t take much convincing. Joe had enjoyed his travels in Paris and told his kids stories about his adventures. Isla and her nine year old brother Nash were especially fascinated by the catacombs where Paris had buried her dead for a couple of hundred years when the aboveground cemeteries were full.   Isla's birthday is February 21 so we planned to arrive there February 17 and fly home on Sunday the 22. Joe, Isla and Nash would fly from Boston and we'd meet at an Airbnb apartment near the Bastille monument.    Due to flight delays we ended up missing our first day in Paris. Joe and the kids arrived on time, dropped their bags at the apartment and enjoyed a sunny day walking around the neighborhood and riding the subway or métro as it's called. When we arrived Wednesday morning the apartment had a l...

    In a vain attempt to relieve the boredom of windy, cold & cloudy February-March days I'm reproducing a series of Sven & Ula stories in hopes of generating periodic laughter inside or outside our bodies. I think is important to entertain some silliness once in awhile, in response to what negatively confronts us day by day.                                                                Sven and Ula Do Nebraska     “Vere?” Ula asked, squinting off into the distance.     “Dere!” said Sven, pointing with his left hand while holding his Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18 to his eye with his right.      “Vere?” Ula repe...

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for February 25, 2026, the eighth Wednesday of the year, the tenth Wednesday of winter, the fourth Wednesday of February, and the fifty-sixth day of the year, with three-hundred nine days remaining. Wannaska Phenology Update for February 25, 2026 Snow Fleas As a sure sign of the approaching spring in Wannaska, Palmville's own official bug, Hypogastrura nivicola , manidoosh in Anishinaabe, has started to sprinkle snow surfaces on warmer, sunnier afternoons. These tiny, harmless, dark-blue, or black hexapods are not true insects or fleas. Commonly seen jumping on melting snow in late winter, they're classified as a springtail, using their forked, tail-like appendage called a furcula to leap about in the hopes of getting close to one another. They have been endowed with a unique protein that acts as antifreeze, allowing them to survive sub-zero temperatures. February 25 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special : Potato Dumpling F...

I have started a new morning ritual. Before I drink my coffee, before I check the weather, and certainly before I steel myself to enter the petri dish of hormones known as a middle school hallway, I look at a number. Today, that number is 821. That is exactly how many days stand between me and retirement. It sounds like a huge number, I know. But even when you measure time in 6th-grade class periods—which operate on a strange, agonizingly slow relativity scale—821 days feels like a manageable prison sentence. I am currently serving my time on the front lines of puberty, and let me tell you, the troops are restless, highly emotional, and smell vaguely of cheap body spray. What the students think they look like The core issue, and the source of my bone-deep exhaustion, is biological. I spend my days trying to inject knowledge into brains whose prefrontal cortices are currently marked "Under Construction." As any neurologist (or parent of a twelve-year-old) knows, this is the pa...

  If there is such a thing as a textbook cold, I ran through the pages last week and still feel crummy. At first, I was hopeful. The small twinge of sore throat that pinched on day one quickly slidesteped to make way for unique water features that took over my nose. For twelve hours, I felt like a pop-up water park—flowing, spraying, and sneezing jet streams into reams of tissues. When all that excitement died down, I naively thought I was better. I'll skip the details on the unproductive cough that finally blossomed. Viruses are stealthy. And, I can't say I'm sick anymore, but my usual pep has disappeared, and I'm in a funk. It’s like a fog has slipped in through the windows, and I'm stuck in a state of torpor; a slow-motion pace that's forced me to stop and look around. I see rolls of wrapping paper gossiping in a corner. Stacks of folded magazines loiter on the couch with pillows. I'm wondering how it is that scotch tape shares shelf space with the box of...

  The Palmville Globe Volume 2 Number 4 Man Makes Cost Risk Analysis  Joe McDonnell, 78 and a resident of Palmville Township, Minnesota, recently learned a valuable lesson while traveling with his grandson. "By the time we arrived at our lodging, my grandson had already changed the fifty dollars that his other grandmother had given him into the local currency and was running through it like the prodigal son. He saw a vending machine with a granola bar right on the verge of falling into the pick-up compartment. He decided to put in two coins worth a total of two dollars, thinking to get two granola bars for the price of one. But nothing happened. He pushed the return money button. Nothing. Our subway train pulled into the station and we got on. Then the train stayed in the station with the doors open. Our grandson and his father returned to the machine and started pushing buttons. The rest of us also left the train. Stay with the group is our motto. The equivalent of two dollar...