Wannaskan Almanac

  The Palmville Globe Volume 2 Number 37 Man's Garden Vandalized Joe McDonnell, 79 and a resident of Palmville Township, Minnesota, recently had his garden fence breached by a large deer. "If we didn't have a tall sturdy fence, there would be no point in having a garden," McDonnell tells the press. "When our dog was young, the deer stayed away, but when our dog lost interest in chasing the deer, we had to put up a six foot tall fence which was effective at keeping the deer away from our vegetables. But when I went to the garden recently I found the garden gate open. Now that it's late in the season, we've gotten careless about latching the gate. I noticed deer prints in the damp soil. Then I noticed big bulges in two places in the fence as though the deer had rammed its head into the fence. I surmised the deer had eventually gone out the way it had come in until I noticed the post where the two ends of the fence come together. The deer had found the weak ...

Hello and welcome to a 10 out of 10 Saturday here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is October 10th. A friend shared an Instagram post with me about the significance of today being a 10-10-10 day. Let's start with the math. The first two numbers are easy enough to figure out: 10 (October) - 10 (day). The third part is 2+0+2+6 = 10. Hence 10-10-10. According to the video, the stars and planets are aligning in a special way that suggests a cosmic invitation for new beginnings. To let go of old habits, identities, patterns, and begin something refreshingly healthy, positive, and life-affirming. Here's what McGoogle and AI Allison tell me when I ask, "What's the significance of today being 10 10 10?" "10/10 Portal: A Powerful Day to Manifest & Transform Your Life ✨ The 10/10 Portal on October 10 is considered a powerful spiritual and numerological window for new beginnings, transformation, manifestation, and releasing old energy. In numerology, 10 carries the e...

    Every fall we get a copy of our property insurance policy and invoice. It's a thick packet and it takes all our united brain power to figure out how much we're paying and how much the company will pay us if our house burns or blows down. There's a small category called "Inland Marine," and we always wonder what the heck that's for. We have a canoe, but I would never bother insuring that.   When we check with Duane, our agent,  he says without hesitation, that's Teresa's ring. Duane has lots of clients and I'm in awe that he can remember such minutiae as Teresa's ring. But why is a ring insured under Inland Marine Insurance? Shouldn't that be for boats? Duane explains that Inland Marine insurance is not for boats, but for stuff like personal jewelry. Boat Insurance is for boats. So why the strange name. Duane said it came from shipping insurance that had started long ago.    To me, shipping insurance means Lloyd's of London. The curr...

  Sundown Beneath Skies as Blue as was That Day with Leaves Upon The Ground        A black plastic bag pivoted from its perch on a weed in the field and for a moment appeared as a raven feeding in the dirt. A hawk circled the tractor, its wings perpendicular from its body, un-moving except for the feathers on its wing tips and the tipping of its head as it watched my long lazy circles in the field below. A shadow crossed the grass ahead of me and disappeared in the silhouette of spruce trees on the gravel road, then reappeared that wound around Mikinaak Creek, then dropped off the road, down into the long grasses and was gone.    I saw the shadow again -- there, it had returned. Again it disappeared into the silhouettes of the spruce trees, spiraling out and away from them, then reappeared as a raven just over my head so close that I stood upon the tractor seat I could've slightly caressed its breast.     I looked at the faded red hood o...

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for October 7, 2026, the fortieth Wednesday of the year, the third Wednesday of fall, the first Wednesday of October, and the two-hundred eightieth day of the year, with eighty-five days remaining. Wannaska Phenology Update for October 7, 2026 pumpkins Curcurbita pepo are now widely on sale for pie-making and jack-o-lantern carving in and around Wannaska. Okosimaan in Anishinaabe, and otherwise known as winter squash, is among the oldest known domesticated plants, first cultivated between 7000 BCE and 5500 BCE in Mesoamerica. According to the Oxford English Dictionary , the English word pumpkin is a 17th-century corruption of the earlier pompion , denoting any of various kinds of edible gourd. The latter ultimately derives, via French and Latin, from Greek πέπων ( pepōn ). An alternative etymological theory derives pumpkin from the Massachusett word pôhpukun , meaning "grows forth round", used by the Wampanoag people wh...