Riverbend Journal

Fleshing Out a Family Tragedy

2012-01-30T06:00:00.053-06:00

Mary Mayer Kuck

This post is sort of a continuation of my last post about the almost lost legacy of the Kuck family due to a lost container of family heirlooms. As you know from previous posts, it was almost lost due to an entirely different reason when John Kuck's wife Mary and five of his seven children died in the space of a five months. When I started my research into this family, John's name wasn't even known but thanks to census records soon discovered. Eventually I was able to determine where he was buried and got my my first glimpse of a tragedy that took place within his family. I saw that five of his children had died within a period of two months and his wife a few months later. I was determined to find out.

Mary Mayer Kuck Death Notice

My first clue was the newspaper article above that I found in a scrapbook compiled by my 2nd great grandmother which transcribed reads:

Died in Charles City, May 31, 1879, of paralytic convulsions, Mary, wife of John Kuck, aged 42 years, 4 months 23 days.

It is said, "Afflictions never come singly." On the 14th day of December, 1878, John Kuck lost one child; by the 3d day of January following, four more had been taken, all by the same fatal disease. And now comes the reaper, and takes his companion. The death of the children undoubtedly had much to do with Mrs. Kuck's illness, as it seemed to weigh heavily upon her mind. Mrs. Kuck was a practical Christian, having been a member of the German M.E. Church for 25 years. She has left a devoted husband and two sons, Henry and George. The funeral was held Sunday at 3 P.M. in the M.E. church. It is a singular coincidence that just nineteen years before, on the same day and hour, this couple were married in Galena, Illinois. The funeral was very largely attended, over 75 teams falling into the procession.

It mentioned that the deaths of the children were due to disease but not what the disease was. Over the years I have spent lots of time scouring the internet for what it might have been and finally theorized that it was due to diphtheria which caused quite a few deaths in Charles City during that time frame. However diphtheria of that time was recorded as being on fatal 25% of the time and John Kuck had lost 71% of his children. So my theory remained just that even thought I never gave up hope of someday confirming it.

Emma Kuck Death Notice

The Kuck family lived in the NE corner of Iowa and I live in the SE corner, far enough away that a day trip with research time isn't feasible. So I bided my time until I might get some time to spend up there doing research and I'm still waiting for it to happen. In the meantime, I went to look at a state historical archive while getting some recall work done on one of our vehicles and was unable to find any microfilm of newspapers local to Charles City during that time frame. But I did find out that they do exist. So I turned to a resource I have used in the past, a retired fellow that runs down genealogical requests in the area for a donation to his gas and coffee fund. He was happy to oblige and came back with three newspaper clippings that further fleshed out the family tragedy. The one above reads:

Kuck - Saturday, Dec. 21, of diphtheria, Emma R., daughter of Mr. John Kuck, aged 9 years.Scarce a week had passed since the death of their elder daughter, when Mr. and Mrs. Kuck were called upon to suffer the pangs of parting with another of their household treasures. Up to Friday night she was not considered dangerously ill, but then came more alarming symptoms, which resulted in death on Saturday. Her last hours were not painful ones, and when at last the lamp of life went flickering out, those present scarcely knew the moment when "mortality put on immortality." She was buried, Sunday, beside her sister Anna. The sorrowing family have the heartfelt sympathy of all.

Edward Kuck & Lydia Kuck Death Notice

It confirmed my diphtheria theory. The second clipping reads:

DiedKuck:-Saturday night, Dec. 28th, Eddie, son of John Kuck, aged 2 1/2 years. Kuck:-Wednesday, Jan 1rst, Lydia, daughter of John Kuck, aged 12 years, 10 months.Four times during the past month has the dark angel spread his pinions over this fated household and borne away one of its loved ones. There are three children left, and two of these are sick, but, we are glad to state, are now considered out of danger. Truly, friend Kuck and his wife have borne their heavy cross. We trust that their trials are now over, and that the other homes of the elty may be free from such a sad visitation.

This article made me realize how closely my fate rested in this tragedy. The articled stated that either my 2nd great grandfather George or his brother Henry were also sick with the disease but survived it since two of the three surviving children were sick with diphtheria. The other one was undoubtedly John Kuck Jr. who though the article says was recovering died, two days later on January 3, 1879.

Mary Mayer Kuck Death Notice

The kind volunteer also looked for more information on Mary Mayer Kuck's death in hopes of perhaps discerning more about her ancestry, one of my research brick walls. Although he found a second death notice for her and one that I hadn't seen, it didn't yield any additional clues. It reads:

Died: - In this city, May 31, 1879, of paralytic convulsions, Mary, wife of John Kuck, aged 42 years, 4 months, 28 days.

Since last December the hand of death has been laid heavily on the family of Mr. Kuck. Five beloved children, in quick succession, were followed to the tomb, all taken away by that fatal disease, diphtheria. Two sons Henry and George, are all that are left of that happy band of young hearts. Once more the dark angel has visited the stricken household, and the mother, best beloved of all, is gone forever. Mrs. Kuck had been a member of the German M.E. Church for more than twenty years, and died in full and happy faith of a brighter home beyond the stars. The funeral was held at 3 o'clock, Sunday afternoon, and there was a very large attendance, about eighty teams joining in the procession.

While diphtheria is a respiratory tract illness caused by baterial infection of the mucous membranes that is all but non-existant in today's world with modern vaccines, I didn't know much about what paralytic convulsions were in the late 19th century context. I'm not sure I still know but after doing some googling, it might possibly have been a case of tetanus.

In conclusion, I am pretty confident in the diphtheria theory to say it is no longer theory but fact. It answers my questions begun so long ago as to what tragedy befell this family buried together in a cemetery in Charles City. The one avenue of research that I would like to pursue is Mary Mayer Kuck's affiliation with the German M.E. Church. I would like to track down to see if any records exist and if so, what they may offer of Mary's ancestry to perhaps knock down that brick all once and for all.

Taxes

2012-01-27T06:00:00.091-06:00

After getting robbed (paying $240) by a nationally known tax preparation company to do taxes that I felt should be fairly easy to do since we only had two W-2's and a few 1099's, I decided things had to change. I started doing my taxes myself and the last few years, have bought tax preparation software which speeds up the process considerably. The first year took five or six hours to complete since I had to enter all the information in and then my inexperience to the software made me go through all sections regardless if I thought they applied or not. Flash forward to this year, my third year, and I spent all of about an hour. Painless and the $30 price is right.

Doing my own taxes means that I get to understand them in a way that perhaps most people don't. When you do your own taxes, you tend to pay attention to all the deductions, credits and such to see how you can save yourself paying more taxes than necessary. You also understand the tax system better and how if functions. I think it is impossible to understand it all but it is certainly easy enough to understand the taxes that do affect yourself. This has been a good process for me and one that I'm not likely to give up soon. The biggest reason is that I see many people around me essentially paying more money than they need too because they don't understand how it works and the tax preparation company they go to don't inform them. I thought I would mention perhaps one of the biggest ones I see among my peers that I'm around.

It seems as if the large majority of the people prefer to withhold enough money for taxes to ensure a refund every year, mostly it seems as if a forced piggy bank account that they can then go blow. Not only do you lose the earning power of being able to invest that money yourself for a year, but if you have children, you are throwing away a lot of money. For instance, a coworker of mine who has one child and another on the way just told me that they like to arrange things so they have a refund every year. They were aware that the government gives a $1000 tax credit per child but because they didn't understand the way it works, they weren't collecting a cent of it because that credit is only good if you owe the government money. Say you owe the government $700 in taxes. The government would give you $700 tax credit and say you owe zero in taxes. They keep the remaining $300 of the credit. If you get a refund as this person likes to do, the government gives you a big goose egg worth of credit. So you want to owe the government if you have children and make less than $110,000 as a couple so you take advantage of that credit. Just don't go too far or if you owe more than $1000, the government will fine you.

Another observation of mine is that most people I talk to don't know how much they pay in taxes, not even as a percentage of their AGI or Adjusted Gross Income. This as come up a lot recently with people gasping at the Romney's and the Buffets of the world who pay less than 15% of the AGI in taxes. They don't realize that 80% of the taxpayers in this country pay less than that. When you go to a tax preparation firm, they just tell you how much MORE you own and very rarely say the whole amount. You have to look among the numbers on your form to find that out. Check it out, you might be surprised at the dollar amount. I know I am every year.

I think a lot of the government's excess spending would be solved by mandating that tax payers had to write the government a check for the full amount of their taxes once a year, not the difference between what the government took out of your paycheck and what the government says you still owe them. If people had to write out a check that large, I'm guessing they would quickly be more concerned about where it is going.

The Almost Lost Legacy

2012-01-25T06:00:00.072-06:00

I hadn't spent a lot of time pondering why I haven't been able to find a lot of information on my Kuck ancestors. I mean I have found information and compared to other ancestors whom I know little about, I do have a lot but with hindsight, I now realize I should have had more. John Kuck and his son George Kuck pictured above are my third and second great grandfathers respectively. John had only one other child that survived to adulthood. George stayed around his father all his life where brother Henry took off for the wilds of Oregon to make his mark. So one might expect that George inherited a lot of the family information and belongings that typically get passed down from generation to generation. George only had two children of his own, one of whom never had children and the other my great grandfather Victor who had two children. One of those my great Uncle recently moved into a nursing home due to failing health and I've seen his photos which didn't have anything about the John Kuck family. In fact, he thought the Kucks came from the Von Klucks who settled Kluckville, Pennsylvania, a fact that I eventually set straight with my research. His brother, my grandfather, also possessed no other pictures other than the one above and even then, with the incorrect people listed in it. Neither has any relics of this part of the family. How does/did that happen?

