Wannaskan Almanac

Hello and welcome to the LAST Saturday of January here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is January 31st.  Hoowee! We made it through Januar-ee! I'm thrilled to share that January 2026 has been a personal improvement over Januarys past. I give the credit to Vitamin D, good hydration, exercise, adequate rest, and a workspace with windows where I can bask in warm sunny rays like a cat on the days when we have it. I love winter, but even I will admit that making it through winter is a little bit like running a marathon. I feel relieved to have made it through this stretch and I'm holding the celebration at bay as I ready myself to tackle the next stretch - February. I'm actually pretty excited about February. Right out of the gate, I have two things to look forward to. In last week's blog post , I mentioned that our kids' teams were competing at the Lego League Qualifier in Grand Forks. The Brick Bobs won 1st place for Core Values and Warbotics won 1st place for Innovati...

     You would think we'd know where the site of Jesus' first miracle took place - the turning of water into wine at a wedding feast in Cana. Scholars are still debating in which of four different sites, three in Israel, one in Lebanon, that the miracle took place. The name Cana comes from the Hebrew and Arabic word for  reed , just as Roseau's name means  reed  in French.    It was also in Cana that Jesus healed a nobleman's son while the son was in Capernaum 20 miles away. In one gospel, the apostle Nathanael is said to be from Cana. The other three gospels call him Bartholomew. Same person.    What is the pilgrim to do who wants to visit Cana along with all the other New Testament high points? The sites of Bethlehem and Nazareth are well marked, as are Jericho and Jerusalem.     But Cana presents several options. One of the four possible sites is adjacent to Nazareth. After visiting Nazareth, the pilgrim could hike to n...

  Scientific Study Undertaken at Palmville Town Hall .    Iclic Vermer spends a lot of time at the Palmville Townhall being as he’s township constable and caretaker of the hall and all. He walks from his shack, where the children attending Palmville District 44 West (now the town hall) used to tie their horses. Forty-four West was also known as the Billberg School for a nearby family of original homesteaders.       Iclic knew many of the stories. He had visited with all sorts of people that stopped by the old one-room school house, or whom he found sleeping in their cars east of the building, either taking a nap after a long drive from somewhere--or sleeping it off after a drunken slosh toward home. One guy had passed out and left the keys in the ignition, and his more sober dog had started the vehicle, pushed it down into gear, and drove it smack-dab into the outhouse where the car had stalled, proving they make outhouses pretty solid in Palmville....

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for January 28, 2026, the fourth Wednesday of the year, the sixth Wednesday of winter, the fourth Wednesday of January, and the twenty-eighth day of the year, with three-hundred thirty-seven days remaining. Wannaska Phenology Update for January 28, 2026 European Starling The common starling, Sturnus vulgaris , also known simply as the starling in Great Britain and Ireland, and as the European starling in Wannaska and the rest of North America, is a medium-sized passerine bird in the starling family, Sturnidae , that immigrated with other of our fellow Americans from across the pond. The Anishinaabe have no word for this bird. Their legs are pink and their bills are black in winter and yellow in summer - just now starting to change. Its gift for mimicry has been noted in literature including the Mabinogion and the works of Pliny the Elder and William Shakespeare. One of their older names is Stare, which  William Butler Yeats' p...

I was watching hockey when I realized I am nothing. Okay, maybe it is the nighttime cough medicine I am taking. Or maybe it is just that I could care less anymore. I don't care who wins. I started out as a Canadian. Then I learned that I was born in the United States. So I am a dual citizen. For the longest time I only cheered for Canada in sports. Then I cheered for some American teams. Now I don't care. I am a sports fan without a country. I have no real ties. Just a human watching sports. Watching people crowing and glowing with patriotism. Finally realizing that I truly am neither. I can respect each nation. I can respect most countries. But none of them own my affections. Maybe living here and living there. Has divided my heart. I don't hate either country. They both have their flaws. They both have their good points. Color or colour...odor or odour.   Maybe one day one country will adopt me.

  I’ve never been one for making New Year's resolutions. It could be the rebel in me, the part that doesn't like being told what to do. Or maybe it's because my generation came up during the boom of the self-help movement. Friends, feelings, finances, fitness - begin again and be better. Perhaps that deluge of books diminished the import of January 1 as the day for resolve. These days, I'm more attuned to the complexities of choice and change. ​ Last year, around this time, Isaiah 48:6-7, a passage that talked about making things new, became my 2025 focus. The translation offered an angle I hadn't noticed before. These new things... hidden and unknown... were created just now, this very moment. And, what's more, the scripture went on, of these things you have heard nothing until now, so that you cannot say, Oh yes, I knew this. I liked the authority conveyed in the lines, the way the speaker spoke to the audience's wiseacre nature. A know-it-all - that ca...

