Riverbend Journal

  I've brought my game camera in for the winter now but it mostly always caught glimpses of the does and their fawns. After watching one of Steve's many game camera feeds of a diverse set of animals, it occurred to me that I should check my other cameras, namely the security cameras that hang on the outside of the house. By default, they mostly only catch our comings and goings which isn't that interesting. I forget however, that they do capture other videos of movement but if the A.I. doesn't deem it a human or a vehicle, it sticks it in another folder out of sight. So after digging around for the month of November thus far, I found a few clips to show you. 0:00 - 0:51 The longest part of the clip is of a squirrel investigating our back deck. 0:52 - 1:02 A small four point buck heading across our driveway and down to the woods. 1:03 - 1:15 A bigger buck heading in the opposite direction, likely looking for a hot doe.

If I had to pick one of the biggest issues that affects nearly every aspect of our government today, I would have to say it is the gerrymandering war that is heating up and likely heading to the Supreme Court. Although initially started by Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry and the district he signed into law looked like a salamander, it ramped up recently with Texas and California both blatantly doing it to swing the next election. I don't think people really understand how significant their efforts might impact us. Did you know that before Texas and California's attempts to redraw their election district maps, 90% of the House of Representative races and 80% of the Senate races  in the next election were already decided? We know which party will win already! The only selection we are voting for in the primary is to determine which Democrat will win the primary and go onto secure their seat in Congress or vice versa for the Republicans. There are only 47 (41 Representative ...

  Above is the initial stages of designing a dresser to build that I did simply to get the bosses approval before I invest lots more time going down a dead end which is possible in the world of computer aided design (CAD). It is just a few 3D surfaces thrown together to give one a sense of aesthetics. The above was the model approved by the boss. In reality, we started like perhaps how many do by simply understanding our current dresser and what we like and dislike about it. My wife is the only one to use it as all my clothes fit into my closet. Hers occupy a similar sized closet and a six drawer dresser. Her preferences were to have smaller but more drawers to organize things better. She also wanted it a bit taller which isn't much of an issue. Currently, our dresser hosts the usual collection of framed pictures along with a internet mesh router, a jewelry tree and a box that I made years ago full of small keepsake items. Making it six inches higher to gain another row of drawers ...

  Several years after starting my blog, I had a series I called the "Little Abbey" series about my eldest daughter as we and her experienced her birth and childhood for the first time. Eventually time ran it's course and those posts faded away. She is now in her second year of college.  I got married later than most of my peers and my wife was going through her residency soon after the birth of our first child so it was six years later before we had our second child and by then, we were in the "higher risk" category according to the doctors. But the second one arrived just fine and I started another series that I put tons of effort into naming calling it "Littler Abbey". It faded out much more quickly as there wasn't a lot of mystery left to behold or figure out. Thus our second one never got much written about her on this blog. That likely won't change anytime soon but I saw this picture on my phone and thought I would temporarily break and sh...

  I thought I would do a post detailing a bit about the search for news articles, using my great grandfather Lee Roy as an example. Although he lived across the border and I have found some articles for him in newspapers there, his wife, my great grandmother Dorothy, lived on the Iowa side of the border in the region where until a month ago, no historic newspapers were online in searchable format. Knowing that they probably spent a lot of time in her neck of the woods, I did a search for his name in the new online site for the local historic newspaper. It returned 224 articles for the name Roy Luther alone! He also went by Lee Roy, L.R. Luther, R. Luther, etc., all of which return even more results to sort through! The newspaper site returns each result in the format above. Essentially, the program that reads the newsprint and transcribes it into searchable text, reads from left to right across two columns at a time, one line at a time. Why it does this I do not know but it makes t...