Wannaskan Almanac

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Wannakan Almanac for Tuesday, June 2, 2026...Sadulting

Adulthood has a funny way of sneaking up on you. One day you’re a kid who thinks getting mail will be exciting, and the next you’re a full‑time crisis manager who pays for things you don’t want, maintains things you don’t use, and eats meals that haven’t been warm since sunrise. You wake up one morning and realize you’ve somehow become the designated responsible person in a world full of people who test your patience like it’s their spiritual gift. Half of adulthood is pretending you didn’t hear something ridiculous, the other half is deciding whether it’s worth correcting, and the rest is whispering “Lord, give me strength” into your coffee while someone asks you a question that could’ve been a Google search. Meanwhile, the bills never stop. They multiply. They evolve. They show up like jump scares in a horror movie. Electricity, water, insurance, subscriptions you swear you canceled—your mailbox becomes a haunted house you’re too scared to open. And while you’re juggling all tha...

Truce

She rinses black beans and pauses to watch them glisten in the strainer. Before opening the can, she had fished the tail end of a red onion off the fridge door, found it still firm, and, twack, enjoyed the crunch of her knife cutting the crisp pulp into a satisfying dice. Oil, a splash of lemon juice, a pinch of herbs, salt, pepper, a grabbed fork, whoosh, she settles into the soft chair by the window to eat her lunch. She never takes calm, clear moments like this for granted—times when she gets to savor the simple wonderfulness of life. In between bites of lemony bean salad, she looks around the room at clear, dust-free surfaces. But it’s not always like this. She’s just crawled out of a busy phase. This morning, she restored order to her house. Each tasty bite now feels like celebration. Yesterday, every surface — tables, bureaus, and counters — overflowed with debris. Weeks ago, mail piles had begun innocently enough - an envelope here, another stack over there. Weeks later, they’...

Sunday News

The Palmville Globe Volume 2 Number 18 Man Becomes A Two Phone Operator Joe McDonnell, 79 and a resident of Palmville Twp, Minnesota, recently acquired a new smartphone which proved problematical. "A friend recently acquired a new phone which she disliked," McDonnell tells reporters. "The phone was offered to me at a low price and the money I payed was donated to a dog shelter. My friend loved dogs. I had my phone number switched to the new phone and that worked fine, but I couldn't move my apps, pictures, etc. to the new phone until I deleted my friend's apps and pictures from her phone. To do that I needed her phone ID which could not be located. Paperwork was sent to the phone's maker and while I wait for the ID to be sent, I'm operating with two phones, one as a phone and the other as everything else." McDonnell says he feels like one of those business tycoons who were always portrayed talking into two phones at once. "Or like a secre...

Where have all the magpies gone?

Hello and welcome to the last Saturday in May - and the start of summer vacation - here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is May 30th. This past week, we reflected on 2026 as our 20th anniversary living in Wannaskaland and 23 years since we returned to the U.S. Wannaska looks different than it did in 2006. The first thing I noticed is the absence of magpies. When we moved here, I remarked, "Magpies! Look at all the magpies!" This is especially memorable because magpies is one of a handful of bird species I can recall from my own sixth-grade science class with Mr. Hanson at Washington Middle School in Brainerd, MN. Mr. Hanson was diligent and patient in the pursuit of memorizing two things: our ornithological lexicon and timeless proverbs in the vein of "Good, better, best, never let it rest. Make your good be your better, and your better best." On the other hand, eagles seem abundant these days. Another memory I have is that of a warm spring. A very specific memory I ...

How To Publish a Book

A bookseller once said that writing a book is hard, while publishing a book is even harder. But the hardest thing in the world is selling a book. I once knew some college students who were so good at selling books that they were able to pay for their education. For several years in the summer, Marion and Jerry Solom would host a college student from one of the former Soviet republics. These young people were recruited by a US encyclopedia publisher to scour northwestern Minnesota for sales. One time I asked a young man from Estonia what his technique was. "Grandparents," he said. He didn't call grandparents suckers, but he knew grandparents would do anything to help their grandkids succeed in school and that's what he told the grandparents his encyclopedia would do. A little over four million books are published in the US every year. Three and a half million of them are self-published, mostly through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. Most self-published books ...

May 28, 2026 Sounds Like A RAVEN Story

My friend Joe McDonnell and I are local writers. In the early 1990s, I wrote a column in the Roseau Times-Region about Polaris titled, “Points North” and Joe wrote a column in the Roseau Times-Region about 50th wedding anniversaries. We both contributed stories and illustrations for the Roseau County Centennial Book and the Roseau County Heritage Books. I also contributed to the Roseau County book, 'Up Home ', its title derived from my mother’s expression for her childhood home in Palmville Township. Joe and I interviewed people over the years and realized the tremendous wealth of human interest stories around us. All we had to do was be good emphatic listeners and accurately write their stories in their own voices. Consequently, in 1994, we started a publication we named THE RAVEN: Northwest Minnesota’s Original Art, History, & Humor Journal. The Roseau Times-Region did a story on us and launched us into the public’s eye. We were both working f...