Wannaskan Almanac

    We arrived in Mesa in plenty of time for Uncle Vern's 100th birthday party on September 17. His actual birthday was on the sixth, but they had pushed the party back in hopes of cooler weather. A vain hope because the temperature was hitting 100 by noon almost every day. After all, we were in the Sonoran Desert.   The Arizona part of the desert receives up to 12" of rain per year which makes life for humans just possible. The early Hohokam people built hundreds of miles of canals to irrigate their crops before they disappeared. When white settlers, mostly Mormons, moved in, they used some of these canals for their own crops. Once air conditioning became available, the population skyrocketed to its current half million.   But enough about Mesa, we were in town for Uncle Vern. Vern Karlson (the Navy lost the extra 's' in Karlsson) is Teresa's uncle and the brother of her dad Karl Enar who just celebrated his 105th birthday. Vern grew up on the farm near Roseau and...

  Wednesdays Are For Witticisms     “You look just like that African Queen guy ...,” the wife said laughing, presumably at me. "You know, ... what's his name?"     We were just sitting down to lunch yesterday; me having just come in from a project I had been working on outdoors. I hadn’t worn a cap to the table forever ....     “Humphrey Bogart?” I queried, cutting my Johnsonville New Orleans Style smoked sausage sandwich diagonally, wondering from where in the world her idea had sprung (a common occurrence).     We eat different things, this woman who I’ve been married to since the last subzero afternoon of 2008. So it is these past several months I’ve begun fixing my own meals for the most part, and she hers; joining one another at the dining room table to dine together, chitchat, laugh, and, especially in the mornings play a game or two of cards or other entertaining activity, (Indian leg wrestling no longer...

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for September 28, 2022, the thirty-ninth Wednesday of the year, the first Wednesday of fall, and the 271st day of the year, with 94 days remaining. Brought to you again by Bead Gypsy Studio, featuring a 20% off sale for all necklaces with chains, in stock or new orders, for the entire month of September. Wannaska Phenology Update for September 28, 2022 First Frost Pretty much right on schedule, we had our first frost on Monday, September 26. According to the Plantmaps interactive Web site, we live in Zone 4, where first frosts happen on average between September 1 and September 10. And yes, Sven, the site lists Wannaska, but not Pencer. September 28 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special : Potato Dumpling September 28 Nordhem Wednesday Lunch : Updated daily by 11:00am, usually. Earth/Moon Almanac for September 28, 2022 Sunrise: 7:19am; Sunset: 7:10pm; 3 minutes, 33 seconds less daylight today Moonrise: 10:29am; Moonset: 8:21pm, ...

A couple of Fridays ago I decided to do something nice for the people at the school where I work.  I am kind of a barista...or is it a baristo for guys...which is just a fancy way of saying I can make up some coffee drinks.  I have a pretty good recipe for making a blended iced salted caramel Frappuccino.  That really makes me sound sophisticated.  All I do is mix milk, ice, salted caramel syrup, cold brew coffee, and french vanilla cappuccino powder together.  I can't tell you the exact amount of each because it changes every time I make it.   So I sent out an email on a Thursday inviting all 160 employees in my building to come down Friday morning for a free iced coffee.  I knew that not all 160 would show up, but just to be safe I added in that it was first come first served and that supplies were limited.  All together about 15 people stopped by on Friday morning.  As a professional conspiracy theorist, I spent the rest of the day tr...

An Old-New Poetic Voice – Sonia Sanchez This is not a small voice you hear. Sonia Sanchez  Sonia Sanchez was a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement (~ 1965 – 1975), and Sanchez is known for her ability to blend musical formats (like jazz and blues) with traditional poetic forms (like ancient Japanese haikus and tankas). She credits her inspiration to poets like Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown, who celebrated the unique and personal sounds of Black English and slang words of the 1960s and 1970s. In these years, she focused on the necessity of separatism (similar to Malcom X). Her first collection of poems, Homecoming (1969), is known for its blues influences in both form and content. The themes in this collection include the stresses caused by efforts to define black identity, as well as deep celebrations of black culture. Continuing in the 1970s, her themes included the everyday lives of black men and women. Taking her cue again from the nature of jazz, she made use of ur...

  When making a fake, leave a couple of flaws to perfect the illusion.  Every revolution has it’s downside. The agricultural replaced the joy of the hunt with the drudgery of the hoe, the Industrial filled the countryside with satanic mills, and now the Information Revolution is replacing blissful ignorance with fake news.  I am as aware of the vastness of God as the fly in amber is of the piney woods.  The freeway is full of buzzing traffic. How many are locals who are here every day and how many are passing this way just the once, never to return? Dig deep enough into history and you begin to feel the shovel hitting your own bones.  The guy who says failure is not an option has yet to meet the ref.  The motel patron in his review complains that the place needs refurbishment. Yet he himself is too cheap to stay in a place that isn’t a dump.  Those who abstain from intoxicants themselves will permit their fellow citizens to enjoy their THC, CBD, edible...

