Riverbend Journal

  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...

Unknown perhaps no longer? Not long ago, I discovered this photo in a folder I had designated as unknown. That folder was a subfolder of pictures that I had inherited from my grandmother so I knew any answer as to the identify of the house or the people was likely to be found somewhere along her line. So I started clicking through folders of pictures along her line and maybe 15 minutes after starting, I got my first major clue. This is a picture of my great great grandparents, my grandfather in the light suit jacket and my great uncle in the dark coat and hat. They are standing in front of the same house though the trim and railing cap have been repainted with white paint versus the dark paint in the photo above. So immediately my mind turns to the possibility that the first photo is of my great great grandparents along with my great grandmother and her older brother. Above is a picture of my great grandmother and her older brother Clay. Clay looks very similar to the boy sitting in th...

  Perhaps you might remember a close up of this picture in a blog post that I recently wrote about trying to track down the original from a descendant who wrote the book that it is in? It is a picture of Albert Frederick Buchholz and wife Amanda Jane Thomas Buckholz, which I wrote about in a blog post close to five years ago . Well I am happy to say that persistence paid off and in a big way. Not only did I get a copy of the original picture, I got 17 more photos of this family. I feel like I won the lottery! Albert and Amanda Thomas Buchholz - 5 Sep 1902 For reference, Frederick Albert Ludwig Buchholz, who went by Albert or by A.F. most of his life, is my 3rd great grandfather and is one of my original immigrants from Germany along this line. He immigrated as an 18 year old young man with his parents so I don't know if it is proper to call them the original immigrant or Albert, but I guess I have always tended to side with the youngest of the family to make the journey. They immi...

It was tough finding a solution about protecting the farm through generations as a whole and we spent all of last winter going back and forth on various ideas before we finally came to something we could all agree upon. In order to complete our idea though, we were going to have to involve others more specialized in their knowledge base than we were and that would take time. As of this writing, we are 90% of the way there and hopefully in a month, we will have completed something that will better the world we all leave behind and leave a bit of a legacy. In short, the first half of our solution was to create a trust into which we put all of the farm. By doing so, it ensures that the land will all stay together and per our wishes, never be broken up and sold at least during our lifetimes. However, tax bills are still due and succeeding generations will still have the ability to dissolve the trust and sell it off when the hassle of maintaining it becomes not worth any potential income an...

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 ...

I haven't had a lot of luck with obtaining peace with neighbors. Let me explain a bit. At the first house I owned, I was surrounded on three sides by neighbors with small yapping dogs that were constantly neglected in the backyard and spent their days yapping at my every move. If I went outside on the back deck to grill supper, I would grill to the constant sound of dogs yapping constantly at me. I'm not sure how others can find this acceptable but it wore me down not being able to enjoy my own yard in relative silence, at least as silent as one can get in a small town environment. So when we moved, one of my criteria was to find a house with more space between myself and my neighbors. After almost a year of looking, we found it. Our current house is surrounded by trees on two sides and the only neighbor which we have that actually shares one of our borders yard to yard didn't have dogs, only cats. That neighbor died and her replacements have two dogs but they are old and s...