Wannaskan Almanac

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for April 30, 2025, the twenty-eighth Wednesday of the year, the sixth Wednesday of spring, the fifth and final Wednesday of April, and the one-hundred twentieth day of the year, with two-hundred forty-five days remaining.   Wannaska Phenology Update for April 30, 2025 Spring Peepers Pseudacris crucifer has begun singing in the Wannaskan forests. Pseudacris breaks down to pseudes , meaning false, and akris means locust, because the sounds of this frog family are similar to a locust; cucifer - Latin for cross-bearer. Somebody has to bear the cross of announcing amphibian spring. Spring Peepers grow up to be 3/4 to 1. 5 inches long, tan or brown in color, with a distinct darker X marking on their back. Males usually have dark throats, and are darker and slightly smaller than the females. Spring Peepers sing a high-pitched, short peeping sound similar to the trill of a young chicken, only louder and rising slightly in tone. Th...

Middle School Students It was the best of times.  It was the worst of times. It was a tale of two teenies...well, actually way more of them. Middle school teachers see the craziest things. Middle school students do the craziest things. The frontal lobe is not fully developed. The hormonal glands are overdeveloped. The skill of thinking before speaking is a future endeavor. I take students to the library every Friday.  This is because my classroom is right beside the library, and my principals want me to utilize this proximity.  Because of these two things, most students return and check out books on Thursdays.  That way the trip to the library is less meaningful...more of an opportunity to display their awesome skills of messing around.  This past Friday a student gleefully found a book that they immediately checked out.  The title...according to the student...was Life kills That Every Teenager Needs to Know.   This was the title that was displaye...

Originally published October 28, 2019... After eight Songs and over 130 pages of Wannaskan Almanac posts, we have reached the end of “Movement One: Arriving,” a very long way from the “Dark Waters” of a birth coming into the light. After this post, we enter the “Second Movement: Becoming.” Although I’ve made little mention of the three movements that divide this epic poem and its Songs, the milestone points where the movements end and begin carry important information.  Consider “Dark Waters,” the first Song in the First Movement: “Arriving.” Our main character has come a long way, indeed. Perhaps, you would like to quickly review the journey we have made so far. If so, the entire poem to date is contained on a separate website here for ease of reading. Nothing but The One resides at this site, and the poem is set up in order, from beginning to the most current posts. One caveat: as you know, due to the length of each Song, we post each Song in segments; however, only after all se...

  The Palmville Globe Volume 1 Number 13 Man Has Wish Fulfilled   Joe McDonnell, 78 and residing in Palmville Twp, recently had his wishful thinking rewarded. “On Sunday we drove two hours south to an Easter brunch," McDonnell tells the press. "I am an all-day nosher by nature and having to cram myself to justify the price of admission at a brunch is painful. But to keep the peace I didn’t grumble. I knew the venue had one spot with a view of the lake. I said we’d never get that spot, but someone said ‘If you don’t wish, you don’t get.’ When the hostess led us to the lakeview table, my day brightened. Plus, one member of our group picked up the tab. Win-win.” Man Worries About Nothing Joe McDonnell, 78 and a do-gooder, recently put the batteries in a friend's golf cart for the summer. "I had never put batteries in a golf cart before," McDonnell tells reporters, "so I consulted a cart owner who is also an electrician. He said the batteries should be hooked u...

Hello and welcome to a sunny, last Saturday of the month here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is April 26th. Last night, the Fourth Grader and I slipped out for an adventurous and invigorating walk through the country and across a farmer's field in the delicious twilight hours before sunset. Ever since the days started getting longer, I haven't wasted a moment of sunshine. At our house, our affinity for spring is unanimous, as we run outside to enjoy the fresh air, melting ice, rising rivers, and frog song. This is the sweet spot of spring, when the bugs have yet to return and a bareness of nature lingers, beckoning us to go out and explore before it all bursts into bloom and bounty. "Do you want to tromp across the field?" I asked the Fourth Grader. There was no hesitation in his leap into the short stalks of last year's crop. The ground was soft, yet firm enough to hold a boot. We trotted a bit as we chatted, angling across the field, a red stop sign on the othe...

      I've seen the homeless sleeping rough on big city streets. I can't imagine what it would be like to live like that. Yet they've figured it out. They know where the free stuff is and where the cops won't bother them.     In one area I envy them: their freedom from stuff. The older I get, the more I am sandbagged by my possessions. I've helped to go through my parent’s possessions after they died and more recently through my in-law's stuff. In both cases, I was amazed at the amount of stuff that was carried from the rooms of their house to a central disbursement area.      I was also chastened by the difficulty in getting rid of all this stuff. Family members shared the good things. The public was invited to a sale and to a give-away of what didn’t sell. Then a dumpster took the worst of the worst. After two years and the sale of the property, we’re still we’re looking at five totes and a flagpole.      Is there some way of avoi...

  It was six o’clock in the morning. I had just gotten up from bed when I saw an unknown object that my brain didn’t recognize as flora or fauna amid the grass in the creek basin. It looked more like an out-of-place  exclamation mark sitting on an upright stick, so I grabbed up the binoculars to see it more clearly. Aha! It was a Strix nebulosa !   Looked like an exclamation mark from a distance.   I had never seen an owl sitting there before, but it made sense; what a perfect place to hunt for food. Through the telephoto lens of our camera, I saw a dark-colored animal on the opposite bank, behind the owl, that leapt up from the waters edge as though as surprised to find an owl sitting there that morning as I was. It could have been a large mink or weasel, but it moved too fast for me to make positive identification. I suspect it suddenly felt endangered and skedattled before it could experience the owl's talons in its back. I had doubted a Strix nebulosa would ea...