Glenn Kubish

  The little Three Things podcast  is where each week I try to notice three things that I noticed that made me happy or grateful. Not the biggest things in the world, just things like: 1.  Frazil Ice 🧊 🥘 In the days before the North Saskatchewan River freezes, it blooms with floating ice pads. These are those short days, and the mosaic pieces of ice are called frazil pans.  Frazil, F-R-A-Z-I-L, what a great word, the F-R of freeze and frigid and fragile, the shard of the Z, and the way the L lingers and trails off like in the words gentle and beautiful and peaceful. My hydrologist friend Steffen can explain how frazil ice forms at northern latitudes when the atmospheric conditions and heat exchanges are conducive to its making. I phoned Steffen at his ice-free retirement home and we talked ice. I asked him if he missed frazil ice.  “I definitely miss them,” he said from Ladysmith, BC. “I loved going onto the Terwillegar footbridge and just watching them go by....

There is no denying that as a big city we must play on the big stage of the small screen, and that means dealing in the big messages that are sent by small images like this from our good mayor: Norwood That throng was yesterday in Edmonton, as the Women's World Cup debuted at Commonwealth Stadium in front of the largest crowd ever to turnstile its way into the seats to watch a national side sporting match. In fact, Edmonton broke Edmonton's record, going back a few years to a men's soccer match against Brazil. Nicely done, hometown. Yes, the trees of Norwood have witnessed crowds of trembling size. But it's not the whole picture. Here's another soccer image from yesterday: Glenora On the other side of the Glenora School fence, watched, tweeted, and retweeted by an audience of exactly no one, 10 or so middler-agers were in a pitched battle of their own. Evidently, no one wanted to play goal, because the players had planted hockey nets in front of the...