Wannaskan Almanac

  THIRD MOVEMENT REMEMBERING   SONG EIGHTEEN A VOICE BETWEEN   II Waking to dark Waking to sound             of boom thudding across from starboard to port I scramble on deck under noon-high moon,  check the wind’s shift, re-rig and secure, then settle back panting behind the sail. I am alone, yet somehow not. Are those blue arches cresting starboard of me?             or only moon-waves curling their tails?             or shadows cast from my own bright sails? It’s nothing, I think, yet re-membering green             I look to port searching for something unseen Nothing to port, starboard or ahead             one-hundred-eighty degrees of moon upon sea   But asudden ...

  The Palmville Globe Volume 2  Number 39 Man Boils Pot Dry Joe McDonnell, 79 and a resident   of Palmville Township, Minnesota, recently boiled a pot dry on the stove. "I was helping a friend via text messages with a computer question," McDonnell tells the press. "At the same time I was boiling a pot of water to make oatmeal. I thought my friend's problem would be easy to fix, but it turned out to be more complicated. We were on the verge of success when I heard a hissing from the pot on the stove behind me. I jumped up and turned off the heat. I now called my friend and her problem was quickly cleared up. When I told my friend about the pot she said, 'I can picture exactly how everything looked.'" In a follow-up report, McDonnell says that once the pot cooled off, he started his breakfast again. He says he's glad it was just water in the pot and not the oatmeal. "That would have been a cleaning nightmare," he says. Man Packs Boxes Joe McD...

Hello and welcome to a swimming Saturday here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is October 24th. Whoa, I almost wrote September 24th. The realization it was actually the latter half of October made my heart squeeze and my breath catch in my throat. We are almost to November. The idea of having another month before 2026 closes out sounds pretty nice, actually. I know it's not good to be too wistful about time passed, but I think a little Saturday morning musing is okay once in a while. This past week was gorgeous weather-wise. I enjoyed several walks outdoors in the sun without needing to bundle up. The sunny, fall warmth was a nice afterglow following a trip to the tropics. I apparently acclimated pretty quickly to Puerto Rico's heat and humidity, because when we landed in Minneapolis Monday afternoon, I was like Anna from the film Frozen , saying, "Cold, cold, cold." This weekend's adventure includes a swim rumble. Our at-home oldest is on the Wannaskaland swim tea...

     Happy Birthday Earth! According to my calculator, you are now 6030 years old. You've crammed a lot into six millennia. My greetings today are based on the studies of Bishop James Ussher of Dublin and London (1581-1658). We use methods not available to Ussher to arrive at an earlier date for the creation of the earth. Ussher did well with the tools he had to work with, which was mainly the Bible.     Starting from 4 BC, which he correctly realized was the year Jesus was born, he worked backwards using Jesus' genealogies to 4004 BC. He chose October 23 as the date because he believed everything must have started on the Autumnal Equinox (England's calendar was off a bit in Ussher's day). First he picked midnight on the 23rd for the start, then he backed it up to 6:00 pm on the 22nd. This must have been when the Big Bang took place, which Ussher could not have been expected to know about.     Before we scoff at Ussher, we should recall that Isaac...

   Camera ready, darlin'? Look, here's a good trail. This'll fer shure be a No. 1 spot on the Wiktel Page. May even make the phone book cover! Ish Dah! Smell dat? That's because it smells us. Steel yourself. It'll be worth every stinkin' bit.  Lissen ... Hear it, girl? It's just ahead ...  Steady now... ready? You can do it ... Fee fon! It's a sneaky one. Slow a bit. It's ... there .  See it tween the trees? You can just make it out .... YES1 YES! YES! ATTA GIRL! YOU GOT IT!! A PALMVILLE THRESHERANNOSAURUS REX!

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for October 21, 2026, the forty-second Wednesday of the year, the fifth Wednesday of fall, the third Wednesday of October, and the two-hundred ninty-fourth day of the year, with seventy-one days remaining. Wannaska Phenology Update for October 21, 2026 Tamaracks Turning Larix laricina, commonly known as the tamarack, hackmatack, eastern larch, black larch, red larch, or American larch, is a species of larch native to Canada, from eastern Yukon and Inuvik, Northwest Territories east to Newfoundland, and also south into the upper northeastern United States from Minnesota to Cranesville Swamp, West Virginia. There is also an isolated population in central Alaska. The Anishinaabe word for tamarack is mashkiigwaatig /mash-KEE-gwah-tig/. A boreal deciduous conifer tree common to low-land areas such as swamps, fens, and bogs, reaching seventy-five feet tall, with a trunk up to twenty-four inches in diameter. The tamarack leaves are need...