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The Now and the ...

Until March 20th, when Spring officially arrives, winter reigns, and walking around DC these days means wrestling with the season's obstinacy. Dribs and drabs of piebald snowpack laze on random street corners. Patches of sopping grass slow me down as I pick my way through sidewalk gardens. Mud - late winter's final insult.  And I caught another cold. Or was it the six cats in the house we toured last Sunday? Whether virus or dander, my nose is running again. Another seasonal offense, and it makes me mad.  As does waking to another grey day. We’ve had an intrusive string of them: foggy skies from constant rain, our two rivers, and the warmer spring air sneaking in.  For me, tea is one defense against the dregs of winter, so I make another cup and sit down to reflect. Winter is not the only thing that’s getting me down. Back when we concocted the idea of a temporary move, we’d been feeling stuck in our old house and were overdue for a change. Friends were entering tiered ad...
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Sunday News

  The Palmville Globe Volume 2 Number 6 Checkout Control Center Named For Store Employee  Joe McDonnell, 78 and residing in Palmville Twp, Minnesota, recently noticed his longtime self-checkout assistant had not been in his usual place. "I always use self-checkout because I hate waiting in line," McDonnell tells the press, "though I question whether I'm saving any time, because I invariably do something that locks my screen and triggers the flashing yellow light over my checkout station. Most of the time it's Leon who fixes my problem. Over the years I've gotten to know Leon, a short, trim man who used to drive semis, has a summer place at the lake and lives in the trailer park next to the store. I haven’t seen Leon lately and Justin, another asssitant, told me Leon had retired and moved out west with his son. I asked Justin if Leon had quit because he didn't like the newly installed control center screen on which assistants    can now fix problems withou...

Hockey Hair

Hello and welcome to a Boys State Hockey Championship Saturday, here at the Wannaskan Alamanc. Today is March 7th. This past week, I watched the movie F Valentine's Day , in which the main character talks about her love of the Raiders football team. "Ride or die!" she exclaimed to the guy who started the scene wanting to steal her wallet, then ended with the two of them doing the secret Raider handshake. With this being the week of Boys State Hockey, I totally get this sentiment. Loyalty and nostalgia for a favorite sports team abound in this season. SuperBowl, Olympics, Final Four, March Madness, and high school state championships. It's an exciting time. It's an emotionally charged time. These ultimate face-offs make normally sane people paint letters on their bellies, creating human billboards that shout, "TEAM USA!" Face painting and temporary tattoos of mascots and coloring hair, and, of course, big handmade signs declaring love, affection, and loya...

Planes, Trains, and Ferry-Mobiles

  Ordeal #1    I had broken my own main travel rule - It's worth paying extra for a non-stop flight - so I wasn't surprised when things went sideways last month on our trip to Paris. We should have driven six hours south to our friend Alex's house near the airport. Alex always puts our car in his heated garage then he and his wife Nancy drive us to the Minneapolis/St Paul Airport. After the trip, he picks us up, feeds us supper, and after breakfast next day he packs us a lunch and sends us on our way. Sweet.    But direct flights to Paris from MSP were expensive, so by driving three hours north to Winnipeg and booking our flight with WestJet, we saved several hundred dollars. The catch was we'd have to fly two hours west to Calgary to catch our direct flight to Paris. Our travel day to Winnipeg was beautiful, but during the drive to Winnipeg, WestJet, for some unexplainable reason, had delayed our flight to Calgary by four hours, meaning we'd miss out flight to...

Thursday March 5, 2026 Sven & Ula: Townhall Coffee. (Oldie But Goodie)

      In a vain attempt to relieve the boredom of windy, cold & cloudy 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; A TALL ORDER AS OF FEBRUARY 28, 2026.   “Vat ya doin’ dere, Sven?” Ula asked, leaving his pickup. “Bear’s a l’l ol’ to catch dem l’il balls vun after anudder like dat, eh. Can’t ya yust feed ‘em to ‘im in a bowl?”    “Nah, Ula,” Sven said, not looking directly at Ula. “Dese line up yust perfect in ‘is intest tines sose dey don’t bunch up. Don’t be vantin’ dat.” "The large black curly-haired dog sitting patiently in front of him . . ."         Sven readied another ball, about the size of a quarter coin, to toss toward the large black curly-haired dog sitting patiently in front of ...

Word-Wednesday for March 4, 2026

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for March 4, 2026, the ninth Wednesday of the year, the eleventh Wednesday of winter, the first Wednesday of March, and the sixty-third day of the year, with three-hundred two days remaining. Wannaska Phenology Update for March 4, 2026 Maple Syrup Ininaatig in Anishinaabe, Acer is a genus of trees and shrubs commonly known as maples. The genus is placed in the soapberry family Sapindaceae , with approximately 132 species, most of which are native to East Asia, with a number also appearing in Europe, northern Africa, and North America, including Wannaska. The first attested use of the word was in 1260 as "mapole", and it also appears a century later in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales , spelled as "mapul". Most maples usually have easily identifiable palmate leaves. Maple syrup is made from the sap of some maple species. Starting about now, when the night-to-day temperatures change from freezing to thawin...

Wannaskan Almanac for Tuesday, March 3, 2026 Small Town One

I have been playing around with short stories lately...ones about growing up near a small town.  Hopefully it will be okay to share a few of them with you.  This is what happens when you finish all your conferences on Wednesday and have all day Thursday to stare at your computer. Extremely rough draft but still readable.  Enjoy! I didn’t grow up in a town. I grew up outside of a town... and that town was so small that people in that town didn’t consider it to be a town. The people in that "town" claimed to have grown up near a town that was about 25 miles away. It was a hierarchy of distance, a strange social ladder where the closer you were to a paved road with a yellow line down the middle, the higher your status. Where I lived, the roads didn't have lines. They didn't even really have names, at least not names that appeared on any map. We called them things like "The Old Miller Run" or "The Creek Path," and if you were giving directions to a str...