Riverbend Journal

  In the era of global warming, we have had an unusual amount of snow the past couple weeks. That suits me just fine as what little shopping we do has already been done and I am happiest avoiding all the consumerism madness going on around me.  With the snow still falling, I opted to spend the second to last shopping weekend before Christmas enjoying a nice fire in the fireplace and reading. To do that however, required me to go out in the sense that I had to open the patio door underneath our deck and walk approximately five feet to my wood box to carry in a supply of firewood and I did that maybe six times in a row before deeming the firewood supply sufficient for a couple fires. I only paused long enough to take the above photo.  Soon the fire was started and I indeed spent the rest of the weekend reading in front of it with only a trip out to go to church on Sunday morning for the third Sunday of Advent before returning directly home. I did make one other trip outside...

  All my life, I have only known Christmas trees that we have liberated from their earthly toil out in the wild. All but a single tree have been wild red cedar trees that thrive in our area in pastures or corners of land that don't get cared for regularly. In case you are wondering, the one non-red cedar tree was some sort of fir that we found one year. However, as my parents are good stewards of the land, we eventually ran through the plentiful supply of available red cedar trees and the last decade or so have required more hunting and more settling on which tree will literally make the "cut".  Earlier this fall when I was helping on the farm to cut trees sprouting in our terraces which can cause problems with farming when they get bigger, I found two small red cedar trees that I left standing, hoping that in a future year I'll cut one or both of them down to serve as our annual Christmas tree. I had thought one might do for this year but by the time we got back from...

Blogging friend Kay over at Musings  a few weeks ago brought up a darker chapter of our history where society decided to imprison Japanese-Americans in internment camps and unbeknownst to me, some of them used that time to play baseball. Now all these years later, we celebrate three Japanese-Americans who helped the Dodgers win the World Series. I know I along with most, probably find putting any race of citizens in internment camps to be morally unacceptable under our current set of morality codes but I know most of my Iowa ancestors probably found it morally acceptable 83 years ago. Our past is littered with similar changes in morality. Going back just to the beginnings of our nation, one can easily point out such practices as slavery, indentured servitude, child labor, public execution, public shaming and assertions of class superiority to all be examples of things we find morally repugnant today but weren't 250 years ago. Even in my lifetime, I have seen changes and shifts to m...

  Above is a picture of my 4th great grandmother Anna Gerken (on the right), who never made it to the United States. Her son Johann, my third great grandfather would for reasons unbeknownst to me, would immigrate to the United States in 1853 taking up the name of John, leaving behind both of his parents and several brothers and sisters. I've pondered a lot about what would cause him to make such a break over the years but perhaps only around three or four years ago, I learned that it wasn't a clean break and that he journeyed back at least once to see his mother who lived until 1872. His father died in 1864. After the death of Anna, the three surviving siblings also immigrated to the United States to be with their elder brother completing this particular family's presence in Germany. Being one of the oldest pictures I own, I decided to use the AI Nano Banana to touch it up and get rid of the spots which it easily did as you can see above.  However, two things weighed upon m...

  Above is the only picture I have for my 2nd great grandparents Ira and Maria when they were young. I have a picture or two near the end of their life that are actual photos. The one above is merely a facsimile of a photo that is on one of the pages of a family history book that was given to my grandmother and I eventually inherited.  I don't recall if it credits who has the original photo because it has been a couple decades since I read through it last but I'm pretty sure even if it did, it would be a time consuming task to track down if it exists today and who has it.  So based upon this information and my last experiment using A.I. to fix old photographs, I thought I would try it on this facsimile and see what happens. I loaded up the picture and gave the following command to Nano Banana Pro in Google Gemini: restore and increase resolution. I am just gobsmacked at this result. It didn't remove the "tape" or whatever is across the top but other than that, it ...

As I mentioned in my last post, the death of Jeanne and my attendance of the funeral made me want to to update my family tree with names and a new death date. As I was looking at Jeanne's youngest daughter's page, it had numerous hints and many of those hints were of high school pictures. I remember my mom talk fondly of Jeanne's daughter and knew they were good friends so it shouldn't have been a surprise that my mom was in nearly every single picture too. It was kind of a neat trip down memory lane that I thought I would share. Above is a picture of the Honor Society and my mom is second from the left in the front row sitting down and Jeanne's daughter is third from the left sitting down. Above it the Drama Club and again, my mother is the girl in the very back row in the center with blonde hair and Jeanne's daughter is immediately to the right in the dark colored dress. Above is the softball team and my mom is the very left one in the back row and this time, ...

  I met "Tex" from a distance soon after my mom married my dad and we moved down to the farm. Tex was driving a tractor in the field across the gravel road from our house without a shirt on and was extremely obese. As the tractor bounced across the rough field, so did the fat and I was horrified in the same way one sees a wreck about the happen. You know it isn't pretty but you can't look away. Tex and his wife Jeanne were one of the many casualties soon afterwards due to the farm crisis in the early 80's.  I don't know if they sold their farm as a result, but they moved to the "big city" where I now reside and managed a landmark inn in town that still exists though I don't think it is in business anymore. I have memories of visiting them at the inn while my grandparents, who were close friends of theirs, visited. I have a distinct memory of sitting in the managers area behind the front desk watching "The Man From Snowy River" and sippi...