One reason which I didn't realize before and it is an important lesson to pay attention to the time frame of the world in which our ancestors lived was that my 3rd great grandfather died when his grandson, my great grandfather Victor was away in France fighting a war. He was gone when his ancestor died and estate divided up which could explain the lack of knowledge of where it went or even where John Kuck was buried. The latter was a mystery until I discovered it through my research. But as I found out on my recent vacation to Florida during a morning chat with my grandfather, there was a much larger reason for the lack of photos and relics.

My great grandfather Victor, a man I remember well and have written about those memories in past posts, started out life as a farmer when he returned from the war. Unfortunately he leveraged one farm with another and when the bottom started falling out of the markets in 1929 as a precursor to the Great Depression, he lost them all. On a side note, he also lost a lot in stock and always blamed it on my grandfather who was in his mother's womb about ready to come out when my great grandfather who on the road, called his wife and told her to sell all the stock before the bottom of the market fell out. Naturally she was preoccupied with child birth, didn't, and my great grandfather Victor ended up with stock not worth the paper it was printed on. They bounced around different states and jobs for another 18 years before deciding after my grandfather left home to move down to Florida. They loaded up a car and trailer and also two more containers of stuff that would be freighted and took off.

As some of you may recall, my great grandfather Victor made it into Florida where he wrecked his car and trailer near some town in northern Florida, the name of which currently eludes me right now. While repairs were being made, the ended up falling in love with the town and living there for many years before retiring further south to Fort Myers. Now to the point of this entire post. Of the two containers that were freighted, only one would ever arrive. The other one was lost, never recovered, and you guessed it, was full of the family's more valuable possessions among which were family heirlooms and pictures.

Due to the loss of one container full of furniture and other assorted stuff, only one photograph of my 3rd great grandfather and one additional one of my 2nd great grandfather survived for me to find. Fortunately a few more surfaced through one of John's siblings which I have blogged quite a bit about but still meager by what it might had been had that second container made it to its intended destination. It has also motivated me a bit more to make contact with the descendants of George's brother Henry who went off to Oregon to make his mark. Perhaps he got some family stuff after all and perhaps it has made it intact through the years. Perhaps.

Closing Notes

2012-01-23T06:00:00.001-06:00

Above is a picture of our bungalow taken when they finally opened up our beach. As you can tell, the perfectly flat beach two days ago was already well pocked with holes where people had kicked and dug for shells. Below is a picture of my usual position in the evenings as I watched it unfold. Unseen was the icy cold beer in my left hand. It was taken using a special photo altering app for my phone that my brother introduced me too.

On New Year's day, we loaded up our cars and made the long drive back to Iowa arriving at the farm around 11:30 that evening and at my house and waiting wife around 1 a.m. A soft bed and a wife's embrace never felt so good.

Shore Stuff

2012-01-20T06:00:00.006-06:00

My daughter spent hours playing in the ocean and I found it difficult to do much else than watch her. One at, five and a half years of age and barely twice the sizes of the incoming swells, I didn't trust her judgement to allow her out of my sight for more than a second or too. Two, the fine white sand just seems to get into everything I try to use while sitting there be it a camera, book, or other entertainment gadget. It destroyed my camera last year and I didn't want the same thing to happen this year. Thus I spent my time just bulldozing sand with my hands and daughter's sandals and making a pedestal for my water bottle as seen above.

I'm not sure what these sea birds are but there were a flock of them less than ten feet away from me one day pulling those tubular like worms/plants out of the surf and eating them. One would get one part way down to have another bird grab onto the other end. They would take to the air in a fast spinning duet trying to yank the other end from the opposing birds throat and eventually the winner would find a quieter space on the sand to wolf down the food. I tried in vane for a half hour to get a shot of this but my digital camera just isn't fast enough and by the time I remembered the video feature, they were too far down the beach to capture.

Unmarked sand and surf always seem to call my name. I couldn't help but leave my 'mark' if only for awhile.

Sunsets

2012-01-18T06:00:00.000-06:00

Every evening, I would grab a cold beer and head for the deck to watch the sun set over the ocean. I only saw it set the very first evening and recorded it in this series of pictures. The other nights were overcast and while I still watched and it was still relaxing, wasn't nearly as beautiful.

Deep Sea Fishing

2012-01-16T06:00:00.056-06:00

We enjoyed our deep sea fishing expedition for red snapper so much last year that we decided to do another trip this year. Unfortunately, the boat we had chartered last year and was crewed by such an excellent crew was dry docked and being repainted. The captain recommended his brother who also captained a similar boat as a replacement and we scheduled our trip. The day was beautiful again when we arrived at the docks but unfortunately the brother of our previous year's captain hadn't shown up himself and instead hired two other guys to take us out on his boat. These guys weren't nearly as friendly or overly concerned about making our experience one to remember like last year's crew but we still had a lot of fun.

This year we asked to be taken out to try and catch game fish that were in season even if that meant the fishing wasn't quite as good as the year before. As it turned out, the fishing wasn't as good as the year before and we spent a fair amount of the four hours we rented the boat for moving from one spot to another in search of fish and then when we found them, ones big enough to keep it seemed as if the captain would tell us to reel in our lines to try someplace else. All told, we ended up with probably a dozen pounds (filleted out) of white snapper and triggerfish. There was no 'shore lunch' this time nor did the crew fillet out our fish and instead gave it to some dockside workers who charged us for the privilege after they were done. I'm guessing they have some sort of arrangement. Back home, we fried up a batch in breading and sauteed another batch in butter with some Greek seasoning and all agreed the ones seasoned with Greek seasoning were by far the best. What we couldn't eat we froze and I had the privilege of taking them home so that my wife who missed out on the trip due to work could have her share. Of course it meant I got two more helpings of it myself. Fish doesn't taste any better.

Back in the bay heading through the channels towards the docks, we found half a dozen shrimp boats out trolling with their nets. I have never seen one at work so it was a real treat for me. On every shrimp boat there was a man standing out on the bow pointing this way and that. I never could figure out if he was pointing at where the shrimp were or where obstacles were but every boat had one. Perhaps someone in the know can enlighten me on that point.

If you recall, on the previous year's fishing trip, I went from thinking dolphins were adorable sea creatures to thieving bastards in the space of a few hours. So I was hoping I wouldn't see any of them follow us out of the harbor and follow us to the fishing sites this year. Fortunately they didn't and we didn't see any dolphins until our return trip through the bay this year and that is what the above picture is about. What is hard to see were a pair of dolphins. So now perhaps they have moved up a notch on my mental list from thieving bastards to thieving rascals.

I believe I had a picture of this boat hull last year too. I still don't know the story of it.

As soon as we got to the docks, we were inundated with creatures coming to see what we had caught, the above creature the most pleasant of them all. The rest were foul smelling two legged humans who smelled like they spent the last night in a beer soaked ash tray who seemed to be angling for brownie points to earn them a ride as a captain's mate on a fishing charter sometime in the future. Presumably to earn money for more beer and cigarettes. There were plenty of the tourist types too who were probably deciding if they wanted to hire a charter for themselves. Last year we didn't have this problem mostly because it was pretty cold the day we went fishing.

Overall, it was a good fishing trip though I think I enjoyed last year's trip better mainly due to the very friendly crew who went out of their way to make our trip enjoyable. This year the captain was more interested in talking to his buddies via cellphone and planning what he was going to do with them after he was rid of us. The plus side was that we had lots of fresh fish to eat this year.

Mining For Shells

2012-01-13T06:00:00.076-06:00

As soon as the construction crew opened up the beach, the throngs of people were soon on it. Temperatures in the upper 70's certainly played a part. The main draw to the beach seems to be looking for sea shells. With the new sand mined from the ocean floor ten miles from shore spread on top of the old sand, there were plenty of shells to be had. They littered the surface of the sand and were much larger and better preserved specimens than the ones I normally find along the shore. But with hordes of people, they quickly disappeared.

Then my parents while out walking on the beach made a discovery. If you kicked at any foreign glint that you see in the sand, 9 times out of 10 when you kicked it you turned out to be an entire shell just 99% buried in the sand. They soon had a couple dozen large bivalve shells that the put out on the deck railing to dry. Soon this discovery seemed to pass through the throngs and you saw everyone walking along turning over sand with their toes. The members of our group soon had a fair collection of shells in 'mint' condition, more than I've ever seen in my lifetime.

I decided to join in on the fun and kicked two shells out of the sand before I made my discovery. On the third shell I turned over with my foot, I felt the resistance of another shell beneath the one I had just freed from the sand. I kicked the second shell out of the sand only to feel a third. Two hours later, I finally quit digging in that spot after wearing my finger tips bloody on one hand from digging in the sand and had a huge bag of the nicest shells I have ever seen. The entire time I was digging, I saw people eyeing my progress and growing pile of shells on the sand and by the time I left, people were showing up on the beach with shovels and buckets digging here and there. In fact, even before I had cleared the dune in front of our bungalow, one of these couples with buckets and shovels would be in the middle of my hole digging where I had left off and would continue to dig there for the next five hours.

