Riverbend Journal

 As you can see from the above vehicle sitting in our driveway, big things are about to happen. As I write this, my brother-in-law, wife and three teenage children are boarding a flight for the middle leg of their journey to Midwest America. It was supposed to happen about this time in 2020 but we all know how that year went. Their tourist visa's run out at the end of this year so it is better late than never.  When they were last here in 2016, actually before they arrived, I searched for rental vans good for 10 passengers and found then extremely expensive. Somehow though, I stumbled on a place that rents such vans in the heart of Amish country about 80 miles to the northeast of us. Due to their primary clientele and/or location, they rent them for a small fraction of what a rental company like Enterprise does. What I rent it for through this company for all three weeks of use, is less than 40% of one week through Enterprise. This time around, I didn't even bother to look els...

 Above is a picture of my great great grandfather George Kuck. I had some free time and stumbled upon a folder on my computer containing scanned items given to me by a distant relative many decades ago. Our nearest common ancestor would be George's grandfather. Among the scans was a newspaper article detailing the drowning death of George's cousin Maximillian while ice skating above a river dam in town. Like all the articles given to me back then, it is undated and unsourced and so I was trying to tidy things up by finding the source of the article.  I wasn't able to. However in the process of doing that, I ran across some new-to-me newspaper articles about my great great grandfather George that I thought I would share. George, like his father before him, was self employed man for much of his life, owning a variety of stores. At this particular point in his life, 1890's, he owned a leather shoe and boot store that was always advertising in the newspaper. What got me was...

 As you read this, we are hopefully mid stay in a VRBO rental in Maryland visiting our nations capital day and swimming in the pool out back in the evenings. But this picture was taken a little over two weeks ago when I made a trip out to the garden with the sole goal of picking peas and seeing how things grew in the week since mulching. Above is our two rows of potatoes split by a now partial row of onions. All are looking really good. Behold a literal field of tomatoes, though there are some kohlrabi, cabbage, peppers and perhaps a few other things out there. The second planting of tomatoes, the ones that were our backups after the first planting died of thirst, grew so much over this last week, they have overtaken the bigger ones we planted just a couple weeks back that were given to us. They just need a couple weeks to acclimatize and grow some roots and then it is off to the races.  I think those are cucumbers that my wife planted in hopes of trellising them later.  ...

Still on the road and if things went well, we are somewhere in western New York state by now.  When we moved into this house some 11 years ago, we made the decision to keep all the purchased artwork, which wasn't much, boxed up and eventually sold it. Instead, we opted to only hang up original artwork created by us on our walls. For me, that is mostly enlargements of my photography but for my wife, it is oil paintings that she has done. Although they hang throughout the house, our main entry hall has too large walls that we have used for smaller artwork and the best of the best done by our kids. We hung up a number of them earlier this spring during spring cleaning but there were three that couldn't be hung because they didn't have anything to hang them by.  We had a framer here in town but it was always quite expensive to use them and they have retired anyway and the shop has since closed. There is a large box store hobby shop that supposedly does framing as well but I hav...

  I'm wrote this before our road trip which we currently are on. If things went well, we are somewhere east of Chicago by now. Comments are welcome though there may be a delay of some days before I am able to publish them. During my boyhood years, there was a large sour cherry tree on our home farm and also another one on my grandfather's farm. We would pick many gallons from them every last spring and it would keep us in sour cherry pies, cobblers and jelly for the rest of the year. For some reason, the taste of those sour cherry pies, cobblers and jellies have stuck with me over the years and I have always hoped that someday I could have some of my own. Many years later, I would finally have a home of my own and once we had something that resembled a bit of savings account, I bought and planted a sour cherry tree in the backyard. It finally got big enough to start producing a cup or two of fruit a year when we decided to sell that house and move to where we are now. After som...

  I typed in a description of my next three weeks into Microsoft Bing Image Creator and it created the above wonderful creation. In short, my wife's brother and his family are here and we are going on a road trip (with their choice for destination) for at least the next two weeks. They will be all over our house when not on the road so I will be down to just an iPad for blogging which means I won't be doing any posting and probably very limited commenting for awhile. I do have some prewritten posts that will publish during this time for you to enjoy and I'm sure I'll have some good stories to tell when I return sometime in the second week of July. 

  Sad to say this next sentence but due to the state of things I must. LONG TIME READERS may remember that late last summer, we decided we should do something about vehicles. Our oldest is a driver and will be going away to college about a year from now and will need some form of transportation. My wife's vehicle, which is the oldest vehicle of ours, has relatively low miles and was an excellent candidate for this. But it required us obtaining another primary vehicle for my wife. With lead times back them being estimated at 18 months to 2 years due to the chip shortage, we put our name on a waitlist for one. Nine months go by without hearing a peep. We were number one on the waitlist for a RAV4 Prime which has a plug in option as well as standard hybrid mode, but apparently, Toyota wasn't making any of those and perhaps still isn't. At least they aren't shipping any of them to rural Iowa. So after talking it over, we decided to broaden our horizons and get on the waitin...

