WobblyReport

A run for the trees On runs, sentences... Half an hour was not a winning time in last week’s Happy Little Trees 5k race but it was good enough to place in the top 15% of finishers who had reported results as of Monday morning. Late reports are likely to be added—28% more results were submitted in 2024. The nearest meet-up for the event was on Earth Day in Bay City State Park. Unfortunately, Earth Day fell on a production day at the newspaper this year. Fortunately, the race could be completed anywhere outdoors between Earth Day and the weekend of Arbor Day, which fell on a Friday. Registration fees support invasive forest pest control as well as tree planting, care and maintenance. Presumably they also support the purchase of race kit contents, which comprised a racing bib, tee shirt, sticker and finish medal. Friday afternoon the weather was close to ideal for a run, after a bitterly cold start to April that made training more challenging. Some runners in humid-continental climate z...

Security and stability of one’s shelter is a fluid situation, as so many Midwest residents were reminded this spring. But three months before the 2025 ice storm, in late January, nonprofit workers and volunteers in the Midwest and across the nation made efforts to contact and count people living without stable and secure housing. Known as the Point-in-Time (PIT) Count and coordinated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the goal is “a count of sheltered and unsheltered people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January.” “It’s basically like the homeless census,” said Chad Lytle, Northeast Michigan Community Service Agency (NEMCSA) Street Outreach Director. Lytle coordinates homeless prevention in Crawford, Iosco, Ogemaw, Oscoda and Roscommon counties. “During that time, we're counting those who are literally homeless,” he said. “Literally homeless has a little tighter definition than people might think.” The federal government’s definition is simple ...

Vernal equinox occurs in Northern Michigan sooner than the end of winter proper. It’s a fact we and others live with amid perennial, invisibilising media campaigns proclaiming spring’s beginning at that moment in March when successive durations of light and dark are equal to one another. Someone updated a Wikipedia * article about the spring season on March 25, 2025, shortly before an ice storm interrupted electrical service to so many northern-Midwestern U.S. households that national media took notice . Michigan’s governor went on to deploy the National Guard to help move fuel and equipment around the state during recovery efforts. The Wikipedia article’s dovetailing introduction and conclusion provided broad definitions and lists of events both natural and cultural correlating with the spring season. In between, signs and stages were defined more systematically under headings and fields like ecology, astronomy and meteorology. Photo by Chandra Etymologically, the word spring ...