The next morning, my daughter who had helped me the day before wanted to go out digging for more shelves so after securing larger bags and wooden utensils from the kitchen drawers to save our hands from further damages, we started digging for shells here and there on the beach. Despite looking in several different places, I never found shells in any density like I had in my shell mine from the day before. So we walked over the the now vacated mine that was now a hole eight feet diameter and 18 inches deep, and started poking around the edges. Soon I was onto the shells and with the help of my daughter and grandpa, we mined shells for another couple hours and had several more large bags full of them. It took me several hours to clean them all and lay them out to dry on the deck of our bungalow.

This time, people all over the place were digging here and there and about a half hour after I started digging, the couple I saw in my mine from the day before showed up again with their bucket and shovels. They walked up to it, eyed our progress and large pile of shells, and asked if we were finding lots of shells. It was obvious we were so I couldn't help but respond that we were finding a few when it was obvious we had a lot more than that. The dug nearby, closer than is really probably considered polite, and then went on down the beach after not finding a lode as rich as mine.

A little bit later a Chinese lady and her daughter came up, hopped into the hole with me and started rummaging through my shells and tailings pile. She said something in her language, showed me a small shell that I had discarded in the tailings pile and walked off. A half hour later she brought back her husband, rummaged through my pile of shells again for awhile, gave me a thumbs up and walked off. I knew, from having been to the far East that the culture 'distance' barriers between people are much smaller than what we here in the United States expect but my grandfather was getting a little ruffled in the feathers by the time she left. If she had tried to abscond with one of our shells, I'm sure my grandfather, newly replaced hip and all, would have been out of our mine in a flash and may or may not have been beating her on the head with a large shell.

When we had our bags loaded to capacity, we carried them back to the bungalow and spent hours cleaning, drying and bagging them. You can some of my share of the take below and a representative picture of the types of shells we were finding above. As you can see, we were finding Alphabet Cones, Ear Moon, Slipper Shell, Nutmeg, Florida Cone, Spiny Jewel Box, Lettered Olive, Banded Tulip, Fighting Conch, True Tulip, Sozon's Cone, American Auger, Calico Scallops, Pecten Raveneli, Broad-Ribbed Cadita, Van Hyning's Cockle and Whelk shells. According to a lady who stopped to talk and was presumably local, she said after a beach rebuilding project is when the locals come out to shell hunt, especially after a heavy rain that exposes them. She also said that of the shells I found, the Whelk and Tulips were the rarest and the ones worth money.

I'm not sure yet what we are going to do with all our shells yet. I sent my daughter to school with a small representative sample of them and have spent some time searching websites to identify them. I expect we will buy a large glass container to put them in somewhere as a reminder of my shell mine I dug in December of '11 and maybe put a handful on the crapper tank lid. It seems like that is the most common thing to do with them, perhaps to give people pleasant memories while taking care of an unpleasant business.

Beach Closed

2012-01-11T06:00:00.006-06:00

After two days of driving and months of anticipation, I opened the curtains of our beach front bungalow onto see rusty pipes and earth moving equipment as far as I could see in either direction. WTF!? We wandered around in a daze for awhile carrying in the rest of our stuff from the van but eventually we decided to test the waters. Most of the sand moving equipment were a mile away down by the distant pier and the area of sand between the property line and the pipe was used as their road but not very frequently so we decided we would walk across it, hop the pipe and go down to the shoreline. We got up to the pipeline before two men dressed in construction orange appeared out of no where on a John Deere Gator and stopped us in our tracks. They broke the news that the beach was closed and would be for our entire stay.

Over the course of the next couple days, we learned the why's and how's of what was happening. Due to the natural erosion of our beaches, that is currently accelerating with higher ocean levels, our government shells out tens of millions of dollars for this stretch of beach every four to five years to have it rebuilt. I'm assuming that means that it does that for many other stretches of beach. In the photo above, you can see a pier in the far left side of the picture way off in the distance. This pipe ran from where I was taking the picture all the way there and they also went the same distance in the other direction. According to the guy I talked with, that distance equaled $10 million in federal funding to rebuild and it was done almost every five years unless a hurricane necessitated a sooner rebuilding. They had been working on this stretch of beach for the past three weeks and had one week to go.

From a mine about ten miles off shore, the ship above would pump sand from a pit that contained the same quality and color of sand as what was currently on the beach. It would be pumped onto the ship above, motored to about two hundred yards from shore where it would connect itself up to the pipes in the picture above and pump it down the length to whatever section of beach they were working on at the time. The ship must have had a massive pump because it got the 3' diameter pipe under quite a bit of pressure. One evening I heard what sounded like a cannon shot and then saw an explosion of water follow that nearly took off a construction workers head who happened to be nearby. He was fortunate that it took his hard hat off his head complete with a mining light attached to the front and flipped it about twenty feet away.

At the end of the pipe, in the section of beach being rebuilt, they would dig a huge pit and push the former sandy contents into huge berms on three sides of it. The sand laden water would come gushing out in a geyser, fill the pit allowing the sand to drop out and then flow back out to the ocean from the fourth side. I'm guessing one shipload of sand could fill a pit about half the size of a football field and 8 to 10 feet deep. It was pretty impressive to see. Once the ship had emptied its load of sand into the pit, now no longer in existence, they would level out that patch of sand, add more pipe and start another section of beach.

All told, they were adding as much as six to eight feet of sand in depth by the time they reached the old shore line and extending the new shoreline another twenty or thirty yards further into the ocean. It was a lot of sand.
They graded it (with automatic GPS controlled levelers attached to their blades) flat the entire way and then left a steep shelf down to the new ocean shoreline. It made it difficult for my grandparents to get down to the water's edge.

At first I was crestfallen because our direct beach access bungalow had no beach access. Instead, we had to walk a mile along a busy four lane road missing portions of sidewalk that meant walking in the road at times, to the next beach access point not closed due to construction. Certainly not as easy and definitely not a spur of the moment jaunt I love to take. However, I do admit, that it was interesting to watch while waiting for the sun to go down and that beer to disappear down my gullet. I also enjoyed watching the guys on the Gator constantly racing here and there on the beach to run off the constant stream of people trying to invade their construction site. For two whole days the beach in front of our bungalow was closed and then they tore down the pipe and rebuilt it in the other direction and after running off more people, gave up and opened up half of their construction zone, including right in front of our bungalow, to the public. So for the last half of my week, I was able to enjoy the beach at leisure while still watching the entertainment of the beach reconstruction in progress.

On a final note, this is one of the few pictures I have a bulldozer actually moving sand. 95% of the time, these huge beasts would clank the mile plus from the end of the pipeline up to where it went into the ocean nearly in front of our bungalow, sit there for a spell, turn around and rumble back. They appeared to do this for hours on end for no apparent reason that I could determine. Occasionally they would dig one of those pits described above in about fifteen minutes, sit there for an hour while the barge unloaded sand into them, and spent the next fifteen minutes grading it. Then they would rumble back up and down the beach (in the same tracks so I know they weren't trying to pack anything) for the next three hours or so until the barge returned with another load. I would be willing to bet that the local terrace builders here in rural Iowa could move twenty times more sand in the same amount of time with much small equipment than these guys could. But since it is paid for by the government with unlimited pockets, (i.e. we taxpayers), it doesn't surprise me that they work this way.

Alabama Observations

2012-01-09T06:00:00.042-06:00

With airline tickets being high priced in my neck of the woods mainly because they involve zigzagging through at least three airports to get to my destination and knowing that I would be treated like one cow in a herd by the airlines after paying such a high price, I opted to drive down to Florida again this year. This was a tough decision knowing that it was just myself and my daughter since my wife had to work but it was made slightly easier by the decision to carpool with my parents. It was a double edge sword. One edge is having two people to help entertain my daughter for the 15+ hour drive. The other edge is having to be in a small enclosed space with your parents for 15+ hours. The latter ended up not being bad at all even if we had to stop three times as often as I normally do for various bathroom breaks, purchase of stimulants, gas, etc. I tried to keep a vision of the picture above in my head for extra motivation.

We spent the first night at my brother's place in NE Alabama just down the road aways from some great BBQ. It was raining when we arrived and rained all night long so it was kind of dreary but it was also dark out so I didn't have to see the dreariness. The next morning we headed south to our destination of a beach in Panama City Beach, Florida when I finally decided that I'm not a big fan of Alabama roads anyway. I know and like some of its citizens. My dislike of the roads is especially true near the Gadsden area, it seems like there are tens of miles of nothing but strips of retail areas full of stoplights. In Iowa, you reach the retail area and everything is condensed into perhaps a half mile before you are back out in the residential parts of town if you compared similar sized towns. In Alabama, they just string it out for miles and miles and miles. I bet in that ten mile stretch of retail area, driving the same highway the entire time, I saw at least a dozen waffle houses, twice that many pawnshops and pay by the week loan places, etc. I never thought it would end. Just when it did, we reached Montgomery and it started all over again.