    The Palmville Globe Volume 1 Number 52 Man Denied Entry to Guest House Joe McDonnell, 78 and residing in Palmville Twp, Minnesota, was recently unable to use the front door of his guesthouse. "We have two houses," McDonnell tells the press. "We live in one and put guests up in the other one, which is 137' from the main house. It's been a busy fall and winter for guests, and recently I saw a guest having difficulty closing the front door. I discovered one end of the bottom weather strip had curled down just enough to cause problems. I knew it could be fixed but the door would have to be taken off its hinges to make the repair. We're in the middle of cold snap, so once we got the door fully closed, we blocked the door on the inside with a big plant, and put a sawhorse on the outside. We'll be using the back door until it warms up outside." With the guests gone, McDonnell walks to the guesthouse several times a day to put wood on the fire. "On ...

Hello and welcome to a second-consecutive-sub-zero Saturday here at the Wannaskan Almanac by way of Grand Forks, ND. Today is January 24th and the big Lego League Qualifier . We've got a Warbot (Warbotics) and a Brick Bob (The Brick Bobs) competing this year with their respective teams. Tune in to next week's blog as the WAKWIR 2.0* gives a play-by-play of how it all went down! In the meantime, I'm drumming my fingers on the keyboard and considering cracking open a bag of peanut M&Ms in the hopes that munching on some chocolate will inspire my brain to cough up some blog ideas.  How about using AI? my brain asks. Ah...yes...AI. That would do the trick. It's so tempting. All I'd have to do is throw in a handful of nutritious adjectives, sprinkle a few sentiments, and voila! A poem ready to eat in the amount of time it would take to microwave a Hot Pocket. How do I know this?  Okay...I confess. I've done it before. Not once. Not twice. But three times. My ol...

               The Jewish city of Capernaum was only a couple of hundred years old when Saint Peter was dipping his nets into the Sea of Galilee. A thousand years later the city was gone. That’s a relatively short life span for that part of the world. The city eventually disappeared from the map completely only to be rediscovered in the 19th century by Franciscan archeologists.     Capernaum was one of several fishing villages on the northwest shore of the lake. Most of the inhabitants made a living by fishing or farming and the city also prospered as a stop along the east-west trade route, plus the Roman's kept a garrison there. Once the Muslims took over in the seventh century the town declined. The trade routes changed and the Muslim troops were stationed elsewhere. A series of earthquakes devastated the city so that by the time of the first Crusade in 1099 Capernaum was a ghost town.    After the Franciscans excavated ...

Serendipity : A Silver Lining .    How many instances of serendipity can we thus define in a single hour?      I have to answer nature’s call before sunrise, the house is dark. I arise from bed, swing my feet to the floor then as I try to quietly move between the bed and the wall, I step painfully on the plug-in end of the cord on my electric blanket that was laying on the floor -- but I don’t trip into the leg of the steel bed frame like I have before . Serendipity      I open the kitchen door to the basement and the cat isn’t there to meow insistent to go outside. The dog isn’t there to thump her tail loudly against the landing when she sees me. Serendipity.      I descend the basement steps without incident, recalling the afternoon during the winter when I came through the door from the outdoors in my winter gear, big boots, heavy coat and wool hat, carrying a snow shovel for some reason--then slipped and wildly careened down th...

 A day of outdoor work done, I st upon the upside down jonboat to listen-in the night, something I haven't done for quite awhile. It used to be I'd get an opportunity to sit outdoors as the sun webt down, in some inconspicuous place. It was an evening of observation, a passive interaction with nature of some spontaneity and commonly done at home.    I am fortunate to live in NW Minnesota on a quarter section of forested land with two diagonally-opposite waterways; Johnson Creek on the NW corner, and Mikinaak Creek on it SE, intersecting it. They quietly meander through wetlands bordered with deciduous and conifer trees; some that our families planted over 40 years ago; and some others well over a hundred years old perhaps, given how short the growing seasons have been around here , historically. Beaver have dammed the Mikinaak for centuries, as the land formations indicate, backing up its water levels along its length, stalling its northern flow into the south fork of the...

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for January 21, 2026, the third Wednesday of the year, the fifth Wednesday of winter, the third Wednesday of January, and the twenty-first day of the year, with three-hundred forty-four days remaining, brought to you by Bead Gypsy Studio & Scandinavian Shoppe, 101 Main Avenue North, Roseau, with a Ekelund Linens & Scandinavian Food BOGO through the month of January. Open Monday through Saturday.   Wannaska Phenology Update for January 21, 2026 Dark-eyed Junco Junco hyemalis — jaashaawanibiisi in Anishinaabe — a year-round resident of Wannaska, heads north to the arctic to breed in the summer, but some may travel as far as Mexico to winter. These hardy six-inch gray birds have white bellies and white outer tail feathers that flash when in flight. Both sexes have dark eyes, but males have a slate-gray to charcoal chest, head, and back, while females have light tan to light gray-brown feathers. Listen for their trilled mu...