As we entered our third month without any measurable rainfall, we decided we had to take drastic measures. Instead of carrying bucket after bucket of water, we gathered every garden hose on the farm and strung out a country mile of it from the spigot to the garden. While my girls gave each and every plant a thorough soaking, I mowed the grass in the orchard and hauled many bales of straw from a barn to the garden. We then mulched everything in hopes of retaining some of that moisture for a bit longer and to help prevent blight on the tomatoes. Above, the unmulched portion of the garden is where our current pea crop and defunct carrot crop that never germinated grow. We will probably pick the peas our next time down and then plant a couple squash plants, so my wife says. She is the garden planner in chief and I'm the cheap labor. Above is about a million tomato, cabbage, kohlrabi, pepper and other plants growing. They were all looking pretty good before we mulched everything but are...

 With the cabin building on hold while a plumber and electrician do their things, I turned my attention to a long ago started project in hopes of finishing it and this time, was successful. The neighborhood hardware store that sold bolts, washers, nuts and other hardware piece at a time closed after a long run. The couple who own it, good friends, decided the time had come to close it and enjoy life for awhile. I can't blame them. But it required an unsuccessful trip to the huge box store that only sells hardware in packages of 5 or 12 and still didn't have what I needed. For that it took me two times of attempting to order it online before I successfully got what I was missing. The installation of the hardware itself went pretty quickly and one morning before things got too unbearably hot, I was able to get it hung. I even sat on it myself to test it out and everything held. Since then, all the women in my family have been fighting over porch swing time which thrills me to no ...

My wife and I have always loved the thought of having our own orchard. So much that instead of spending money on trinkets to give guests who attended our wedding, we planted an orchard on the farm in their honor. That orchard has grown and is now largely gone save for three fruit trees well past their prime.  We started to create a new orchard on the farm where we could fence it in to protect from predators and pests better. It is only at six and a half trees strong right that moment having lost several trees over the last few years to inclimate weather. But as we have gotten older and our needs have changed, we have come to realize that for us to enjoy an orchard or a garden, it really would be nice if they were much closer. Our property is divided roughly in half by a deep ditch seen in the background of the photo above. The greenhouse I build can be barely seen through the leaves of the trees. In the foreground of this photo and behind me for a ways, is an open clearing that was...

  This event happened to our minivan while on the way back from seeing my maternal grandmother. Every trip seems more special to myself and to my grandmother as we both know time is getting short for such visits. It has been awhile since I've passed this amount of miles on a vehicle. The first couple cars that I drove (but didn't own), all had that many miles on them when I started driving. The first car I ever bought did pass that mile count and I put on every single one of those miles but I got rid of it in the year before the pandemic as it no longer fit our family lifestyle, namely it was a manual transmission that only I was able to drive. I imagine it is still out there being used and may have crossed 200,000 miles. My last vehicle was totaled by a hail storm before I could cross this milestone. This one, it's replacement is still in great shape and will hopefully continue to serve our family until enough of them leave the nest that a smaller vehicle can replace it.  ...

 Awhile back, I mentioned that I might be helping someone building a small cabin and that call to help came back when I was absent from blogging for a week and a half. There were three of us and work started shortly after dawn when it was still cool and progressed sometimes for 12 hours days as we tried to get it erected in a timely manner. I think the picture above was taken on Day Two so you can see how fast we were going. Below is how it looked after Day Five. As I write this, we are pausing for the Sabbath and will return tomorrow, now just two of us to work on a myriad of detail work to get it weather proof for the time being while electricians and plumbers do their thing. I'm guessing later this year I will be helping out with some of the interior work as well which should be a big more pleasant with a roof over our heads instead of the blazing sun. 

I ordered and received a raccoon baffle which is the black thing in the above picture. It supposedly prevents raccoons from being able to climb up to the bird house and rob me of bluebirds. I also took the time to put metal strapping across the back to hold the bird house firmly on the post and prevent it from being drug down to lower heights or rotate in the wind. Hopefully this will solve our problems we've had the last couple years. Thirty minutes after I hung it up, I saw a female bluebird (I think as they are mostly brown) fly over and check it out. It actually went inside for a minute before flying off again. Our neighbor who owns the birdhouse and who had bluebirds the same age as ours, had his fledge and already has another nest built in his with two eggs as of writing this. Maybe we too can also get another batch of bluebirds this season, this time successfully fledged.  The only thing I am worries is that I drove the post a little deep and so the birdhouse is perhaps six ...