Wannaskan Almanac

   During a visit the grandkids who live at the south end of the Gulf of Maine, I was invited to go with them on a field trip with the Science Club. We gathered on the high school football field on a sunny late September morning-- perfect weather for this sort of thing. The teacher, Mr. Dom, would be helping us understand exactly how big our solar system is.     Mr. Dom held up a pea. “Imagine this is the sun," he said. "If you hold a pea at arm’s length in front of the sun, it will block out the sun." Then he set the pea on a small square of paper on the goal line. Two feet away he put a piece of paper on the grass.  This is the earth and the moon,” he said. He held a magnifying glass over the paper and two dots appeared. "The earth would be tiny if the sun was a pea."   Jupiter was a poppy seed 12 feet downfield. Pluto was a tiny dot on a piece of paper 90' further down the field. We followed Mr. Dom another 217' over the opposite goal line where he ...

 This week I drove the truck to pick up our completed taxes. The temperature was 35-degrees above zero, 52 degrees warmer than last week. I left later in the afternoon too, after deciding to take the gravel roads and go cross-country, than stick to the boring stretches of laser-straight county highways. I planned to come out on the north side Strathcona where a Cenex Gas station and a cafe called Paradise, as well as the nearby accounting office sits parallel to Minnesota Hwy 32.  As I left home home, I pushed my new cool-guy ear pods in and called my old friend Kerry, from Carlisle, Iowa, whom I've known for about 58 years. He's a long-retired individual with some serious time on his hands who doesn't mind me calling on occasion; the oft time occasion being when I'm on a road-trip.     If you've read the Wannaskan Almanac for a few years, you may vaguely remember when, on a similarly nice day, I was talking to Kerry, when as I traversed a Beltrami Island Forest...

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for February 26, 2025, the nineteenth Wednesday of the year, the tenth Wednesday of winter,  the first Wednesday of Psychological Spring, the fourth Wednesday of February, and the fifty-seventh day of the year, with three-hundred eight days remaining.   Wannaska Phenology Update for February 26, 2025 Psychological Spring As recently reported in The Palmville Globe , Volume 1, Issue 3, a fit, 28,462-day-old Irish retiree from Wannaska declared that Sunday, February 23, 2025 (coincidentally, the birthday of Sven’s bride, Monique) was the first day of Psychological Spring. This same 40,984,799-minute-old meteoastroastrologist (who happens to be an Aries) defined Psychological Spring as as that period “which starts when the long-range forecast shows no below-zero temperatures for the next ten days”. The jumpiness of the Palmville snow flea sprinkles (collective noun) confirms the retired toddler’s proclamation, and judging by ...

I didn't sleep last night. Staring at the ceiling Wishing for a rem cycle Has nothing to do with wishing for the end of the world Sit up Lay down Toss Turn Go to the bathroom Go to the fridge Go to your knees and beg  Pull the covers up Stick one leg out The times are so interesting 12:34 1:23 4:00 Only 12 hours until work ends The alarm Coffee Insomnia According to recorded data, the longest episode of insomnia, or time spent without sleep, belongs to Randy Gardner, a teenager who stayed awake for 264 hours (just over 11 days) in a sleep deprivation experiment in 1963, setting the world record for the longest time without sleep; this record is no longer officially tracked due to safety concerns.  As a longtime insomniac, I am pretty sure I have beaten that record.  There was a time when I was working nights, and I remember not really sleeping for about three months.  It isn't an official record.  All I can recall is staring at walls and clocks and taking handfu...

  Last December, the woman sat in her chair and frowned as she looked out the window at the pin oak's bare branches dithering in the winter winds. S he fretted over how ill-fated it seemed to stay rooted like that in one place. These days, she tends to exchange memories for gratefulness, and, though the woman can't remember where she came across it, she'd copied down lines from Isaiah at the start of the year when she was thinking about New Year Resolutions. Now, I am revealing new things to you Things hidden and unknown to you Created just now, this very moment. Of these things, you have heard nothing until now. So that you cannot say, Oh yes, I knew this.                                                                      ...

  The Palmville Globe Volume 1 Issue 3 Man Struggles with Bank Key  Joe McDonnell, 77 and a resident of Palmville TWP, Minnesota, recently struggled several minutes trying to remove his key from the lock of the overnight deposit box at the bank in town. McDonnell, 77, told reporters “It’s been extremely cold this month but that’s to be expected in this area at this time of year. Once a month I drop the Sunday church collection at the drive-up deposit box.    You have to turn a lock 90 degrees counter-clockwise and then the deposit-drop cylinder rolls towards you revealing an opening big enough for your bag. There’s a satisfying clunk when you release the handle and your bag drops into the vault. This lock is stiff even in July. When I mention this stiffness to people they say they don’t have any problem.    I thought the lock would be super stiff today because it was a super cold day, but it wasn’t that bad and I dropped in the bag and released the handle. ...

Hello and welcome to a State Hockey Championship Tournament Saturday, here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is February 22nd, or, if you're a numbers person: 2-22-25, which sounds like a pretty cool locker combination. Hallelujah, we made it through a week with no illness, unless you count my husband's four-hour nap and headache on Sunday afternoon, which I don't because the guy bounced back the very next day and that was that. I'm grateful for his incredible resistance to maladies because I needed to give all my energy to my first-ever colonoscopy. Or rather, the preparation for my first-ever colonoscopy. Having lived with two cultures for a quarter of a century, I can tell you there's a marked difference between how Americans and Czechs discuss intestinal activity. American etiquette generally eschews conversations such as these as gauche, whereas Czechs grab this topic by the horns and plow forth unabashed. Even now, it's far easier for me to type  průjem than...

    I was having a discussion with a friend recently and was throwing out billions to clinch my argument. I don’t remember what the discussion was about, but I do remember my friend saying, “You have no conception what a billion is.” He was right. What is a billion anyway?   There's billions of stars in our galaxy.  For a long time we thought the Milky Way was the only galaxy there was. Because of earth's location in the Milky Way, it was hard to see other galaxies until about a hundred years ago when Edward Hubble proved there were more. Thanks to telescopes in space such as the Hubble, astronomers have found billions more galaxies. Enough so that everyone on earth could have at least 20 galaxies of their own. Twenty is a number I can relate to. Trouble is, there are billions of stars in each of those galaxies.   Maybe I should try relating to a million before trying to understand a billion. A million is a thousand thousands which sounds more manageable until I...

    Although by 8 a.m. yesterday morning, temperatures had warmed up to a balmy -22 below from -24 below at 6 a.m., I wanted to warm my car up before I had to drive to my tax appointment at 9:00, twenty-two miles away. Irrationally, I drove the '98 Subaru that had been having sporadic over-heating problems. It had been diagnosed having a head gasket leak or cracked head, two weeks earlier. The word, 'sporadic,' meant just that, that it didn't overheat every trip. I had driven it this past Tuesday--without issue-- to Roseau and back, a round trip of about 40 miles with no problems. So, given the extra time I allowed to my destination, I decided to drive it but be aware of the severe cold outdoors, and the severe heat indoors, maybe showing up on its temperature gauge.     I knew I could deal with both problems with a little preparation, the easiest being was to dress for it from the beginning, i.e., insulated long underwear & warm socks and a stocking c...