Riverbend Journal

We headed down south the family cabin to celebrate Thanksgiving and we accomplished that. We had prepared a lot of what we ate for our Thursday dinner back home in Iowa so there wasn't much to do except to heat things up and make a few odds and ends to go with it. The forecast was for rain and indeed it was raining. We decided to do a small hike anyway and went on a hike we did the last time we were down there to a somewhat famous outcropping of rock seen above. Our daughters, who had never been there, were with us this time. We walked out on the rock and had our picture taken so those who get our Christmas card, will see us in that version of the photo. The following day wasn't raining but we spent it helping friends of ours collect a winter's worth of firewood. Although there is some work involved, we enjoy doing it and just being in each other's presence. Unfortunately for me, on the final (as it turned out) load of wood, I was helping to throw it from a pickup into ...

On previous trips to the Philippines, our flights have always originated here in the Midwest, flown to some major hub, usually Dallas, flown to the far east to Japan, Hong Kong or Korea and from there down to the Philippines. On this trip nearly five years ago, we opted for a different route flying to the west coast on the first day, overnighting, and then catching a direct flight to the Philippines. The comments in this post reflect this new route. Other comments also reflect the purpose of this trip was to attend the wedding of my wife's adopted brother.  On previous trips to the Philippines, our flights have always landed in the wee hours of the morning and then we have to drive five or six hours up into the mountains to Baguio where our home is, arriving just after dawn. Spending 30+ hours traveling and then staying up another ten hours until evening is hell. So this time with our new flight route, we got to Manila in late afternoon and spent the evening there staying in the ho...

  Smoked turkey cooling down The earliest Thanksgivings I can remember attending were those hosted by my maternal Grandparents. They were elaborate affairs that involved my grandparents getting up at four in the morning to start cooking the turkey. Why turkeys took so long to cook back then is beyond my comprehension. If I had to guess, I suspect it would be so it was done early enough that the last few hours could be used baking other things in the oven like rolls, green bean casseroles, dressing, etc. After the meal, sometimes the adults would go out shopping for deals while we kids stayed home and played cards with our great grandmother for nickels. Although I'm sure there were sports on a television somewhere, I never recall them being a big part of our day. In my early adolescent years, my grandparents retired and moved down to Florida. About the same time, my parents bought some land with a little cabin on it in the Ozark mountains of Arkansas. So for many years, our traditio...

  This photo fell out of a book that I was perusing and I thought it interesting enough to post here. Although I don't collect many things like the bottles and other items on display in this photo, I do collect books though to be honest, I'm trying to reverse that collection to something more manageable. I used to think I would save books that I found very enjoyable for my kids to read but there was a couple problems with that thinking. The first is that they haven't yet shown an interest in my non-fiction reading habits. The second is that as I look through some of those that I though were keepers, they have become dated over time. I now give most of my used books to others who host free mini libraries on a post in their front yards for those who may walk by. Occasionally I do save a book to pass around and add to my collection, but not nearly as often as I used to and definitely not as fast (still at a fairly glacial pace) as I have been thinning down the ones already col...

For the most part, bathrooms in the Philippines are stripped down versions of the ones here in the States. Many of them contain only a toilet and a sink. They are fully tiled with a drain in the floor and if you shower, you do so with a tabo or dipper which you use to poor water over you. As the country becomes more affluent, houses are starting to install at least one actual shower in the house but these are plumbed up to inline heaters with lots of dials, switches and scary looking electrical plugs plugged into sockets right in the shower with you. All this is leading me away from my main point which is that most bathrooms are very tiny compared to those here in the States.   The one where the above picture is taken was about three feet wide by about five feet deep. In order for me to use it, I had to open the door, squeeze between it and the sink and get turned around in front of the toilet so that I can get the door shut again. On this particular trip early in the morning when ...

  The top photo is of the train that sits in front of our local Amtrak depot and the bottom one is the one that sat in the past in a different part of town and with my great grandfather perched upon it. There are differences for sure but to my untrained eye, there are a lot of similarities as well. However, I thought I would share a story about the train above that happened many years ago. My kids were fairly little and for some reason, we stopped to see the train. My kids climbed up part way but were scared to go to the ledge that runs the length of the boiler. To show them there was nothing to be afraid of, I clamored up to the ledge and then started to come back down when disaster struck. I was wearing grippy soled hiking boots at the time and the tread caught in the iron tread steps and as I shifted my body around, my leg stayed put. Something had to give and what gave was my kneecap. It painfully dislocated to one side of my knee. Meanwhile, I was still five feet up and not su...

Salvaging some more pictures from the farm, I found a box with the above photo in it showing a train sitting in the very town where I live now. Sitting in the upper row, third person from the left, is my great grandfather Irvin who worked for that railroad. It certainly is a classic picture and one that I knew the story behind. Taken in 1937, is certainly wasn't the first train in town and not the last because trains still run through town to this day. Incidentally, down near the historic train depot that Amtrack uses now, a nearly identical train engine sits out front on display of times gone by. The front end is just a little bit different and the number isn't the same but it is close enough one might not notice without comparing pictures. 

