Riverbend Journal

  I sit on the board of an orchestra and we kicked off our 40th season recently. As on officer of the board, I have to show up early so I was able to snap a picture of an empty stage before the performance began. Although I like our symphony and our civic center, we don't get any off Broadway plays coming through. We do have a couple locally produced shows but nothing I would call current. Someday, I hope to just get season tickets at the civic center in our Major Urban Jungle but it will have to wait until we have more time since it is a major commitment to get there, eat, watch a play and get home. Not a very good picture of some Oreo macarons by youngest daughter created. She is turning into quite the baker which I have no complaints about. I told her that they were so tasty that she should start a side business. I thought she would say she couldn't sell them for a price to make it worthwhile but her response was that merely she wouldn't have enough time to meet demand. ...

  A month or so ago and again this week, our little town made the news when a prayer before the local city council started led to a prayer to Satan. As usual, the media outlets across the country picked up the "story" with sensationalized headlines but had absolutely zero backstory. A guy stood up and said a prayer to Satan, not once, but now for the second time. That was all the details offered.  The backstory actually began eight or nine months ago when our city council voted to allow their meetings opened with a prayer by any citizen who wished to sign up. I of course was against it because I am a firm believer in the separation of church and state as generally interpreted by our First Amendment in our Constitution. Only one city council member thought it might lead to trouble in the future and was the lone dissenting vote.  The warning shot came later when a few months later, a fellow citizen offered up an amusing prayer in a Star Wars theme, among other things urging...

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...