Wannaskan Almanac

Diving deeper into magic territory, the main character understands both Dragon and dog languages, and they understand human speech. Curiouser and curiouser. Down the rabbit hole. The white rabbit. Suspending disbelief. All these are necessary approaches to what comes next in our story.   Now I hear the dragon’s language clearly and dog’s meanings are simply understood as if unexpectedly thoughts translate between us and human, dog, and dragon dance wildly, singing in their native tongues Dragon stops her swaying, looks at me saying, “I am Shield Bearer, fifth of nine second of three, numbers of my birth and rank I am come for you crossing space and time I am come to impart our truth to you You are worthy even if you aren’t pure” Argose looks like he’s grinning and appears to understand Dragon Speech as I do although perhaps in some canine accent “Where I am from, hope alive is not gone,” speaks the dragon, fifth of nine, in her song “I guard all Speech in ...

  The Palmville Globe Volume 1 Number 43 Man Bids Ice-maker Adieu Joe McDonnell, 78 and a resident of Palmville Twp, Minnesota, recently removed the ice maker from his refrigerator. "When we bought the fridge in 2000, the ice maker seemed like a great option. But I soon came to resent all the room it took up just for the convenience of having ice at the push of a button. When the ice maker quit working I pulled out the ice bin and gained a cubic foot of space. That's huge in a side-by-side freezer like ours. My only concern is that if the ice maker should start working again, we would have a mess.    I plan to pull out the fridge and find the water shut off valve." When asked if he misses having lots of ready-made ice, McDonnell said, "Not yet. I bought four ice cube trays and set them next to the gallon jug of ice cream we never had room for before."   Man Thanks St Anthony Joe McDonnell, 78 and a true believer, recently recovered a flashlight he had lost three...

Hello and welcome to a still-no-snow Saturday here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is November 22nd. Well, it's time to face the music - Little Kitty is gone and not coming back. Little Kitty was our "ditch kitty" - the one we found in the ditch on our way home from adventures in town, and our last (or most recent) feline acquisition. At the time, we already had three cats: Nicey, Scrawny, and Fuzzy. We weren't looking to acquire a new cat, but there's something irrepressible about saving a little being's life, even if it is just a cat's. Little Kitty was sweet with her humans when she was indoors, but a fierce little beast when she was out. She'd terrorize the other cats - swatting at them and pushing them out of the way at the food bowl - to assert her dominance as the new Alpha gal in the 'hood. It wasn't long after Little Kitty's arrival that Nicey "ran away." I say this in quotation marks because I'm not sure if she was i...

     As a non-hunter, I have no business spending extended time at a deer camp. However I have visited a few deer camps during hunting season. Very interesting. I'm interested in the hard-core camps in bare bones structures. These shacks have been cobbled together by the hunters themselves and as they settle over time will let in daylight here and there. It gets cold during hunting season, but a roaring fire easily overwhelms any cold that comes in through the cracks.    It's sad to see a hunting shack gradually get civilized. The first major concession is a generator for lights. Now a muffled roar out back disturbs the quiet. Next the hunters have the electric co-op bring in power. Once a well is drilled I cross that place off my list of deer camps I have known.     Homo sapiens were hunter gatherers for 200,000 years between the time we split off from our ape forebears and the time we settled down on the farm a mere 12,000 years ago. That's a lot of...

  Morning November 17, 2025. View from The Privy, a deer stand.    Don't you wish your view from your privy was as grand? Maybe it is. I'm sure I don't have a corner on privy views nor think would everyone in the world would enjoy this one as I did. I just wanted to share it before it lost its significance in a pile of thousands of my other images that won't mean a thing to anyone else.         Woe Wednesday has a word in his vast encyclopedic collection for people who imagine things in cloud formations. I admit I am one of those characters of some voraciousness. Here, I immediately see an eagle with its wings back as in a dive, and to the right of the sun possibly a bear or a lion taken aback by the eagle's aggressiveness, its body recoiling -- or possibly going after the same thing just above the horizon.        I remember that the morning of November 17th., was around 19-degrees before sunrise. " It's always coldes...

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for November 19, 2025, the twenty-third Wednesday of the year, the ninth Wednesday of fall, the third Wednesday of November, and the three-hundred twenty-third day of the year, with forty-two days remaining.   Wannaska Phenology Update for November 19, 2025 A Regular Some residents just stay in Wannaska, so we'll talk about one of those this week. The red-breasted nuthatch, Sitta canadensis — Omakakakiigoozhiis, in Anishinaabe — is a small songbird native year-round in Wannaska. The adult has blue-grey upperparts with cinnamon underparts, a white throat and face with a black stripe through the eyes, a straight grey bill and a black crown. Like all nuthatches, the red-breasted nuthatch is assigned to the genus Sitta , a name derived from sittē (σίττη), the Ancient Greek word for the Eurasian nuthatch. The specific epithet canadensis is Neo-Latin for "belonging to Canada". "Nuthatch" is a linguistic corrupt...

Suckers in the Stands: A Love Letter to Sports Fans Who Should Know Better Let’s face it—we sports fans are a special breed. We willingly fork over $200 for a polyester jersey made in a factory that probably doesn’t know what a touchdown is. We pay $18 for a hot dog that tastes like regret and optimism. And we cheer for teams owned by billionaires and staffed by millionaires, all while pretending our loyalty somehow affects the outcome. Spoiler: it doesn’t. But we do it anyway. Why? Because we’re romantics. Delusional, wallet-emptying romantics. Team Gear: The Uniform of the Financially Gullible There’s something magical about slipping on your team’s jersey. It transforms you from a mild-mannered accountant into a sideline coach with strong opinions about zone coverage or the perfect power play. But let’s be honest—most of us own more team gear than actual athletic ability. And don’t get me started on “limited edition” merch. That’s just marketing code for “we added glitter and doubled...

  Halloween is big on Capitol Hill: monumental-scale skeletons, witches, and all sorts of other scary stuff lurk everywhere. One whole street gets blocked off, allowing kids to enter a haunted scare maze. Eerie sounds, smells, live monsters, ghosts, and spiders jump out, eliciting screams of Halloween terror. For days before the holiday, Jim and I listened to descriptions of how costumed people come out in droves to fill the District's streets with seasonal revelry. I had surgery scheduled in Boston on the Monday following Halloween to remove the hardware from my ankle, which broke a few years ago. After consternation, and a bit sheepishly, we decided to slip out the back, Jack, and leave town on Halloween night.  I wanted to be calm and ready for surgery. For us, spooks and o'lanterns could wait for another year.  Once in a while, I trick myself into thinking I've got things under control, that I know what paths to walk, and which to avoid. There are times, though, whe...

  The Palmville Globe Volume 1 Number 42 Man Extends Sewer Vent Tee Joe McDonnell ,  78 and    residing in Palmville TWP, Minnesota, recently had his sewer pipe tee extended. "Every toilet in a house has a vent to prevent sewer gas from entering the house," McDonnell tells the press. "During the winter ice can form in the vent allowing gas to enter the house. The tee consists of a 3' long copper pipe that goes in the vent with a 4” pipe on top (forming a tee) which prevents the 3' pipe from dropping into the vent. My tee and vent pipe froze up last winter so I brought it to the local hardware to have an extension put on the 3' pipe which would in theory reach warmer air to prevent freeze up. I told the clerk I was going on a six week trip. 'No problem,' she said. When I returned to the store the other day, the clerk, a different clerk this time, gave me a blank look. We went into the back room and I found my pipe. The clerk immediately soldered on an ...