Another observation of Alabama is that it seems like every square inch of two-laned roadside is residential housing. Up north, there are lots of farm fields right to the edge of the road and you can sometimes go a mile without seeing a house but in northern Alabama especially, it was just a continual stream of houses unless you were driving through a retail area. It made me wonder how it developed that way so differently than what I am used too. I had a long time to think about it since all interstates lead to Birmingham and there really isn't much but two lane roads between where I spent the night and the beach where I was heading. About a third of my time driving from Iowa to Florida was spent driving the back roads and vast stretches of retail jungles of Alabama.

One interesting note was that I got to see the utter devastation left behind by the F-4 tornado that missed my brothers house by literally a stone's throw. Trees and vegetation are still pushed into massive piles and there is trash remnants everywhere but many of the houses have been rebuilt. It will still be a decade or two before all signs of that tornado vanish.

So after driving through Alabama and the desolate country of rural Florida, I was more than ready for some beach time when we pulled up to our rented bungalow for the week right on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico. We carried our bags up the steps, threw them down in the hall and quickly opened up the drapes. What I saw sent my stomach hurtling south.

Perfection In a Hickory Stick

2012-01-06T06:00:00.001-06:00

Originally posted on February 8, 2005.

I should have returned from vacation a few days ago and probably this weekend I will begin the task of uploading photos and writing about my journey. Stay tuned as my blog autopilot is turned off and original writing resumes on Monday.

The first seemingly random thing occurred many years at a flea market where I was walking to kill some time. At one stand, I was looking through a collection of pocketknives for a unique one to wear to work when I came across a United States Marine Corp K-bar knife. The handle is bound in leather and the black steel blade only about eight inches in length but the weight felt solid in my grasp. I unsheathed the knife and held it in my hand, the balance perfectly center and giving it a sort of life all it's own. It felt perfect for whatever one might use it for. I rarely hunt and if I do it is only for game birds so I didn't need it for hunting. For farming, the sheath was too bulky hanging from your side and would forever be banging into things, so I didn't really need it for that. What then? I couldn't think of the answer but for ten dollars, who was I to question it?

The second seemingly random thing occurred a couple days later when a local golf course was expanding. A friend of mine who was a biology major needed some owl pellets to study in a class and I was craving some fresh morel mushrooms. I volunteered to help him look for owl pellets if he would look for mushrooms and so we had made an agreement. Coming back from our outing, me with no mushrooms and him with a bag of owl shit, we decided to cut across the golf course expansion and came across a pile of trees that had been cleared for one of the new holes.

When we neared the pile of trees, one in particular seemed to jump out at meet. A young hickory sapling maybe ten feet tall, still green with new spring leaves had been ripped out at the roots and shoved into the pile. The trunk was straight as an arrow and free of any limbs for the first six feet. By chance, I had grabbed my new K-bar knife on my way out the door with my friend and had brought it with me tucked into my pants in the small of my back. I knew what must be done.

I unsheaved the knife and within minutes had freed a five-foot section of that young hickory sapling from the pile, a task that would have taken forever with my pocketknife. Hickory is a hard wood and green hickory even harder and with a dull knife, cutting hickory is impossible. As I stepped out of the pile like a doctor from the operating room, I felt that I had given my patient a new life. I held the stick in my hand and new that like the knife, it was perfectly balanced and just felt right. Back in the dorms, I tucked my new hickory stick into the frame of my loft bed and let it cure. After many months, the result was a perfectly cured and extremely strong walking stick. So strong, I could hook if over two objects and do chin-ups on it.

Flash forward now over a decade later and I still have that walking stick leaning in a corner of my house. I have only used it a couple times and the only reason I can come up with is because it is just too perfect. When you have something of such perfection and beauty, one just can't mar it with mundane things like hiking. So it remains in the corner for the occasional time when I heft it in my hands to feel the perfection of strength and balance combined into one five foot length of hickory.

Walking Away - Chapter 17: The End

2012-01-05T06:00:00.001-06:00

Originally written as part of blog a novel month from November 1, 2004 to this chapter posted on November 16, 2004

Just beyond the edge of Donald’s eyesight, there is a book lying in the leaves with the pages fanned out towards the clearing sky. A few feet beyond that are another book, a third one some ten feet further wedged up in the crotch of a tree and more, strung out like breadcrumbs in a fairy tale. Fifty feet past the RV, the trail of books leads to a figure propped up by a mangled backpack still strapped to their back. Only a mere foot past the soul of a sprawled out leg, the land drops away into the canyon leaving an open expanse of air. As the crow flies, it was probably only a mile down to the Buffalo River, which remained hidden among the barren trees and bone white bluffs.

As you get closer, you can see the caved in chest of the man moving slightly and hear a thin rasping of air as it fights it’s way into the lungs and feebly exhaled. Blood was everywhere as it pooled onto a portion of the rocky shelf that the wind had kept clear of leaves. The moon finally breaks free from the clouds shining a white light down upon the scene making the blood on the rock look like shadows. The bloodied face of the man moves slightly and then lifts off the sunken chest and flops back onto the bent frame of the pack. The moonlight glints off of one eye as it stares vacantly down the valley, the other eye lost in the shadows of blood.

Jack felt no pain as he stared off down the valley, only peace. His body was broken and all control of it had left. He remembered being seeing the outline of his body traced onto the forest floor by a bright light behind him before being sent hurtling through the air by something that hit him from behind. His last memory up until now had been hitting a tree about fifteen feet up in the air and the immense weight of his pack squeezing him like a bug on a windshield. Now here he was all busted up and dying, lying on a shelf of rock amongst the trees.

His one eye that worked stared off over the valley where the moonlight reflected off of so many drops of rain still clinging to the branches of trees like jewels. The sandstone of the rocky bluffs along the river stood out white in stark contrast to the darkened trees and shadows all around. It was so beautiful he thought, so damn beautiful.

Off in the distance, he heard a man talking but he couldn’t speak and even if he could, the beauty of the night captivated his attention. Slowly, like the fadeout option of his computer screensaver in the life he had left behind, details of the scene started disappearing, one by one. His vision narrowed down to one silvery drop of rain hanging onto a branch only a foot and a half in front of his eyes. As he tried to focus on that one glorious sight, it let loose, falling just as his vision went dark for the last time. His breath rattled from between his lips and the head sank forward to rest once again, on the sunken remains of his chest that no longer moved. Silence returned to the world.

Jumping T-Run

2012-01-04T06:00:00.002-06:00

Originally posted on February 1, 2005

Bill studied the Radio Flyer and the hill sloping in front him leading down to the infamous T-Run. T-Run a.k.a. Toilet Run was rumored by all the kids at Fox Valley High School to contain the overflow from a lot of septic tanks in town. Yes it was a ditch and most of the time it did contain some stagnate, foul smelling liquid but no Bill didn't think it was actually liquefied shit. He actually drove by the city sewer lagoon on the school bus ride home every day after school but he didn't want the townies to know this. So when the bet had come up, he had accepted it but now he wasn't so sure.

One of the townies had brought in their kid sister's Radio Flyer which was covered in rust making the words barely even visible. One of the rear wheels wobbled when pulled and the handle had been bent many times and straightened over the years. A crude ramp of some blocks and a thick piece of scrap plywood had been set up at the bottom of the hill right at the lip of T-Run and of course, it had been set right in front of the largest pool of stagnate water that the townies could find in the 100 feet or so that ran across the southern part of the school property.

Bill was pretty sure he could steer the rusted Radio Flyer and hit the ramp but the ten feet or so across to the other side of T-Run looked a lot bigger now that there was no backing out. If he made it he would have the admiration of every boy in his seventh grade class and perhaps some of the older kids as well, maybe even some girls. If he didn't, he would crash ass over feet into the liquefied primordial soup of T-Run and walk away smelling like...well, shit. But he figured it would be a good laugh for everyone and he would still go into the annals of Fox Valley lore and maybe win the admiration of everyone. It was a no lose situation unless of course he hit hard and broke something or actually killed himself.

He pushed those thoughts from head and sat down in the Radio Flyer with his feet towards the handle and the handle bent back so that he could steer while riding. Bill gave the thumbs up and put a cheesy grin on display even though his stomach was all tied up in knots. He told the fellows to push him for all they were worth because he was going to need the speed. He tensed his back to provide a good pushing surface and nodded his head quickly giving the okay.

The hands pressed on his back sending him accelerating across the short flat up by the tennis court fence and over the crest of the hill. As he picked up speed the hands began disappearing one after another until all were gone. The wagon picked up speed and hit a small mole hill causing it to lurch sideways almost jerking the handle from his hands. Bill over corrected several times almost wiping out but was able to regain control as he entered the steepest part of the hill nearer the bottom and the ramp. Wind whistled by his ears and he was going faster than he had ever gone before. A bad vibration from the wobbly wheel was shaking the wagon but he thought it was going to hold together long enough.

