Wannaskan Almanac

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for November 30, 2022, the forty-eighth Wednesday of the year, the tenth Wednesday of fall, and the 334th day of the year, with 31 days remaining.   Wannaska Phenology Update for November 30, 2022 Get Ready … November 30 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special : Potato Dumpling November 30 Nordhem Wednesday Lunch : Updated daily by 11:00am, usually. Earth/Moon Almanac for November 30, 2022 Sunrise: 7:55am; Sunset: 4:31pm; 1 minutes, 50 seconds less daylight today Moonrise: 1:38pm; Moonset: not today; waxing gibbous, 43% illuminated. Temperature Almanac for November 30, 2022                 Average            Record              Today High             25        ...

You might not have heard it on the news, but it is Wannaska's favorite holiday today!  Welcome to jokes with puns as the punchline day, celebrated every now and then here at the Wannaskan Almanac! Did you hear about the guy whose whole left side was cut off? He’s all right now. A man just hit me with milk, cream and butter. How dairy. I accidentally swallowed a bottle of food coloring.  The doctor says I will be okay, but I feel like I have dyed inside. I really like whiteboards. I find them re-markable. I am reading a Braille horror story.  Something bad is about to happen...I can feel it. Things got a little tense after the future, the present, and the past walked into a bar. A plateau is the highest form of flattery. E-Bay is so useless. I tried to look up lighters and it gave me 13,749 matches. So long boiled water. You will be mist. My cross-eyed wife and I just got a divorce. I found out she was seeing someone on the side. Did you hear about the kidnapping at school...

Alpha Bravo Chairman  With the holiday weekend still lingering, and today being Thursday, the holiday itself which is when I usually write my posts (“just in case,” you know) I’m making today’s post  on the miniature end of the spectrum. To my recollection – not to be completely trusted at 72 years old (yikes!) –  I don’t think I’ve ever written a minimalist post before, as I’m far more prone to err on the side of being loquacious.  Today’s Feature the Wannaskan Almanac ’s Chairman  Good news: The Chairman is back with a poem composed out of the Aviation Alphabet featured in last week’s post. Will he ever stop churning out these amazing prams? Actually, this creation isn’t exactly a poem with the exception that it’s written in wonky line breaks  Here is The Chairman’s Take(off) on a new use of the Aviation Alphabet: Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta Delta Do I hear an Echo Let's Foxtrot to the Golf Hotel in India, Juliette A Kilo of Lima for Mike In November Oscar ...

  When storing leftovers, I pick the smallest container I think will work. My punishment for guessing wrong is to eat what doesn’t fit.  <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> When I don’t think something is funny, people always say, well, you should have been there. Well I’m here right now so this damn well better be funny .   <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> An administrator works crazy hard to build a lean and mean company. Flush with profits he hires a bagful of administrators to share the work. The company grows fat, flat and left in the dust.   <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Your candidate won. Congratulations!...

Hello and welcome to a post-Thanksgiving, post-Black Friday, presently put-on-your-fat-pants kind of Saturday here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is November 26th. My absolute, most favorite writing to do is journaling. It's been my writing mainstay my entire life. Poems come and go. Articles hopscotch. Books are like mountains. But journaling is the river that snakes through all my moods, phases, and milestones of life's journey. This year I made a New Year's resolution to journal at least one day more than I had in 2021. I was well on my way to achieving that goal when I lost my journal by putting it in a "special spot" - which is basically the same as losing it because I never remember where the special spot is. The last time I saw my journal was in late August. I was packing for my Red Shoes Writing Retreat in Fosston, Minnesota. I distinctly (at least I think) remember deciding I would not bring my journal with me. I wouldn't have time to write in it (oh...

    I've been carrying on a low grade war with squirrels for over forty years. As long as they stay in the woods we get along fine. But let them start hanging around the porch or going inside the garage, then they're dead. I don't shoot them. I set a live trap and transport them five miles to the Wildlife Management Area. I let all of them go in the same area and my expectation is that a family member will welcome the newcomer to his new home.   The problem with squirrels is they chew things. They've evolved to chew and I've evolved to resent it. They also get into places they don't belong. Once, after a party in the screened porch, a squirrel chewed through the screening to get at the leftovers. I opened the door to the outside, but the squirrel panicked. There were balloons tacked up in the corners of the porch and the squirrel kept jumping on them and blowing them up.   This squirrel chase would have been funny but I had to go to work. I got out my .22 and fi...

