Wannaskan Almanac

Hello and welcome to a spooky Saturday here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is October 31st. Happy Halloween. What a two-fer of a Saturday. We get Halloween and an extra hour before the daylight saving time switch. That's pretty great. When Halloween happens on a weekday, we race home to stick some dinner in our kids before racing out to hit the neighborhood trick-or-treating circuit before it gets too dark and/or too cold and/or too snowy. (The forecast looks good for tonight!)  On weeknights, some folks start their ghoulish galavanting as early as 4pm. I recall many a Halloween weeknight when the streets got eerily quiet and empty sometime between 7 and 8pm. I'm usually buoyed by the cheerful spirit of families and kids of all ages racing from house to house to beat the clock and ready to go well into the night. But when the porch lights are turned off, that's the end of it, so then we race home - ready or not - to get through the nighttime routine so kids can get to bed ...

     We just signed up with a new health care plan. Our company said they were losing too much money on our plan so they will be cancelling it at the end of the year. We had to decide if we should go cheap with limited options in a new plan or pay more and have more options that we may never need. Two men from the past faced similar dilemmas. The only comfort in knowing the outcomes of their decisions comes from knowing we're all in the same boat.    Dilemma 1: On this day in 1806, Prussian general Friedrich von Romberg was holding the city of Stettin in present day Poland with 5,300 Prussian soldiers. Two weeks earlier Napoleon had soundly defeated the Prussian army at the nearby battle of Jena. Napoleon was on a tear, taking over most of Europe. The French were chasing the Prussians back towards Berlin.  At Settin the French demanded von Romberg surrender the city. The day before, another Prussian city had surrendered to the French. A demoralized von Romb...

An excerpt from Sven & Ula Do Dingle . THE RAVEN: Northwest Minnesota's  Original Art, History & Humor Journal  February 2003        Dingle, whose narrow streets, sidewalks and colorful, close-in buildings follow the contour of the undulating landscape, was indeed a quiet town. A car or two went by the four as they walked down the sidewalk along the canal the river ran. Few street lights were on the whole way and those that were weren’t harsh but instead lent a soft glow about the street that made even the shadows and the alleys seemingly non-threatening. It seemed that Dingle was merely a quiet sea port town along the Irish coast, where everyone was at home, in bed, by 7:00 pm. But not everybody, for in what was just another colorful building along a street across from a church with no lights over the door, and but a few shining through the small windows; nothing indicated what lay inside. A shadow was about the doorwell of the narrow red d...

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for October 28, 2026, the forty-third Wednesday of the year, the sixth Wednesday of fall, the fourth Wednesday of October, and the three-hundred second day of the year, with sixty-four days remaining. Wannaska Phenology Update for October 28, 2026 Ring-Billed Gull Larus delawarensis — baashka'wa — in Anishinaabe now follow farmers doing fall tillage to pick up worms and other small animals in the soil. Their breeding habitat is near lakes, rivers, or the coast across most of Canada, and the northern United States. They nest colonially on the ground, often on islands, but also increasingly on flat factory or school roofs, especially in Warroad. The ring-billed gull is a familiar sight in Warroad parking lots and school fields, where it can regularly be found congregating in large numbers. This bird tends to be faithful to its nesting site, if not its mate, from year to year. They are omnivorous, their diet may include insects, ...

The End It comes for us all. The end of childhood. The end of adolescence. The end of each stage of life. The End. It waits like a bump in the road Inevitable You might hit it fast Or slow But you will hit it.   There is no avoiding it. The End We can see where we were Where we are  Never very clearly Where we will be Sometimes not at all The future is cloudy And then we reach The End Good people Bad people All people Even Wannaskan Almanac writers Reach that point The December 31, 2026 A date with density Or destiny The End

  THIRD MOVEMENT REMEMBERING   SONG EIGHTEEN A VOICE BETWEEN   II Waking to dark Waking to sound             of boom thudding across from starboard to port I scramble on deck under noon-high moon,  check the wind’s shift, re-rig and secure, then settle back panting behind the sail. I am alone, yet somehow not. Are those blue arches cresting starboard of me?             or only moon-waves curling their tails?             or shadows cast from my own bright sails? It’s nothing, I think, yet re-membering green             I look to port searching for something unseen Nothing to port, starboard or ahead             one-hundred-eighty degrees of moon upon sea   But asudden ...

  The Palmville Globe Volume 2  Number 39 Man Boils Pot Dry Joe McDonnell, 79 and a resident   of Palmville Township, Minnesota, recently boiled a pot dry on the stove. "I was helping a friend via text messages with a computer question," McDonnell tells the press. "At the same time I was boiling a pot of water to make oatmeal. I thought my friend's problem would be easy to fix, but it turned out to be more complicated. We were on the verge of success when I heard a hissing from the pot on the stove behind me. I jumped up and turned off the heat. I now called my friend and her problem was quickly cleared up. When I told my friend about the pot she said, 'I can picture exactly how everything looked.'" In a follow-up report, McDonnell says that once the pot cooled off, he started his breakfast again. He says he's glad it was just water in the pot and not the oatmeal. "That would have been a cleaning nightmare," he says. Man Packs Boxes Joe McD...

Hello and welcome to a swimming Saturday here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is October 24th. Whoa, I almost wrote September 24th. The realization it was actually the latter half of October made my heart squeeze and my breath catch in my throat. We are almost to November. The idea of having another month before 2026 closes out sounds pretty nice, actually. I know it's not good to be too wistful about time passed, but I think a little Saturday morning musing is okay once in a while. This past week was gorgeous weather-wise. I enjoyed several walks outdoors in the sun without needing to bundle up. The sunny, fall warmth was a nice afterglow following a trip to the tropics. I apparently acclimated pretty quickly to Puerto Rico's heat and humidity, because when we landed in Minneapolis Monday afternoon, I was like Anna from the film Frozen , saying, "Cold, cold, cold." This weekend's adventure includes a swim rumble. Our at-home oldest is on the Wannaskaland swim tea...