After the lengthy post that I wrote previously on the ins and outs of shopping for food, I thought I would show you a few miscellaneous food pictures that I took during the course of our trip. Above is a plastic bag of quail eggs which we boiled and snacked on. It was my first time to eat them and while they were similar in taste to a boiled chicken eggs, their texture was creamier and not as dry as a chicken egg. In fact, I liked them better than hard boiled chicken eggs though you had to peel three or four to equal one chicken egg. Fresh shrimp cooking on a little charcoal grill on the patio. Many Filipinos use these as a sort of summer kitchen to keep the heat outdoors. Above is dragon fruit which has a taste and texture similar to kiwi fruit. I saw numerous dragon fruit plantations as we were driving around. They consisted of a field of posts set into the ground about five feet apart with a used motor cycle tire fasted to the top of the post in a horizontal position with a cross br...

  I ordered something online that I needed fairly quickly and so was anticipating getting it just in time one day a couple weeks back when text messages revealed that it was "out for delivery." I was home all day working on various projects so I anticipated no problems with the delivery. But at 1:33 pm, I got a text message on my phone saying that the delivery had been attempted but had an issue. A quick trip out to the mailbox revealed that the package needed my signature for some reason but the mail person had apparently not attempted to get a signature as I was home at that time and my doorbell never rang. So I checked the security camera and sure enough, the mailman pulled up to the mailbox, sat in his vehicle two minutes to fill out the form saying they "attempted" to get my signature and failed before driving off. I have signed the slip and told them to leave the package at my front door. I have refrained from showing them the video clip of their "attempt...

  Most houses that I have been inside in the Philippines have refrigerators but they aren't utilized like their American counterparts. In America, a typical refrigerator would have staples like milk, butter and eggs along with meats, vegetable, cheeses and leftovers from previous meals. Filipino refrigerators have the staples but none of the rest. They are much smaller and are not the central part of a kitchen like they tend to be in America. I write all of this to say that most Filipinos tend to shop at markets on a daily basis or several times a week. Their food is fresher than the freshest of American food found in the supermarket often picked, caught or killed that day. If they aren't buying fresh food to prepare, they are buying prepared food from food vendors like the one in the photo above who make it fresh every day. This particular stand is owned by my wife's uncle and is in Manila. As I sat inside eating breakfast and talking with my wife's uncle one morning...

 Now out to the garage to work on something in peace.

  Ancestry DNA has now separated your maternal DNA from your paternal DNA and labeled them accordingly. Earlier this year they made the split but only labeled them "Parent 1" and "Parent 2". For me, it wasn't a big mystery though it did open up a mystery. On my maternal side of my family tree, I have traced several lines directly back to Germany. and only one parent contributed Germanic DNA to me. So I could label the sides of my DNA profile contributions from my parents and Ancestry proved that I was correct. But at the time it opened up a mystery to me and that mystery still remains even now. According to the DNA ring up above, both parents contributed Scottish DNA to me and in fact, Scottish DNA remains the biggest part of me at 44%. I have traced many lines of my family tree to England, Germany and even a few to Ireland. I have not been able to find the small part of me that came from Sweden or Denmark but most interesting to me is that I have not traced a s...

Typhoon Harurot was the worst typhoon to hit the Philippines in the last five years and the outer bands of it as it departed for Hong Kong were still lashing out at us as I made my way to the airport. Huge rollers coming in from the South China Sea would hit the barrier wall separating the ocean from the van I was riding in not twenty feet away. The resulting twenty-foot wave carried on heavy winds would engulf the road, our van and all other traffic even just a few feet away, giving the illusion that we were just a bubble in a washing machine. Though we were underwater about once every ten seconds, are driver kept going and only turned the windshield wipers up to medium speed as if it were all a mere annoyance. Such is life on a typhoon prone island.   I felt lucky to even be in Manila because the storm started lashing out in earnest just as we were leaving Sagada in the northern mountains of the Philippines for the long (through the night nonetheless) journey to the Manila airpor...

Like most people who read this, I'm nearing my threshold of political partisan sniping that I can tolerate and I actively go out of my way to avoid it. Nobody seems to want to listen to what others say these days which only seems to make the other side shout louder. I wish I could say I was excited for the day after next Tuesday when everything is over but the crying, but with former President Trump still looming in the background eyeing another run, I'm not.  Iowa has on the ballot a gun rights amendment to our constitution saying  “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. The sovereign state of Iowa affirms and recognizes this right to be a fundamental individual right. Any and all restrictions of this right shall be subject to strict scrutiny.” While I do believe that the right to own SOME arms is a fundamental right, I don't think we need to specify that any laws need extra scrutiny, especially ones that have gone through the democratic proc...