  After my recent post about using A.I. to edit a photo to replace humans with goats, it got me thinking about the possibility of using A.I. to restore some of my favorite genealogy photos. However, before I could attempt one, my blogging Canadian friend AC did exactly that and also using the same A.I. that I had used for the goat trail photo called Nano Banana Pro which is linked through Google's Gemini A.I. Seeing his success, made me sit down and make the time to restore a photo and the one I chose is the one above.  It is an inherited photo from my grandparents taken when they were dating. When I received it, it has been folded a bit causing the broken white lines across the upper portions of the photo but was in fair shape overall. Above is the result that I obtained after scanning it using my flatbed scanner and doing some minor altering such as cropping off the photo edges and adjusting the contrast a bit. So I uploaded it to Gemini and per AC's post, simply typed in t...

  One consideration I hadn't considered in trading vehicles was the step height to enter the vehicle. I'm six feet two inches tall with longer legs than average so for me, it wasn't a problem in the slightest. However for my vertically challenged wife and mother-in-law, the latter closing in on 80 years old at a fast clip, it was a harder affair. I looked at the options of carrying around a step stool and acting like a butler every time they wanted to enter or exit the vehicle or running boards and decided on the latter. I priced out the running boards and they weren't bad however to have a professional installed them would cost me around $700. After watching a video, I decided I could probably to the installation myself and save that $700 for something else.  The running boards came as a kit which essentially was the running boards themselves, bolts to mount them and a set of installation directions. The directions were pretty short and after previously watching a vide...

  In my recent post about the Goat Trail , Leigh from Five Acres & a Dream made the comment about how much she liked the layers of the rock. I responded that I had more dramatic pictures showing the layers but they had others in them that I didn't want to post pictures. If you recall, I hung back and didn't go on this portion of the hike and so these pictures were taken by my youngest daughter.  I no longer have photo editing software up to the task of editing photos since Adobe Lightroom decided to make my lifetime purchase of their program obsolete and force me to go to a subscription model which I detest. But A.I. has gotten a lot better and a fairly recent post by Kay over at Musings  about the capabilities of it got me to thinking. Could A.I. be up to the task? So I pulled up Google Gemini, uploaded my picture and asked it to replace the humans in the photo with proportionally sized goats. It dutifully did but they ended up being the same size as the humans. I a...

 In opposition of Black Friday, we chose to spend our day out in nature instead of joining the masses in a glut of consumerism. We headed to a little known spot that doesn't get advertised so guarantees us the peace and solitude we seek. It mostly hugs a band of rock on a nameless mountainside. Eventually the way forward narrows as the world falls away to both sides. The end of the journey is here on a point of rock with a 270 degree view of the world for miles. Since the point is a fairly short hike and the day still young, I set off along a section of river that is usually lightly traveled but highly scenic. Above is a picture of a spring that trickles down a rock to a nearby ledge where it cascades down into the river below. The river below flows through a multitude of channels between the rock face I'm standing on and the one across the river from me. Right now the bulk of the river flows up next to the opposing bluff. Two years prior, it ran up against the bluff that I am ...

  As my family has done for nearly all my life, we spent Thanksgiving and the day after in the woods being a family but without the consumerism that has taken over this time of year. Down from the cabin from where we stay is a trail that heads off into the woods. Sometimes it is a nice path and sometimes it is steep and rocky. Eventually we come to a trail that heads off along the face of a 500 feet tall bluff that is referred to locally as the Goat Trail, I assume because only a goat would be crazy enough to walk it. Eventually we arrive at an alcove of sorts eroded hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of years ago by an ancient river that still flows 300 feet below this point. We often stop to refuel with some snacking and rehydrate here and as it was deserted when we arrived, we did just that. One can't beat the view.  One can continue on across the face where it becomes much more exposed and the path across narrowing down to just a few feet with a three hundred feet d...

  One of the biggest drawbacks to going with an SUV versus another minivan is that I can't haul as much on the inside. Actually, Toyota made that decision easier for me when they did away with removable middle row seats in their last generation of minivans. My solution to their poor decision was to add a bumper hitch to the minivan which worked okay though I struggled with the wiring harness portion of it. So when the time came for another vehicle, I decided that I wanted a professional to install the hitch and wiring harness and I'm happy with that decision. It looks professional where as my previous attempt... well didn't.  My first project for said hitch was to head down to the farm to retrieve the wire panels we used in our trellis for growing vining crops at our old garden. We salvaged them before giving up the land and they have been waiting for me to get them up to my house ever since. I would like a trailer of my own but I really have no place to store one inside ou...