The last few feet came and went as the wagon hit the plywood squarely in the middle with a loud bang and the splintering sound of tearing wood. The former, Bill was pretty sure, was the wobbly wheel letting go. But momentum was his friend and though the back end of the wagon sank and then jumped sideways almost spilling him out, it continued if forward progress off the end of the ramp at alarming speed. The sounds ceased except for a soft escape of air as the ramp fell down into a pile behind him. He soared up into the air with his eyes focused on the grass on the opposite side. The saying was true, it really did look greener.

Harvest Moon

2012-01-03T06:00:00.000-06:00

Originally posted on October 16, 2006

The harvest moon, one day past full, hangs heavily in the eastern sky as I left the confines of the soft yellow light spilling from the kitchen windows of the farmhouse and walked down the gravel driveway to the shop. The air, though cooler, was not yet the crisp fall air that would arrive in another week but it was still refreshing. The smell of cornstalks stripped of their bounty, still filled the air with their earthy aroma. The dryer fan cooling down a batch of corn in the grain bins on the northwest corner of the farmstead kicks in as heated gas is added to the mix. The collection of deer antlers lodged in the lower branches of the Chinese elm tree seemingly glow a ghostly white.

When I got to the shop, I quietly stepped into the darkness through the side door and made my way to the center of the large sliding doors. I've been away from the farm fifteen years and I still know exactly how many steps it takes me to reach that spot and slip the catch chain off the rod. I couldn't tell you an actual number but I know when I get there. I grab the handle and push the south door open, again instinctively pushing harder the last three feet where the door opens harder. Moonlight fills half of the shop bay so I don't have to rely on instinct to find the north door and slide it open. Before I head back towards the farmhouse, I walk over to the side door and reluctantly flip on the overhead lights so that my father can see to pull the combine inside for the evening. It's a little tighter fit than myself so he can't rely on instinct alone.

Halfway back to the house I pause, caught in a world of darkness between two lighted ones. The large doors of the shop cast their light out towards me but fell short, the farmhouse kitchen lights also reached out invitingly but were a long way from reaching me. Only the moon with its soft blue light made it to where I stood but unlike the other too lights with siren's song-like properties, the light of the moon seemed to tell a story. It was the story of the ongoing harvest, one that I know all to well.

The weather in this part of Iowa had been favorable for crops and post pollination estimates looked bountiful. But farmers know that you can't count your eggs before they are hatched and you can't count the grain until it is safely stored in bins and cooled down for long term storage. So when a windstorm arrived a month before harvest and blew a half mile wide swath through that part of the county laying down 400 acres of my parents corn on the ground and leaving another 400 acres at a rakish angle, they knew they were going to have to work a little harder before they could count their eggs.

Farmers are a tough breed of folks and don't complain much. Complaining never brought the crops in. Instead, they do what they have too. Harvest is now almost a month old and last week, my parents finally got through the 400 worst acres of corn averaging about 20 acres a day, a day being about sixteen hours long. Normally they could get through 100 acres a day but then normally the corn was standing upright in long orderly rows. It shows on their faces and in their postures and I wish I could shoulder some of the burden but my life has taken me down a different road. Instead, I just do what I can when I can to lighten that burden even if just for an hour once a week.

The gas kicks out on the dryer fan and I take one last look at the worn harvest moon, the same moon shining over a combine five miles away in a blown down field of corn trying to pull the stalks up enough to strip them of their ears of corn. I surrender to the glow of the kitchen lights and go inside the farmhouse to start supper, still probably an hour from being eaten by the time the combine and tractors are fueled and parked for the night and already later than most bedtimes.

The Death of Ted

2012-01-02T06:00:00.000-06:00

Originally posted on December 15, 2004

I drove down the long driveway and pulled into my customary spot underneath the large elm tree on the west side of the house. Ted was lying in the grass which was unusual. He normally would run out to greet me as I was coming down the driveway but today he just laid there in the sun dappled shade. As I got out of the car and approached, he remained unmoving with no sign of life, causing my heart to skip a step. When I reached him, knelt down and called his name, he feebly wagged his tail and turned his eyes in my direction. I knelt there scratching Ted behind the ears, allowing my eyes to drift down his body and I could see a large shaved area on his abdomen where all his golden reddish fur had been removed down to the skin. A large scar that had been sutured shut now stretched across the area. My parents hadn't said anything about Ted undergoing any kind of surgery so I figured it must have been some sort of accident that had just happened. I continued to stoke his head for a few minutes and then went inside the house.

Mom was at the kitchen sink when I walked in and from the look of inquiry on my face, went directly into an explanation without waiting. The years of arthritis medicine had taken their toll on Ted's internal organs and they were failing. Ted was dying. I asked how long but she didn't know. Ted had undergone exploratory surgery yesterday where he had been diagnosed and as long as he wasn't in too much pain, my parents decided to care for him until he died. They hadn't wanted to put him to sleep at the vets office and had wanted to give me a chance to say goodbye. That spring morning had been such a beautiful one that my mom had moved him outside to lay underneath the large elm tree where Ted could keep an eye on everything. She thought he would be happy there and I agreed.

Ted had shown up about seven years ago near my grandfather's farm thin and starving and after searching for an owner, we had adopted him, brought him home with us, where we nursed him back into health. A couple years later, Ted started getting lame in the rear hip and we decided to take him into the veterinarian to see what was wrong. After some tests and putting two and two together, we were able to piece together some of Ted's history. He probably was meant to be a hunting dog since he was a Golden Retriever/Yellow Labrador mix but as we already had found out, was gun shy. The owner had probably beat him in an attempt to train him but it hadn't worked. No longer interested in him, they had tried to scare him into running off but he had kept coming back and so they had shot him, hitting him in the rear hip. By the time Ted arrived in our possession, his physical wounds had healed but he had a lot of emotional ones. He would cower whenever a hand was raised even if it were just to scratch behind his ears. With time and patience, Ted would grow to trust us and this would fade with the years. Ted never liked to be out of site of everyone, something that never did fade away and loud noised would always scare him, but at long as we were close by he would remain, albeit with a "I'm miserable" look in his eyes.

But at the age of three, the old buck shot wounds were started to cause arthritis in his hip leaving Ted in constant pain. The doctor had said there was nothing that he could do with an operation but that he had an experimental drug used to eliminate the symptoms of arthritis in race horses that we could give him in the form of an injection once a month. We did and it worked. After the shot, Ted would be unshackled from his pain and he could be an active dog again until the pain started creeping in again towards the end of the month. He seemed to sense that the shots were taking away the pain because he never objected when the time came to administer the medicine. That same medicine that gave him four more years of a pain free life, had also taken its toll on Ted's body and now he was dying.

As I walked outside to go help my dad out in the fields with the spring tillage, I sat down beside Ted, put his head in my lap and spent awhile talking to him and stroking his head. Planting season was fast approaching and every minute counted but something inside me felt that I needed to tell Ted what was on my mind. I thanked him for all the good memories that we had together over the years and told him I was sorry that things had to end this way. As I talked to him, I could see his eyes looking into mine and that old fire in them was still burning. I told him goodbye and that I would spend the entire evening with him when I got done working in the fields. A half hour after arriving home, I drove off again towards the fields leaving Ted lying in the green grass in the shade of the large elm tree.

Barely another half hour would pass, when I heard my mom's voice over the CB radio saying that Ted had died. I continued working the fields in silence letting the memories flow as freely as the tears. Instead of my life, it was Ted's life flashing before my eyes and I watched his movie being played in my mind. Both my father and I worked until well after dark, neither of us wanting to go back to the farm and face the reality. When I finally came home, I fueled up the tractor and put it away in the shed where I noticed a tarp wrapped object resting in the other tractor with a scoop on the front. It had been raised up off the ground to keep other animals away and I knew that Ted's body was beneath the tarp. I told Ted happy hunting and that I would see him in the morning.

By dawns early light, Ted was buried beneath the outreached limbs an old oak tree fifty yards from the house. It is a peaceful spot unadorned by anything and covered only by the hardy prairie grasses that grow there beneath the shade. I still visit his grave now and then when I visit my parents to talk to him but mostly I just live with his memories inside me. He was a dog huge in heart and taught me that it is possible to love again even after experiencing so much hurt. I will always be glad that he could hang onto life so that I had a chance to tell him goodbye.

Thanks for the memories Ted.

Day Nineteen: In Mourning

2012-01-01T06:00:00.001-06:00

Originally posted on March 13, 2009

Monday, April 24, 2000, more or less - There was only about an hour of light left when we shoved off and much of that was spent adjusting ropes and rigging as we floated along. We puttered along as the light faded mostly lost in our thoughts. I tried to feel some regret of having ditched my fellow clients now probably in their tents back at camp but couldn't. I was leaving in my own way to mourn the end of the trip and what had become a life changing experience and for that I couldn't apologize. When darkness enshrouded us and we could no longer safely travel even with the air of a flashlight, we anchored on a sandbar, I crawled into my sleeping bag and dozed off to the gentle rocking of the boat.

A nearly full moon arose and all too soon, a voice said, "it's time." I crawled out of my warm cocoon, untied the rope and pushed us once again into the current. We had made good time so we drifted for a while and sipped some warming whiskey. The canyon walls were getting lower to the surface of the water the nearer we approached the lake proper and as any group when around the dead, in this case a free running Colorado River, we talked in hushed tones. There were long periods of comfortable silence and that was all right because we were all men of the same cloth. Words need not be spoken to be understood. After an hour, we started the motor again, retreated back into our minds for silent meditation and motored through the night watching the canyon walls recede into the murky depths.

