Riverbend Journal

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...

  We were pretty excited for our sweet potato crop. Maybe a month ago we had dug a few hills and ended up with nearly two five gallon buckets full of large sweet potatoes. We had to mud those out due to the garden being so wet and didn't want to have to mud all of them out so we waited for a dry spell. That never really has happened but this morning as I write this, we had I think four days free of rain and so with a frost statistically possible at any time, we went into the garden determined to dig the rest.  We did accomplish that goal though it would have been better if we had dug them a month ago. The voles had gotten into them in a big way and eaten probably a large majority of the sweet potatoes. In fact, they were still there because I dug up some that went scrambling away, although slowly due to them being the fattest voles I have ever seen. What they hadn't eaten, many had been gnawed on and had to be discarded.  Fortunately, the crop was large enough that despit...

  As part of the stewardship of my edge of the city property, I have cut down probably close to 50 dead or dying trees in the 15 years I have lived here. Also as part of that stewardship, I have replanted probably half that number back in native trees to our area. However, where I live deer are as thick as flies and probably on any given night, 20 or so deer pass within feet of the tree above and many a buck would love to rub their velvet off on the trunk, abrading the bark and killing the tree. To prevent that from happening when I first planted them and they were nothing but twigs about 12 inches long, I pounded in several posts around each one and wrapped that in woven wire. That method worked well and accomplished my goal of allowing the trees to grow up unmolested. However, it had its drawbacks. Maybe every few years, I would have to unwind the woven wire panels to gain access to cut all the various sprouts that tend to grow up in land that isn't mowed regularly. It wasn't...

  Who the heck starts running a chainsaw at seven in the morning on a Saturday was the question I was asking myself until my wife called me shortly after leaving for an errand and said she thinks one of our trees fell down and was blocking the entire road. So I got my shoes on to walk down the street and onto the other (and much busier) street that runs behind our property and saw the scene above. Yes it was our tree. Yes it was blocking the entire road. The person running the chainsaw at seven in the morning on a Saturday was a contractor for the city working to clear the road block that my property was causing.  Thank you! They had it cleared a few hours later though they left some of the tree overhanging the strip that I mow to keep the sightlines clear and also a lot of debris. So a couple days later on a particularly nice sunny fall day where the temperature was still in the low sixties by mid morning, i.e. perfect chainsaw weather, I put a fresh battery in my electric ch...