Wannaskan Almanac

BOO!       My granddaughter Jessica Helms, is a graduate of Saint Cloud State University about which I'm immensely proud. Afterall, she helped me with my October 10th blogpost "A Meeting of Chance,"  https://wannaskanalmanac.blogspot.com/2024/10/10-october-2024-meeting-of-chance.html      She created an Ojibwemowin word for Great Horned Owl and suggested several books for me to read, including "There There," by Tommy Orange , (Published June 5, 2018) about twelve stories of an urban Native American community in Oakland, California, portraying the complexity and ambiguity of Native American experiences in contemporary America , and "The Only Good Indians," by Stephen Graham Jones (Published June 14, 2020) a horror story about revenge, cultural identity, and deviating from tradition.     These stories about Native Americans of the 21st Century, by Native authors, are quite a change from the gamut of historical documentaries I h...

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for October 30, 2024, the forty-fourth Wednesday of the year, the sixth Wednesday of fall, the fifth Wednesday of October, and the three-hundred-fourth day of the year, with sixty-two days remaining.   Wannaska Phenology Update for October 30, 2024 Bryophytes /BRĪ-ə-fīt/ n., any of a division ( Bryophyta ) of nonflowering plants comprising the mosses, liverworts, and hornworts. Mosses and other bryophytes may seem like an odd choice for a phenology post, but not for Word-Wednesday. But think about it — here is a simple, plentiful species that is present in almost the exact same form all year long here in Wannaska. Bryophytes are simple because they lack roots and vascular systems. Bryophytes do not have seeds or flowers; instead they reproduce largely via spores or vegetatively. They inhabit a variety of environments throughout the state — growing in mats or cushions on rocks, soil, or on bark and coarse woody debris of forest ...

Even though it is flat and square and not that large, Kansas has two time zones.  This is because areas cross an invisible boundary, an entrance into another time dimension, the Mountain Time Zone. Yes, Kansas does span two time zones. Four counties in Kansas are on Mountain Time, which makes no sense, even though they are on the western edge and are highest in elevation. You can set your watch by it There are four counties in Western Kansas that have joined the Mountain Time zone.  The rest of the counties are in the Central Time zone.  Sherman, Wallace, Greeley, and Hamilton counties are all a little bit behind (an hour to be exact) the rest of Kansas.  So why did they do this?  Was it just to be annoying?  Did they originally think they were living in Colorado?  This article can help answer those questions, and is well worth the read.   Questions of this peculiar situation arose for me a couple of days ago.  I took my cross coun...

Originally published May 20, 2019... What happens when we experience a severe loss in our lives? What is our reaction? What’s to be done? What responses do the people around us have to our distress? What reactions do we want them to have? For some who have experienced a loss, the solution is isolation, as we shall see; however, something or someone always seems to intervene to break the solitary state, as will be apparent in Segment 3. When it is a young person bearing the loss, coping strategies are few, no matter how brilliant youth may be. Perhaps more than any other time in life, relationships are highly volatile during adolescence – and important, in equal magnitude. Relationship is all there is! This is true whether we are talking about the natural world, human interaction, or stellar bodies. And if this statement is true, we may do well to attend to relationships in equal measure. Perhaps this Song says something about how life is diminished as relationships dwindle. Since a los...

  Prehistoric man had crazy gods of sky and earth. The Greeks had Zeus, Ares, and Aphrodite. We’ve come up with AI. If freedom is the goal, we have a ways to go.   AI is the Mighty Oz telling the terror-stricken Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion to ignore that man behind the curtain.  “Sic ‘im Toto!” The first case of AI gone wrong was when the stick Cain used to turn the earth rose up and killed Able.  AI can never be more sentient than the reflection in a mirror is sentient.  Every fourth October is blighted with signs...and uncertainty. The devil loves to play the right and left wings against each other.  A centrally located panic room is looking very attractive just now.   America’s political divide has eroded down to a not so grand Grand Canyon. Every election is a bump in the road. This one could be a doozy. But the clever people will soon have the jalopy of state back on the road.

Hello and welcome to a crisp last Saturday of October here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is October 26th.  Over MEA weekend, we embarked on our 6th Annual Family Camping Trip. We headed south to the Bluff Country in the R.J. Dorer Memorial Hardwood State Forest  near Wabasha, MN. It was a new destination for all of us and included the requisite topography my missing-mountains husband desires.  We have a 1998 edition of Hiking Minnesota that we use for inspiration. A quick comment before I hand the narrative over to the Fourth Grader, we also have a 2019 edition of this book and, after this past weekend, we agree that the 1998 edition includes more rigorous and/or out-of-the-way hikes (for example, George H. Crosby - Manitou State Park , which is remote and rigorous and totally worth it) while the 2019 edition emphasizes ease. A couple of pages are devoted to ranking the hikes from easiest to most difficult. Of the six hikes highlighted in the Blufflands section, 5 are...

     Today is my father's birthday. Five years ago I posted this piece about his adventures in the Merchant Marine during WWII. Thanks to two leap years, I have the opportunity to post it again. My father was a great man and his family and friends continue to miss him. From the Wannaskan Almanac , October 25, 2019  Today is the birthday of my father, Joseph Francis McDonnell. He would have been 96. I thought I knew all about my father. I used to call my parents on Sundays and, after chatting with my mother, she'd put my father on. "I suppose your mother has told you all the news," he'd say. We'd talk of this and that, but very often the talk would drift to his time in the Merchant Marine during World War II. He worked on Standard Oil tankers and enjoyed reminiscing about his runs up and down the California coast. I think this had been an idyllic time for him.    Recently though, I got a lot more insight into those days thanks an interview our son Joe record...

  There was nothing fantoosh about him, save for an unusual finkle, or maybe scar, that ran from below his left ear to the corner of his mouth in a jagged curve. No doubt about it, Ralph Larson was his own man. I met him in the fall of 1979. I was working at Farmers Union Oil Company/West Plant. He came to get some of his 100-pound cylinders of propane re-filled, because someone, he said, had been surfeit with his gas using it to heat the place instead of using firewood of which he had many cords cobbed and stacked right out the back door. He had no qualms about strangers needing to use his cabin if they needed to, for things happen like that in the northwoods sometimes; it was the reason he never locked its door, another's life could depend on it. This time, however, he thought he knew who acted so callously, and called them, “Lazy bastards!” as one by one, he lifted the heavy (65-120 lb) empty cylinders to me, standing patiently by the scale. He was not happy about it as their b...

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for October 23, 2024, the forty-third Wednesday of the year, the fifth Wednesday of fall, the fourth Wednesday of October, and the two-hundred-ninety-seventh day of the year, with sixty-nine days remaining.   Wannaska Phenology Update for October 23, 2024 Anthocyanins /an-THə-SĪə-nən/ n., a blue, violet, or red flavonoid pigment found in plants. Anthocyanins absorb blue, blue-green, and green light. Therefore, the light reflected by leaves containing anthocyanins appears red. Unlike chlorophyll and carotene — the other two leaf pigments — anthocyanins are not attached to cell membranes, but are dissolved in the cell sap. We have anthocyanins to thank for our fall maple and oak tree reds, as well as for the stunning reds of the ground shrubs. October 23 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special : Potato Dumpling October 23 Nordhem Wednesday Lunch : Updated daily, occasionally. Earth/Moon Almanac for October 23, 2024 Sunrise: 7:57am...