The moon shining on the walls of a canyon is perhaps one of the most beautiful sights to behold. The canyon then gathers it, molds it, and shines it down upon me, an insignificant being passing through, blinding me. Twenty days ago, I had set upon a vacation of adventure and for a few days on the river, even believed it. But something inside me changed and I knew it had done so in a fundamental way where there was no going back. I first realized it at Phantom Ranch, then again at the helicopter pad along the river and at Separation Canyon. I didn't want to go back. I wanted nothing more than to be frozen in this place and spend my life running this river over and over. Eternity would never seem so sweet.

As the moon set over the rim and false dawn soon began to take over, I was chilled to the bone partly because the effects of the whiskey were wearing off. I was saddened at the thought of what was now behind me. I wanted to just roll over the side and let what was left of the Colorado river consume me. But dawn's light brightened and chased away my demons and the chills that had entered our bodies like a thief in the night. Soon the world was illuminated and I was feeling more at peace with my fate though I still was visually appalled. The cliffs that had been thousands of feet high were now not more than one hundred feet. Their walls were stained with a bathtub like ring of scum deposited by the lake during one of its higher cycles. The emerald green water we had floated on all week was a stagnate dark blue covered in a slimy scum of motor oil, Styrofoam, and other assorted trash that people had thoughtfully left behind for others to enjoy. I fervently wished I could collect it all, track them down and dump it on their lawn among other things that bordered into the land of the illegal.

We crossed the remainder of the lake in silence, like driving through the scene of a major battle only minutes completed and casualties strewn. When we arrived at the takeout, I carried my gear off to one side out of the way and began helping them unlash the raft flotilla of boats and carry the gear ashore. As the last boat was being stowed onto a waiting trailer, a loud nasally whine from somewhere out on the lake snuck into hearing range and soon into the visual range. A sleek jet boat pulled up and disgorged the rest of the passengers on the shore excitedly babbling about how fast the trip across the lake was. They asked me if anything had happened during the night as we slowly motored across and I told them what they would have perceived, that nothing had. The truth was that yes something had happened during the night. I had said goodbye to the canyon that I had fallen in love with and had left her behind.

Kuya's Philippine Journals: A Day Unlike Any Other - Part II

2011-12-31T06:00:00.000-06:00

Originally posted on February 3, 2006

Upon arriving at my wife's uncle's house in Tarlac City, she went inside to visit and take a nap before the New Year's Eve show really got cooking and I helped out outside by preparing food (enough for an army) for the upcoming feast in their open air kitchen. My job was to skewer about fifteen pounds of marinated pork onto bamboo sticks to later be grilled over the barbeque grill. By the time I had finished this task, my hands were cramped from repeatedly dipping them in the ice-cold marinade to grab strips of pork and tired from shoving them onto the sticks. For once, rather than ask if there was something else I could do, I snuck out into the courtyard to check out the evening.

Fireworks were continually bursting overhead, down the street and some of our relatives were returning fire from the courtyard. I watched them shoot one rocket that was a dud and instead of soaring into the heavens, it barely even cleared the fence out front and disappeared into the alley. I heard a few quick exclamations of surprise, the scurrying of sandaled clad feet over pavement followed by a loud bang. Laughter filled the air almost as much as the smell of burnt sulfur. What a contradiction between the ears and the nose.

The grill was fired up and soon the smell of sizzling meat added to the sulfur. A pot of rice was bubbling in the kitchen along with a few other pots. The older members of the family were now sitting at a table in the courtyard sipping Coca-cola and talking in their native language. The younger children were out in the roadway, which was more like an alley to me, being children. I was somewhere in between listening, observing and taking pictures. Two of the younger ones, Rap and John would come back to check on me and tease me. Rap, whose mother is a cousin of my wife and had been staying in the same house as me most of the time, had formed a special bond to me. He could read and speak English as well as Tagalog but he wasn't yet proficient enough to converse in English. Never the less, he loved my blue eyes and all during my stay in the Philippines he would refer to me as "Blue Eyes" or once even as "Blue Jesus Eyes." Last trip it had been "hey Joe" and this trip "blue Jesus eyes." I could live with that.

About a half hour until midnight, the members of my host family began setting off fireworks at a steady pace using lighters and burning twigs or bamboo shoots that were lit from the barbeque grill. Burnt sulfur now hung so thick in the air that breathing was difficult. Some members of the party put on bandanas to filter it out. Having no such thing, I just breathed through my mouth and tried not to think about my lungs. The roar of the fireworks had grown for a low continuous roar to a more intense roar. In fact, since flash photography no longer worked due to the heavy sulfur fog hanging everywhere, I found that the light from the shelling going on overhead was more than sufficient to take adequate pictures.

I felt like a war correspondent as I ducked this way and that snapping pictures and videos at a furious pace. Stray rockets were shooting this way and that overhead and multitudes of cherry bombs, larger sonic boom bombs, roman candles, flares, and plenty of black cats were exploding everywhere on the ground. Several of the larger fireworks went off near enough to me to slam me with the concussion wave. I was wishing I had brought some earplugs. Right at the start of this new onslaught we suffered our first and only casualty that night. A piece of mortar shell from an exploded firework fell from the night sky and slammed into the hand of young John gashing it shallowly but enough to draw blood. After my wife bandaged him up, I return to covering the event but kept under nearby palm trees hoping that the leaves would slow any more fragments down before plowing into me.

At a quarter until midnight, there was a slight perceptible lull in the fireworks and at first I didn't know what it meant. My hosts took it as a cue to carry out this metal stand of sorts that would hold about two dozen rockets at the same time pointing in all directions and set it up in the middle of the street along with some large flares. I knew the cause of the pause. Everybody was bringing out the big guns for the final showdown..., which started five minutes later. Now Filipinos are late to every thing in their lives. I had determined that early on during my first trip to the country but tonight I learned one exception to the rule. New Year's Eve. For that they were ten minutes early.

The neighbors in every direction fired up every automobile, jeepney, motorcycle and even a police car, anything with a horn or siren, and proceeded to blare them in a continuous chorus. My hosts passed out noise makers to those not working sirens or horns and we all proceeded to blow them until we were literally blue in the face. Have you ever seen someone blowing on a horn while setting off fireworks as fast as the lighter could be worked with the other hand? I have and it can be done quite efficiently. The only thing slowing them down was that the neighbors who had been chased in the street by our stray rocket were now exacting their revenge by throwing one sonic boom firecracker after another from behind their fence into the street where we stood. As I took pictures with one eye, I kept the other eye trained towards their darkened driveway looking for the flash of sparks from a lighter signifying another incoming bomb. At the point, I would dive back behind the safety of the fence and plug my ears until the concussion wave had passed.

Imagine a neighborhood of a hundred thousand families packed into small houses with small yards close together. Imagine that all these families had a large arsenal of fireworks and were all setting them off at the same time. Imagine yourself in the middle of all this. Imagine yourself in the middle of the firework display that is shot off at the largest firework display in the country for the 4th of July. This was about four times more intense. Flashes of hot white light would illuminate the alley making all shadows as sharp as razor blades and as black as ink. Through the heavy smoke I could barely make out figures up the street running this way and that trying to stay out of the line of fire. The machine gun litany of explosions overhead was so quick it was almost impossible to discern even the slightest of pauses of silence.

I found myself wanting to hide in a bunker somewhere until it was over but couldn't. I was drawn forward into the street by the rush of all the citizens the Philippines who in one mass of unity from the youngest to the eldest, ran and jumped, yelled and screamed, laughed and gyrated around wildly in the street among the explosions lost in their joy. I couldn't help myself. I pocketed my camera and with arms waving above my head and a sulfur induced gravelly scream coming from deep within my chest, I ran out and joined them. It was unlike anything I have ever experienced. It was welcoming in a New Year... Filipino style!

Kuya's Philippine Journals: A Day Unlike Any Other - Part I

2011-12-30T06:00:00.000-06:00

Originally posted February 2, 2006

New Year's Eve day was a bright sunny affair and upon waking up with the broken rooster, I noticed there was a slight intensity to the fireworks that were going off at four in the morning that I hadn't noticed before. There were much larger ones going off more frequently sending thunderous roars echoing up the steep valleys of this mountainside town. A hint of burnt sulfur hung in the air. The favorite day of all Filipinos had begun.

I spent the morning packing my luggage because only parts of it would make the upcoming trip with me and the rest would follow later. I carefully wrapped all my souvenirs in dirty laundry to prevent breakage and eliminate any unnecessary searching. I mean who in their right mind would want to riffle through someone else's dirty laundry? With bags packed and carried downstairs, there was little to do but eat and take a nap so I did both.

When I woke in the early afternoon, I noticed another increase in the firework explosion levels. Barely a minute would pass by before another explosion would fill the vacant air with noise. My mother-in-law, youngest brother-in-law, my wife and I caught a ride to the bus station in the town center and within minutes had grabbed seats on a Victory Liner that would take us to Tarlac City in the lower provinces where we would spend New Year's Eve. In America, getting tickets on a bus at the last minute on a very popular traveling day would be all but impossible but in the Philippines it was very easy. You just got on the bus and if there was an available seat, you were good to go. About fifteen minutes later, the bus backed out of the station and we were on our way down the mountain.

