Riverbend Journal

  In the era of global warming, we have had an unusual amount of snow the past couple weeks. That suits me just fine as what little shopping we do has already been done and I am happiest avoiding all the consumerism madness going on around me.  With the snow still falling, I opted to spend the second to last shopping weekend before Christmas enjoying a nice fire in the fireplace and reading. To do that however, required me to go out in the sense that I had to open the patio door underneath our deck and walk approximately five feet to my wood box to carry in a supply of firewood and I did that maybe six times in a row before deeming the firewood supply sufficient for a couple fires. I only paused long enough to take the above photo.  Soon the fire was started and I indeed spent the rest of the weekend reading in front of it with only a trip out to go to church on Sunday morning for the third Sunday of Advent before returning directly home. I did make one other trip outside...

  All my life, I have only known Christmas trees that we have liberated from their earthly toil out in the wild. All but a single tree have been wild red cedar trees that thrive in our area in pastures or corners of land that don't get cared for regularly. In case you are wondering, the one non-red cedar tree was some sort of fir that we found one year. However, as my parents are good stewards of the land, we eventually ran through the plentiful supply of available red cedar trees and the last decade or so have required more hunting and more settling on which tree will literally make the "cut".  Earlier this fall when I was helping on the farm to cut trees sprouting in our terraces which can cause problems with farming when they get bigger, I found two small red cedar trees that I left standing, hoping that in a future year I'll cut one or both of them down to serve as our annual Christmas tree. I had thought one might do for this year but by the time we got back from...

Blogging friend Kay over at Musings  a few weeks ago brought up a darker chapter of our history where society decided to imprison Japanese-Americans in internment camps and unbeknownst to me, some of them used that time to play baseball. Now all these years later, we celebrate three Japanese-Americans who helped the Dodgers win the World Series. I know I along with most, probably find putting any race of citizens in internment camps to be morally unacceptable under our current set of morality codes but I know most of my Iowa ancestors probably found it morally acceptable 83 years ago. Our past is littered with similar changes in morality. Going back just to the beginnings of our nation, one can easily point out such practices as slavery, indentured servitude, child labor, public execution, public shaming and assertions of class superiority to all be examples of things we find morally repugnant today but weren't 250 years ago. Even in my lifetime, I have seen changes and shifts to m...

  Above is a picture of my 4th great grandmother Anna Gerken (on the right), who never made it to the United States. Her son Johann, my third great grandfather would for reasons unbeknownst to me, would immigrate to the United States in 1853 taking up the name of John, leaving behind both of his parents and several brothers and sisters. I've pondered a lot about what would cause him to make such a break over the years but perhaps only around three or four years ago, I learned that it wasn't a clean break and that he journeyed back at least once to see his mother who lived until 1872. His father died in 1864. After the death of Anna, the three surviving siblings also immigrated to the United States to be with their elder brother completing this particular family's presence in Germany. Being one of the oldest pictures I own, I decided to use the AI Nano Banana to touch it up and get rid of the spots which it easily did as you can see above.  However, two things weighed upon m...

  Above is the only picture I have for my 2nd great grandparents Ira and Maria when they were young. I have a picture or two near the end of their life that are actual photos. The one above is merely a facsimile of a photo that is on one of the pages of a family history book that was given to my grandmother and I eventually inherited.  I don't recall if it credits who has the original photo because it has been a couple decades since I read through it last but I'm pretty sure even if it did, it would be a time consuming task to track down if it exists today and who has it.  So based upon this information and my last experiment using A.I. to fix old photographs, I thought I would try it on this facsimile and see what happens. I loaded up the picture and gave the following command to Nano Banana Pro in Google Gemini: restore and increase resolution. I am just gobsmacked at this result. It didn't remove the "tape" or whatever is across the top but other than that, it ...