Riverbend Journal

Such is probably the circle of life, growing up I never thought about my legacy. When you are young, death is an abstract concept. But as I get older and death goes from abstract concept to a certainty with a ticking clock, it starts to fill up more of my idle thinking. What do I want the world to look like when I am gone? I grew up on a farm and for the most part, know nearly every inch of it well because I spent time on every inch of it turning seeds in the soil into a crop that could be sold for money to pay the bills. After I left the farm for a career in engineering, the farm continued to grow so I don't know some of the newer parts like I do the original parts, but it feels like a home to me. For those on the outside, it is a piece of dirt that grows crops on it during the summer but for me, it is decades of my life and the memories that we made on that land.  So it was a bit of relief and not much of a surprise when my parents told me that they planned to give us the land so...

John as I always envision him  John would have been 80 today and meant so much to me that I thought I would write a bit about him for a special post. I first heard John before I met him. My dad, a hard working farmer who rarely spent time indoors when I was awake, would often play John's record on a rainy day when farming wasn't feasible or perhaps a Sunday when we were taking the day off. Thus it is no surprise that when I play record, now in digitized form, I do so most often on those rainy days or as a bonus, rainy Sunday afternoons. Hearing his raspy voice has always soothed my soul and brought me a bit of peace. I always thought of John as sort of a private family thing. I had never met anyone in my life growing up that knew of him. That changed on one vacation when I was looking through our host family's CD collection and found an album of John's that I had never heard. I asked if I could play it and they agreed, even singing along to some of the songs and sort of...

About a year ago, we started a process on defining the future not only for myself, but for my kids and beyond. It has consumed a fair amount of time over this last year and isn't yet quite complete as of this writing but we are nearly to the end. I have had my fill of lawyer's offices, banks, government offices and just sleepless nice mulling over our decisions and wondering if we did the right thing. I think the answer is yes but I won't be around to really ever know the answer. The first part of the puzzle has been doing some 1031 exchanges. These exchanges are named after section 1031 of our Internal Revenue tax code that allows a person to exchange appreciated real estate for similar real estate and keep the taxes owed deferred for a later date. This ability has been in our tax code since 1921 and has been tweaked and revised numerous times since. Basically under current law, this allows you to sell a property you own and purchase another property of equal or higher val...

Several years ago, I started getting severe stomach cramps in my lower guts like I had ate some bad food. I kept thinking it would pass but just seemed to go on to the point where I suspected I was ingesting something that my body could no longer tolerate. From that point on, I started leaving various things out of my diet and seeing if that improved my situation and it took way longer than it probably should have to come across dairy products as being the problem. It shouldn't have. Growing up, I was told I was allergic to milk. When in elementary school and we had milk breaks after recess, I was always given a carton of orange juice which I absolutely hated. I remember my mom buying a special milk called acidophilus milk for awhile but eventually that stopped. I don't know if there was tests or not but my next memories are just using regular 2% or skim milk like everyone else without issue. I just seem to recall that I had "grown out of" whatever allergy I had and c...

  The last two weeks have been all day misting rains which isn't very motivating to work and the next ten days looks to be more of the same. Instead of working in the garage, I've been keeping busy with my volunteer activities and doing some genealogy work. One of my long term goals has been to try to find pictures of all 32 of my great great great grandparents. It is an unachievable goals as some of them were too poor or died too young to have been able to have photographs taken of themselves, but I would like to get as many as possible. A few of my pictures however come from a family book that I inherited that consists of pages run through a copy machine, three hole punched and bound in a cover. As one might expect with a picture of an ancestor that has been through a copy machine a number of times, they aren't very detailed.  Above is one of those copied pictures. So in an attempt to try to get a better photograph, I did some sleuthing to find descendants of the authors ...