Riverbend Journal

  John Kuck Family Home 1897 I blogged about this photo a couple weeks ago when I first saw a low resolution picture of it laying on the Good Samaritan's couch out in Colorado Springs. Now that I have the albums scanned at a much higher resolution, I can actually make out a lot of details that I couldn't before. This allows me to zoom in and see who those people are on the front porch which I couldn't make out previously. Clara, Elizabeth and Paul Kuck On the back of the photo, it says it was taken in 1897 and is of John Kuck's home which I knew already from the previous photo. But knowing the date it was taken lets me calculate that Clara Kuck was around 16 years old, her younger brother Paul would be around 9 years old and their mother Elizabeth would be around 40 years old. Knowing all that I think the young lady holding up the bike is Clara, Elizabeth is the woman with the fancy hat standing on the front porch and younger brother Paul is in the background closer to ...

  Clara Kuck's Photo Album My first order of business upon receiving the albums belonging to Clara Elizabeth Kuck was to preserve them. I started with the photo album by carefully taking apart the album which was fairly easy since it was one of those expandable ones of the era but did require some gentleness since it is over 100 years old. Once apart, I did a high resolution scan of all 75 pages front and back along with the covers front and back. I did this once before with my great grandfather's World War I photo album which was in much worse shape and eventually put all the scans into an online book using Shutterfly that allowed me to see the exact layout and all the pictures as the original album but in new condition. I'm not sure I'll do that with this book but at least I have the option. I would have liked to be able to remove the photos from the album and do individual scans of some of them but time has welded them in place and the fragile pieces that hold the ph...

  I'm not one for political memes and usually actively avoid them. I find them full of misleading half truths meant to stick it to one side or the other as a coping mechanism to make our own views appear superior and do little actual good by being shared. Thus I never share them and actively avoid reading them. Last year, I even culled my blog list of some blogs that were starting to rely more and more on sharing these sorts of memes. On very rare occasions though, a self deprecating one comes along, slips through my active culling process and is one that tickles my funny bone. This one did all those things and so I will break my rule just this once.

Here in the Midwest, unless you live literally under a rock, you have heard that we are in the midst of a large storm. The news would have you believe that we are running to our grocery stores and ransacking them. They have shown empty store shelves for the last three nights now on the evening news including some stores with lines out front of people waiting to get in. That is not how the 95% of open space outside of a few large urban areas on the maps behave. Yes there are a couple bare spots of shelves in the grocery store largely due to people not smart enough to understand the irrational fear that is being created and used to attract people to watch a particular news broadcast. Nobody wants to watch a reporter standing in front of a lightly populated store showing shoppers picking groceries from full shelves while telling the viewers that a big storm is on the way and people are just taking the usual precautions. That doesn't sell advertising spots. Instead, they have to hunt a...

  With three exceptions, I have found and assembled all the kits I have instructions for. Two of the kits still remain unassembled because I was missing pieces that have since been ordered. The third kit, the tall standing robot one in the back right of the above photo is a different story. As I go along and have fewer and fewer pieces to sort through to locate each proper piece, the process is speeding up. Eventually though, I had either assembled or were waiting on parts for all the kits that I had build instructions for or could remember owning. But as you can see in the picture below, I still had a large gallon sized baggie full of blue bricks and I assume that most of them belong to space themed sets that I no longer have build instructions for nor remember owning.  However, the Bricklink.com website has a feature that when you select a particular part, you can hit a button that will show you a list of LEGO builds across all it's lines that the singular part has been used...