The bus conductor came by asking how far we were going and punching out tickets accordingly with the appropriate price. The four one-way tickets for the entire five-hour journey cost me $16.00 U.S. The bus made several stops along the way dropping off passengers and picking up others. About fifteen minutes into the trip the bus stopped and only the driver got out to spend several minutes picking up some fresh produce at a roadside stand. He would make another solo stop for several minutes just outside of Tarlac City to deliver the produce to his wife who met him at their front gate. Not only did he give her the produce but he walked her inside and lingered for a few minutes longer before coming back out to the bus and taking us the final kilometers. Nobody seemed to mind, which reinforced that I was in a world much different from my own.

It was much warmer when we got out of the air-conditioned bus around 8:30 at the Tarlac City station. Unlike in the mountains of Baguio City where jeepneys are the backbone of mass transportation, in the lower provinces tricycles rule the earth. A tricycle is your basic small motorcycle with a sidecar attached and has a top speed of perhaps twenty miles per hour. Walking out to the street in front of the bus terminal, the view was full of them buzzing this way and that like a mad swarm of mosquitoes. Several of the other passengers were already at the curb trying to hail a tricycle to take them to their final destination but weren't having any luck. But as soon as this white guy stepped up to the curb, immediately a dozen tricycles swooped in and jockeyed for position to be the one to get my business.

Now all during my trips, I have seen tricycles with four or five passengers crammed inside the sidecar or hanging onto the side, often times with several sacks of rice or crates of produce stashed on top. So despite their size, I assumed that they must be quite roomier than they actually looked. As my wife and I stuffed ourselves into one of the tricycles with our suitcase and handbag, I suddenly knew what an unhatched chick felt like. My head was pressed between my knees, which were pressed against the luggage and my wife had wedged herself into the remaining available space, which wasn't much. I was very happy that she was petite or I would have had to strap her on top. In a high pitched mosquito like whine that made me want to wave my hands past my ears to shoo it away, the motorcycle driver revved the engine, released the clutch and we crawled out into the rest of the swarm heading this way and that on the road.

At the first little uneven crack in the road, the bottom of the sidecar bottomed out on the axle beneath in a spine-crunching bang causing me to slam my head against the ceiling. The driver immediately slowed down and looked to make sure nothing was broken before gunning the engine and going full throttle again. Every little bump, all three thousand four hundred and thirty seven between the bus station and our destination, caused the little carriage to smack hard against the axle. If I hadn't been wedged like an embryo in my little egg like sidecar, my spine would have been in pieces but the tightness of the quarters actually worked to protect me. That or my wife absorbed the worst of the blows.

As we navigate the narrow roads and alleys for twenty minutes, I felt as if I were a courier delivering a message to a general on the front lines during World War I. Evidently Filipinos tire of lighting huge fireworks when nobody is around so as soon as a tricycle made it's way down their street, they made a point of setting off the largest explosive available in the road right as we drove by. Firecrackers, flares and small bombs were bursting everywhere causing you to instinctively duck and at least three times during our ride, a blinding white light would flash for a painful split second before one of the sonic boom firecrackers went off within feet of our tricycle. The concussive pressure wave would slam my exposed side like a wide board and the resulting boom would send me into a temporary deafness followed by ringing in my ears. My wife screamed reflexively each time but there was nothing to be done except grin and bear it because I couldn't move my arms to plug my ears or wrap them protectively around her. We were wedged that tight.

We made it to our destination intact (both us and the tricycle axle) and after "hatching" or extricating ourselves from the tricycle, we paid our fare and limped up the driveway. For the privilege of feeling like an unhatched chick rolling down a mountainside, I paid $0.60 U.S. which was $0.20 more than what my mother-in-law paid her tricycle driver who had been right ahead of us the entire time. As an American, you must learn the language and the prices or prepare to pay more. Shell shocked and tired, I greeted the awaiting relatives who were preparing food enough for an army for the impending celebration that evening. By the light of the fireworks now exploding in a steady roar overhead and all around, I looked at my watch and saw that it was now nine o'clock... three hours until midnight.

Day Fifteen: Alive Below Lava!

2011-12-29T06:00:00.005-06:00

Originally posted on February 13, 2009

Ote Below Lava

Sitting in the front of the dory boat along with Jurgen the elder German, we silently drifted downstream towards the lip of Lava Falls. Beyond the lip all that I could see was leaping white froth that seemed to be waving us towards our doom like sailors to a siren. My hands were locked onto the gunnel railing and for a second, I looked at them fascinated by the how white and insignificant they looked. The boat started picking up speed as we edged over the lip and slip down the tongue towards the first wave that wickedly towered above us. The boat climbed half way up the wave before the weight of the German and myself combined drove it into the interior of the wave.

The icy cold water took my breath away and the loud roar was abruptly dampened as I hung on and waited for the boat to punch out the backside of the wave. The water continued tossing me around like I was inside a washing machine but I continued to hang on for what seemed like an eternity. I was just about to let go and swim for freedom, certain that we had flipped over when we suddenly emerged into daylight. I gasped for breath as the boat with another half ton of water added to its weight, groaned and slid down the backside of the wave into a water trough so deep that the gates of Hades had to be nearby. With all the additional weight, the boat didn't even pretend to go over the second and much bigger wave and just dove into the immense face. Again I hung on and contemplated life inside a washing but once again we punched out into daylight and slid down into the trough heading for yet a third wave. Once more into the wash cycle and once more we lurched into daylight.

The wave train ahead started getting smaller and the boat full of water, passengers and gear was now able to lurch over them like a drunk on a roadside curb. We were through! I wasn't going to die after all! I had survived the mother of all rapids! Wait. Through my euphoria-laced brain, I heard this scream piercing my mind that sounded almost primeval and not of this world. I looked around searching for the source when I realized that it was coming from the German. No wait, it was also coming from the couple in back. Wait, I was yelling too! Then it hit me, we were all yelling in euphoria at having cheated death. We were alive!

Yet another primeval scream of "Bail!" pierced my other scream already in progress and once again I started searching for a source to this new sound and saw Ote straining at the oars trying to eddy us out as the boat lurched full of water over waves still six feet tall. It still took a few seconds for my brain to process that it wasn't over yet and that we still could tip over if we didn't get some more freeboard by lightening the load and once id did register, I grabbed the bailer and started bailing the water like a man on a sinking ship who didn't know how to swim. The other passengers quickly caught on, helped with the bailing and soon our boat was riding much higher and we were pulling into shore.

Boat Running Lava

Ote told us to get out while she oared back ready to help if any of the three other dories or two rafts behind us flipped over. I grabbed my camera and scrambled upstream stumbling over the sharp lava rocks that cut my legs like razors in an attempt to get some pictures of the remaining boats coming through the rapids. After all the boats had safely made it through Lava and were pulling towards shore, I walked back downstream to the beach where everyone was gathering. The euphoric high was starting to wear off and I finally noticed blood dripping down from a half dozen wounds on my legs. I still had enough of that high not to care so I took an offered beer, popped the top and held it up as we toasted our survival in the dory boat tradition. We were ABL, Alive Below Lava.

When the celebrations died down, we floated on down the river to mile 185-1/2 where we made camp for the night on a huge sand bar. After the initial flurry of setting up camp or tossing my gear in a pile, as was my case, we all kept talking about Lava and the nine people who would be leaving us tomorrow. Because of my journal writing, I was designated group address note taker, so I walked around getting everyone's personal information so that I could send it out after everyone went back to their regular lives.

The crew mixed up some cocktails and an avocado dip to munch on while we waited for the preparation of a beef and chicken enchilada dinner complete with rice and a cake to celebrate Jorge's birthday. After supper, the traditional Lava Follies, or skit show put on by crew and clients alike, began around a roaring fire. There were poems, songs, jokes and stories told by all. Ote read a speech given by Chief Seattle that was absolutely beautiful and since everyone was curious about what I wrote in my journals, I read today's excerpt about Lava. The crew then handed out awards (chucks of lava rock), commemorating the identifiable trait of each client. I received the Harvey Butchart award for hiking every mile of every hike and then some.

After the follies, I stayed up late into the night with some of the crew swapping jokes and reveling in the day. Clouds started moving in but we were all full of sunny cheer at having cheated the river one more time and more importantly, surviving to tell about it.

Customary Beer Below Lava Falls

Coming Down From Hooker In a Toad Strangler

2011-12-28T06:00:00.001-06:00

Originally posted on April 16, 2008

Lightening was popping but still several seconds separated from the accompanying volley of thunder but at 10,000 plus feet, I was in no way feeling comforted about that. I had fortunately made it past the friction slab part of the decent where two 1000 plus feet vertical drop-offs were separated by a severely tilting five feet wide slab of granite before the rain drops began to fall. The friction slab was technically not that difficult because your boots would stick right to it allowing you to walk up or down. However, the mental aspect was daunting because one slip and a couple feet later you would be flying. Trying to do that in the rain wouldn't have helped the mental aspect of it. The rain was falling in a real toad strangler as Pablo would say. Soon I passed the friction slab and was hustling down the mountain as fast as possible. At about 10,000 feet, the gentle slope gives way to a nearly vertical slope consisting mostly of rocks and a few clumps of grass gripping tenuously here and there. The clouds were now very dark and ugly, the temperatures were dropping faster than a rock and I was sweating bullets out of fear and exertion.