Hello and welcome to a Homecoming (#HOCO) Saturday here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is September 24th. I’d like to kick off today’s blog post with a big THANK YOU to all of the readers who tuned in last Saturday to read The 5 th Grader’s blogging debut . Parental pride is one thing, but an even better pride is that which was felt by the kid writer herself. She took to heart the readers’ comments received on the blog and on social media. The ten bucks cash was a nice little “gold star” too. She may even have said, “Pleasure doing business with you.” Today is the last Saturday of September making October 1 st land on next Saturday which means if you’re someone who likes to write – or even if you’re someone who likes to think about writing and you find yourself “never” writing, but people tell you that you write the best emails and Christmas cards – it’s time to think about Nanowrimo. What is Nanowrimo? NaNoWriMo is shorthand for National Novel Writing Month. (This helpful monike...

     When we're not in a hurry, we adopt pretty slow travel. We had a week to get to Uncle Vern's birthday party in Mesa so I told the GPS to avoid highways, toll roads and ferries. We were leaving from Denver's south side and I was surprised how rustic a route the map assistant (I'll call her Siri) chose for us.   Siri’s road took us through rocky, wooded canyons and up steep hills. I wondered how much longer our top speed would be 35 mph. But eventually we got on a southbound four laner, not a true interstate. As the road climbed higher it turned to two lanes, but there were frequent passing areas for passing  slow pokes.   We spent the day climbing into the mountains and over passes at eight or nine or ten thousand feet. When I saw a restaurant in the late afternoon called The High Plains Café, I realized we had just crossed the Rockies. How the pioneers had labored for weeks over what we drove over in a day.    Our goal was Mesa Verde National...

  Threatened by Annihilation Again The American Bison, or buffalo, is threatened again by annihilation . This time in the 21st century by a bacterial pathogen called Mycoplasma bovis.     In 2013, a free-roaming South Dakota bison herd on the Cheyenne Indian Reservation was found to be infected by a crippling disease, later diagnosed to be a frequent contributor to polymicrobial respiratory disease in cattle, has recently emerged as a major health problem in North American bison.        In studies of the pathogen done in 2017, seven head of bison and six of cattle were exposed intranasally  (a route in which drugs are administered through the nose) to M. bovis and examined after death 4–6 weeks later. Blood and nasal swabs were collected before exposure and at death. Samples of lung, lymph node, liver and spleen were also collected at death.     The data provided the first direct evidence that M. bovis can be a s...

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for September 21, 2022, the thirty-eighth Wednesday of the year, the fourteenth and last Wednesday of summer, and the 264th day of the year, with 101 days remaining. Brought to you again by Bead Gypsy Studio in downtown Roseau, featuring a 20% off sale for all necklaces with chains, in stock or new orders, for the entire month of September. Wannaska Phenology Update for September 21, 2022 Sandhill Crane Migration Early records suggest that sandhill cranes (Grus canadensis) were common residents south and west of Minnesota's forested region until the mid-1870's. Ecologically speaking, the Minnesota DNR notes that sandhill cranes employ a "slow" life-history strategy: long-lived, they defer breeding for several years after fledging; they exhibit very low reproductive rates; and they experience high year-to-year survival rates. However, sandhill crane populations are more vulnerable to exploitation than species exh...

It has been a while, so I am back with more fractured history.  The events listed are true.  Only the details have been changed to protect the Wannaskan Almanac from open ridicule.  Closed ridicule is still allowed...perhaps even welcomed. 368 AD:  Emperor Valentinianus visits Nijmegen.  How someone with the last name Anus was able to ascend to the position of Emperor remains a mystery.  One can only speculate that the reason for the visit was to change his name to Valentinibutthole.  That would be much more respectable. 1187 AD: Saladin begins the Siege of Jerusalem.  It appears that he was upset over a very bad haircut he received from the Jerusalem Sports Cuts.   Bad hair day leads Saladin to seige the day 1258 AD: Salisbury Cathedral in south west England inaugurated.  Insert your own steak joke.  That one is too easy! 1519 AD: Spanish expedition led by Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan sets off on the 1st succes...

  Denise Levertov Protest, Solitude, and Resilience Today, we meet  Denise Levertov , and  English poet , and the tenth of twelve in our Monday series of women poets who changed the poetry game. (If you would like to have a digital version of the document about the dozen poets, let me know, and I will send it, after the series is over.) During the course of a prolific career, Denise Levertov created a highly regarded body of poetry that reflected her beliefs as an artist and a humanist. Her work embraced a wide variety of genres and themes, including nature lyrics, love poems, protest poetry, and poetry inspired by her faith in God. Amy Gerstler wrote in the  Los Angeles Times Book Review , that Levertov possessed “a clear uncluttered voice—a voice committed to acute observation and engagement with the earthly, in all its attendant beauty, mystery and pain.” Levertov’s body of quietly passionate poems, attuned to mystic insights and mapping quests for harmony, became...