Riverbend Journal

 As you can see from the above vehicle sitting in our driveway, big things are about to happen. As I write this, my brother-in-law, wife and three teenage children are boarding a flight for the middle leg of their journey to Midwest America. It was supposed to happen about this time in 2020 but we all know how that year went. Their tourist visa's run out at the end of this year so it is better late than never.  When they were last here in 2016, actually before they arrived, I searched for rental vans good for 10 passengers and found then extremely expensive. Somehow though, I stumbled on a place that rents such vans in the heart of Amish country about 80 miles to the northeast of us. Due to their primary clientele and/or location, they rent them for a small fraction of what a rental company like Enterprise does. What I rent it for through this company for all three weeks of use, is less than 40% of one week through Enterprise. This time around, I didn't even bother to look els...

 Above is a picture of my great great grandfather George Kuck. I had some free time and stumbled upon a folder on my computer containing scanned items given to me by a distant relative many decades ago. Our nearest common ancestor would be George's grandfather. Among the scans was a newspaper article detailing the drowning death of George's cousin Maximillian while ice skating above a river dam in town. Like all the articles given to me back then, it is undated and unsourced and so I was trying to tidy things up by finding the source of the article.  I wasn't able to. However in the process of doing that, I ran across some new-to-me newspaper articles about my great great grandfather George that I thought I would share. George, like his father before him, was self employed man for much of his life, owning a variety of stores. At this particular point in his life, 1890's, he owned a leather shoe and boot store that was always advertising in the newspaper. What got me was...

 As you read this, we are hopefully mid stay in a VRBO rental in Maryland visiting our nations capital day and swimming in the pool out back in the evenings. But this picture was taken a little over two weeks ago when I made a trip out to the garden with the sole goal of picking peas and seeing how things grew in the week since mulching. Above is our two rows of potatoes split by a now partial row of onions. All are looking really good. Behold a literal field of tomatoes, though there are some kohlrabi, cabbage, peppers and perhaps a few other things out there. The second planting of tomatoes, the ones that were our backups after the first planting died of thirst, grew so much over this last week, they have overtaken the bigger ones we planted just a couple weeks back that were given to us. They just need a couple weeks to acclimatize and grow some roots and then it is off to the races.  I think those are cucumbers that my wife planted in hopes of trellising them later.  ...

Still on the road and if things went well, we are somewhere in western New York state by now.  When we moved into this house some 11 years ago, we made the decision to keep all the purchased artwork, which wasn't much, boxed up and eventually sold it. Instead, we opted to only hang up original artwork created by us on our walls. For me, that is mostly enlargements of my photography but for my wife, it is oil paintings that she has done. Although they hang throughout the house, our main entry hall has too large walls that we have used for smaller artwork and the best of the best done by our kids. We hung up a number of them earlier this spring during spring cleaning but there were three that couldn't be hung because they didn't have anything to hang them by.  We had a framer here in town but it was always quite expensive to use them and they have retired anyway and the shop has since closed. There is a large box store hobby shop that supposedly does framing as well but I hav...

  I'm wrote this before our road trip which we currently are on. If things went well, we are somewhere east of Chicago by now. Comments are welcome though there may be a delay of some days before I am able to publish them. During my boyhood years, there was a large sour cherry tree on our home farm and also another one on my grandfather's farm. We would pick many gallons from them every last spring and it would keep us in sour cherry pies, cobblers and jelly for the rest of the year. For some reason, the taste of those sour cherry pies, cobblers and jellies have stuck with me over the years and I have always hoped that someday I could have some of my own. Many years later, I would finally have a home of my own and once we had something that resembled a bit of savings account, I bought and planted a sour cherry tree in the backyard. It finally got big enough to start producing a cup or two of fruit a year when we decided to sell that house and move to where we are now. After som...