Writers' Constipation? Hardly.      Imagine losing anything in this office?      Mr. Hot Cocoa’s November 22, 2022 blog post about writer’s block got me thinking (which it was meant to do obviously, thanks John) that, as of that date, the six of us Wannaskan Almanac writers have collectively published 1776 blog post entries, once a week, since January 8th, 2018; which vaguely corresponds to the number of entries to Chairman Joe’s diary since that time as well.     Mine, not so much. I wrote journals -- lengthy tomes for a few years, but let things slip eventually. Full-time employment, farm ownership, and other responsibilities ate into my ability to sit down at will and write whatever I deemed worthy, unless I purposely stole a few minutes from my routine (much to the disappointment of my employers in the form of ‘corrective action slips’.)     Writing there, was both a blessing and a curse. The blessing came in the ...

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for November 23, 2022, the forty-seventh Wednesday of the year, the ninth Wednesday of fall, and the 327th day of the year, with 38 days remaining.   Wannaska Phenology Update for November 23, 2022 Aurora Activity Our sun left the nadir of it’s eleven-year cycle in 2020, where sun spots now steadily increase in number along with solar flares. You know what this means? More Northern Lights! Interested phenologists can track the progress of solar activity by clicking here . Our historians might be interested to learn that Aristotle and Seneca described remarkably complex personal visions of Northern Lights. From Greece and Rome? Indeed! Some solar cycles over history have been so intense that Northern Lights were quite vivid. Here’s Seneca’s description from his Natural Questions : Like a crown encircling the inner part of the fiery sky, there is a recess like the open mouth of a cave… A stretch of the sky seems to have receded a...

I stole Tom Clancy's wooden cube.  I now have writer's block.   I ain't givin' this back, Clancy! A whole bunch of poets bought up both sides of the street.  We now live in a writer's block. Prose a'plenty on my street! Speaking of poetry street, there is actually a website by that name.   https://poetrystreet.com/   is a Florida based poets website.  They have love and hope poetry, and also a category called this and that.  Feel free to check it out.   Did you ever wonder what https stands for?  Well, wonder no longer my afraid to search up stuff on google friend!  https stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure.  That s at the end stands for secure.  When you see it you know that the website you are visiting is both encrypted and verified.  Which of course means nothing really.  You can still get a virus or end up somewhere you don't want to be.  Like the Wannaskan Almanac...or Tom Clancy's p...

Plane Talk Have you ever paid attention to what pilots say. That is, in the air, and that is, when you can hear what they are saying which means you are in a small-to-medium size aircraft, and the pilot knows the lingo franca of aviation, which (s)he better if a safe takeoff and landing is the objective. Lack of communication in the sky can be suicide. In some particularly noisy planes – rotor or fixed wing – headsets are de rigeur, e.g., helicopters to hear at all, and in the big jets to assure clear communication. Every word counts in the air. Today’s “ground school” (look it up) lesson focuses on the lingua franca of the sky which is standardized throughout the planet – well mostly. If you are a pilot, alone or carrying hundreds of souls, you must speak English with rare exceptions. At a 1944 convention in Chicago aiming to resolve some of the problems of air travel at the time, established English as the language of aviation. The aim was to help avoid misunderstanding and confusion...

Your candidate won. Congratulations!    The elevator to your personal hell has paused for the moment. <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. If you still don’t succeed, maybe you’re just not cut out to be a brain surgeon. <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Going big does not guarantee a place in the finals. It’s just as likely to result in a blown gasket and a long bus ride home.   <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> If an artist thinks his work is always good, he’s stopped making progress.  <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>...

Hello and welcome to a pre-Thanksgiving Saturday here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is November 19th. What do you get when you cross a linguist with a non-native speaker of English?  Other than five kids who make up the sum of our parts, lots of word analysis at the dinner table. "Why do you say 'you guys' when you're talking to ladies?" he asks. "You guys. You guys. You're not guys!" Umm, because our 2nd person plural is just "you" and that sometimes doesn't feel sufficient or specific enough? When he was in charge of the Word of the Day in Toastmasters, he would give a thorough lesson in the etymology of the word taking us all the way back to its Latin or Greek roots. For Christmas one year, I bought him the Oxford Essential Dictionary of Word Histories. He takes pride in his Czech language with its precision and once claimed there were no Czech words that had more than one meaning. I delight in pointing out examples like stolice w...