Wannaskan Almanac

The year was 1792.  Mayonaise had been invented 3 years earlier by British loyalists who had fled to the Canadian province of Manitoba.  The objective was to create a product that was valuable both as a lubricant and as a slow poison that would protect the loyalists in the event of an American invasion.  These loyalist fled Boston and arrived in Churchill.  Apparently the loyalists had misinterpreted a Revolutionary War map and thought they were heading for a tropical paradise.  Some say this was due to the fact that they did not understand the Metric system...and who can blame them...seeing as the Metric system hadn't even been invented yet.  Back then when you claimed to use the Metric system, you were likely hanged as a spy.  But I digress... Churchill: A toe numbing chill town! Much like today, true mayonaise is only available from the sea.  It was especially abundant around the sprawling, icy metropolis of Churchill.  The problem was tha...

  Knees on the floor, hands held together, elbows pressed into the mattress for support. It’s the fifties, and that’s me kneeling bedside with my two sisters whispering nighttime prayers. Mom, with the soul of a poet, inspired us to memorize ​ Night is falling, dear Mother, the long day is o’er, And before your loved image, we are kneeling once more, to thank you for keeping us safe through the day and to ask you this night to keep evil away... So, yeah, my relationship with prayer goes way back. In third grade, one particular prayer changed how I thought about God. I guess I was ready for paradox. ​It started one Friday after lunch, after some throwaway lesson led us third-graders into the week’s most beloved hour: Art. In Catholic school, that meant swapping our flimsy scratch paper from Arithmetic for heavy drawing paper. Whoo-hoo, time to go wild with our crayons! Sister had one rule. Each week she’d stand up, point her witchlike finger at us, and warn: NO CRAYONS IN THE PENCIL...

  The Palmville Globe Volume 2 Number 14 Man Returns Cabinet Drawer To Working Order Joe McDonnell, 79 and a resident of Palmville Twp, Minnesota, recently fixed a kitchen cabinet drawer that had been sagging. "I'm presuming the drawer and cabinet had once been in someone's kitchen, but they have been in our garage since we bought our place 52 years ago. The cabinet is great for storing stuff in the garage, but a year ago one of the drawers half-collapsed and was hard to open and would not close fully. On inspection I discovered one of the rails on the side of the drawer had come off. I drilled holes through the rail and the side of the drawer and fastened them together with rivets. Riveting is simple and easy but it has a satisfying high tech feel for me." McDonnell notes that had the drawer been in a cabinet in their kitchen, he would have fixed it promptly. "Storage space is at a premium in our kitchen," he says. Man Finds Fine Dining Away From Home Joe M...

Hello and welcome to a post-May Day Saturday here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is May 2nd. Last week, I took part in an organized tourist trip with The European Rhapsody Tours to Prague. This was a first for me in that A) I've never been on an organized tourist trip, and B) This trip's emphasis was on seeing all the sights that could be seen in 9 days. It's worth noting that, despite 25 years of marriage to a Czech, I haven't seen or visited Prague properly in probably 20 years. This tour was the perfect opportunity. Here are some photos of my favorite places. I'm currently reading The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown, which added an extra layer of delight and significance to this trip. If you've read, or are reading the book, you might notice some familiar locations. Enjoy!

   The two country mice left their home on a cool sunny Sunday and drove north to the border. Teresa told the border guard we were going to Winnipeg for a Mozart concert and the guard said, "Why didn't I know about this?" He was a Mozart fan and had just been in Austria. We chatted a few minutes until a car pulled up behind us. We promised to tell him about the concert the next time we saw him.    We drove northwest through the aspen woodlands and by the dull brown fields, past the onion domed Orthodox churches and the churches of the Mennonites, cousins of the Amish without the buggies. Through Grunthal and Sainte Agathe, over the Red River where water from the Roseau River flows too. And finally past the Daliesque football stadium and onto the campus of the University of Manitoba.    Parking was free on weekends and we walked to the concert hall along streets still gritty from a long winter on the edge of the prairie. The river is only a couple of hundred...

  Picture of the northern lights over the deer shack by Gene Palm.    On April 5, 2026 Easter morning, my cousin Gene Palm 'walked on,' with relief from all the suffering he had been enduring for six long months, and a smile on his face knowing he had provided his wife and children and grandchildren with the very best of everything he had to give of his love and respect. I spent three of his last days in his home talking and joking about the past; his memory coming and going between his silent gasps of pain, his ever-present smile fading then slowly coming back.    Gene was always a guy with a smile on his face and a cigarette, Diet Coke, coffee, or sometimes beer in hand. He made time to listen when necessary; withheld advice until asked, and always admitted when he was wrong. He seemed genuinely buoyed by a life of charity which he bestowed on his friends and family throughout Minnesota; one example being that he periodically visited the city dump in Aurora ...