Riverbend Journal

As per my usual, I stayed up late last night waiting as the election results came in. It didn't take long for me to determine how the night was going to go and it looked pretty bleak if you were a Republican. I was pretty ambivalent about it all on a national level because with a Republican president and a Democrat congress, I'm pretty confident that we aren't going to get some bad piece of legislation forced upon us. Though with the Current Occupant, one just never knows.  I was more interested in more local politics. Iowa, despite what national newscasters say, has long been a purple state and has swung as the tides have shifted. It is just that Iowa has been pretty favorable for the Current Occupant for such a long time that we have been labeled as a red state even though Obama pretty easily won it back in his day. I think a lot of that is due to our governor long being held by the Republican party. What perhaps most of those not from here never see is that Iowa has long...

  Just kidding on the title of course. After somewhere around four or five months on non-stop attack ads, I am going to be thankful to get back to ads about ED or people dancing in supermarkets because of the medicine they are taking. Not a single one of the thousands of ads foisted on me changed my mind in the slightest. All my votes were based upon personal research of what that candidate will do for me and not what the other candidate says the other candidate will do for me. Overall, my ballet was purple this year. The past couple years I have lived in a complete red world, i.e. one party completely controls my state and the federal governments. I have always firmly believed that when one party holds all the power, compromise is put to the wayside and we tend to get the worst legislation passed. So my hope, as always, is for a mixed bag of parties holding power. Forced compromise or just gridlock seems to be the best I can hope for these days. Some predictions: Both parties will...

Tiller waiting repairs and fall servicing before being put to bed Despite my fall crop of peas I am planting to try and make up for the peas that ripened while I was away in the Philippines back in June, my garden is now done and/or we are done with it. Let me explain. We still had tomatoes and peppers but the tomatoes are few are far between now as the plants are mostly dead and haven't been flowering for a long time. The peppers we are just tired of dealing with them. There are only so many peppers one can eat in their diet before you grow tired of them. So on a particular nice day a couple weeks back, I decided to put the garden to bed. Removing the electrified net fence while not difficult, does take me probably an hour to remove and put back up so it not something I want to do frequently. So I took it down and decided to accomplish all the garden work I wanted to do until next spring before putting it back up. With the netting down, I removed all the tomato and pepper plants a...

After fifteen years of nearly constant barking from our neighbors various dogs they've had over those years, one would think I would have noticed after a week of not seeing Walter, that something had occurred, but I didn't. My mind assumed it was simply timing and that he had been let out while I was inside. However after the second week, I finally suspected something had happened to him and mentioned it to my wife. It was perhaps another week that went by before we ran into another neighbor who knew the answer. One of Walter's terminally ill owners is now in hospice in a distant city. The remaining owner still living at home across the street wasn't able to take care of him and so he was rehomed. Where I do not know but I'm guessing it looks something like the AI generated picture above. I for one, won't be losing any sleep of Walter's new home though I would expect his new owner must be saintlike to want to take in such a dog. Instead I will perhaps be spe...

  In case you didn't get the news, Ancestry has made the largest ever improvement to their DNA tools including nearly doubling their regions that they compared DNA too. If that wasn't enough, they also now break everything down by grandparents though they don't say which one yet. For now they just label them as paternal grandparent 1 or maternal grandparent 2, etc. but there is a little grayed out tag that suggests they will identify the gender soon in a coming update.  They also include a nifty table showing what has changed since the last time. They didn't name them very well (it is still in Beta as of this writing) but the left column is my previous estimates, the middle column my new estimates and the right column gives a percentage changed.  The biggest one I noticed is that my Switzerland estimate when from 0% to 8% which finally coincides with my research which has identified only one Swiss ancestor thus far on my maternal grandfather's line. My percentages f...