Earlier that day, I had left from camp at a relatively late four in the morning and after five hours had reached the summit. It was a cloudless warm day and as I ate my breakfast of fruit, nuts and chocolate, the sun seemed to bore holes right through my skin. For an hour or so, I wrote in my journals and lounged like a lizard. Then I did something that I shouldn't have done, I closed my eyelids to check for holes. Well into the afternoon, I woke up still bathed in sunlight but ominous clouds were over the horizon and moving my way fast. As quickly as I could, I had slung my daypack on and was scrambling down the summit and across a mile or two wide flat mesa on top of Mt. Hooker. I knew I was going to be real close to being in serious trouble.

I started down the nearly vertical slope and immediately slipped and fell deeply bruising my hip and leaving me something to remember the trip by for a couple weeks beyond. More carefully, I kept going trying to hang onto what I could while looking over my shoulder for the next step. My legs started shaking with the exertion and I knew I was close to my limit by the time I finally reached the saddle pass and started almost running down the maintained trail along its flank. Several brief periods of hail would hit me every time I thought I should slow down, and give me some new energy with marble sized shots to my upper torso and head. Finally about three hours after I set out, the rain began to pass just as I made it to camp and fell into my tent steaming in moisture and body heat. I learned a valuable lesson that day and one I am not soon to forget

Back Home, Back Home, Thank God, I'm Back Home At Last!

2011-12-27T06:00:00.001-06:00

Originally posted on February 4, 2008

Better later than never has always been a good motto to believe in especially when it comes to airplane travel but it was still hard to keep that in the front of my mine after spending two days in an airport. But before I get ahead of myself, let me start at the beginning.

My flight out from Iowa started off normally. I checked in using the kiosk, got through security in record time and soon found myself in the commuter jet at the end of the runway with the engine revving up. That was the last normal airplane event for the rest of my trip. Before the brakes were releases, the engines shut down and the captain informed us that the tower had halted us due to some weather event in Chicago. Since I had looked at the weather maps before leaving and had seen that everything was clear and sunny for the entire trip, I was baffled along with many of the other passengers. So we sat on the end of the runway for fifteen minutes until the pilot announced that our departure would be delayed by possibly an hour due to wind shear in Chicago and that he would taxi out of the way and shut down the engines to conserve fuel. I had just settled in for the next hour sitting in a plane that I had only been scheduled to be in for fifty minutes total when the engines started up once again. However, the pilot said that there was now a ground stop for all traffic coming to Chicago and we were heading back to the terminal.

We waited in the terminal for several hours before we finally were reboarded and took off for Chicago. Of course we missed our connecting flight to New York and had to get rebooked on a later flight. That flight left without much hassle and we actually made up an hour of flight time so by the time we landed in New York, we were only three hours later than what we had planned on. Just in time for evening rush hour traffic.

Although there was supposed to be light snow in the Midwest on the day of our return flights, I was hoping our delays of the outbound trip would mean that our inbound trip would be hassle free. I couldn't have been more wrong. We showed up to the airport on Thursday three hours early so that we could get through security and find a place to eat before boarding. Security confiscated my 4.5 oz tube of lotion for dry skin that I have taken through probably 20 or 30 security checkpoints since 9/11. At least I didn't get the rubber glove test I tried to tell myself.

We ate lunch and went to our gate to see that our flight was on time but that two previous flights to Chicago and one later flight has already been cancelled. It was not looking good and I was hoping that ours would be cancelled soon so that we could just get rebooked for the next day and head out for another evening in New York. Right at our boarding time, it was announced that our 3:40 flight would now be 4:30 and wheels up at 7:30. Needless to say I wasn't too pleased about spending almost three hours sitting in a plane going nowhere for a 1 hour and 50 minute flight. But we waited. Our flight was bumped to boarding at 6:30 with wheels up at 9:30, then 7:30 with wheels up at 10:30 and then 9:30 with wheels up at 11:05. By this time, I had been in the airport almost eight hours and all but our flight to Chicago had been cancelled across the board of airlines. My traveling companions were still hoping that we would get to Chicago but they were inexperienced and didn't know that it would be worse there. There would be thousands of stranded passengers there and everything would be shut down. At least if our flight was cancelled, we could rebook through St. Louis or someplace else other than Chicago and avoid it all together. But fate just wasn't with me. At 10:10, we boarded the flight and about 10 minutes to eleven, we took off for Chicago.

As I expected, Chicago was chaos. Thousands of people were sleeping on thousands of cots set up and all the ticket counters were shut down for the night. Not wanting to spend the night, we decided to go look for a rental car agency to rent us a car to drive one-way back to Iowa. We couldn't find one. After asking, we found out that the only way was to board a bus to the rental car agencies, one-by-one to see if we could find one. So we split up. My companions tried to locate a rental car while I tried to find a phone where I could get rebooked for a flight tomorrow. I found out that we had been booked on a flight at 9:45 the next morning and my traveling companions after an hour and a half of calling, finally found someone who would rent us a compact Kia Rio for the cost of one arm and two legs. Since it was then 2 a.m. and we were looking at arriving with crappy roads probably around 9 a.m., we decided to just stick it out at the airport on a cot and catch our flight.

There was just one problem to that, we had walked through security to look for a rental car agency representative and security was now closed down. All the cots were on the other side and we were essentially locked out of the airport. Great. We found a comfortable place on the floor of the ticket counters and tried to make the best of not much. At 4 a.m., the ticket counters opened and we got out confirmed tickets. We went through security but all three of us had four S's on our ticket, which to the uninformed traveler means we get the special treatment. Our bags were emptied and inspected with fine combs. My traveling companions were busted for a gallon sized plastic bag instead of quart sized for their sprays, gels and liquid carry-on. We all got frisked and wanded. Some forty minutes later, we were released and allowed to repack and redress. We found out gate and tried to sleep on the benches for the five hours we had left.

Three hours later, I awoke to a woman sitting by my head who kept rattling her cellophane bag that once contained cheetoes. After ten minutes of this I stirred, looked her in the eye and gave her the evil eye. I closed my eyes only to have her start at it again ten minutes later. The boarding area was still almost deserted and of thousands of seats, she had to sit two feet from my head across the aisle nervously making noise with her empty cheetoes bag. I sat up disgusted only to be shocked when she quickly shoved my bag to one side and sat right next to me. I was just about to give her a piece of my mind when out of the corner of my eye, I saw the screen showing that our flight had been cancelled.

I awoke my traveling companions and we made our way back to rebooking only to see the line stretched about half the length of the concourse, which if you have been to O’Hare, is quite long. We were realistically looking at four hours of waiting time only to be rebooked on another flight out this evening. To make matters worse, ours was the fifth flight to our destination that had been cancelled so even if our flight out went, we would be standby. Getting three seats on a packed flight was probably out of the question and all signs were pointing to another night in the airport. It was not going to happen.

We called up the rental car and they still had a Kia Rio available but the price had gone up $20. We booked it and hotfooted it over to the rental agency. With out disheveled looks and probably smelling pretty ripe, I was surprised that they continued to let us rent a car much less talk them into letting us take a Chevy Malibu instead. Along the way, at least a dozen people told us that what we were attempting was suicide, including a woman who lived twenty minutes away from the airport who said it took her two hours to get there and still arrived oddly enough, four hours early? We hopped in the car and set off into the unknown. For perhaps 20 miles, the roads were mostly slush and snowed covered, another 100 miles were just wet and the last 100 were completely dry. We made it to our destination airport in only four and a half hours. The 90-mile drive home went smoothly and after a hot shower and shave, I dropped into bed at 2 o'clock on Friday, never so happy to be home

Not So Peaceful At the Monastery

2011-12-26T06:00:00.000-06:00

Originally posted on March 21, 2007

My stomach nestled firmly high up in my throat near where my tonsils would have been had I not had them taken out as a kid. My testicles crawled up inside my body and had my bladder been full it would have emptied. I was floating in my small yellow kayak about fifty feet upstream of Monastery Falls where a boy had drowned fishing not five days before and I was terrified. The water bunched up from the normally wide expanse of the river and pounded its way through the two large granite rocks at the head of the falls not five feet apart. The river was up and the hole at the base of the upper seven-foot drop was a monster. It was one of those that would swallow me whole and spit me out a couple hours later like a stale burp.

Random blobs of foam flew up from beyond the brink as the roar of the rapids approached. My instructor was standing near the top of the upper drop eyeing my approach and form that right now was desperately feeling like it belonged on a nice couch back in Iowa instead of wedged into a whitewater kayak above the biggest falls on the Red River. The other classmates were scattered all along the right side of the falls all perched at a point where they thought they could see me bite the big one as best as possible. The current sucked harder at my boat pulling me towards the throat of the angry beast and I knew there was no backing out now. There would be no room to paddle until below the first drop because the rocks on either side were too close together. The instructor had informed me that I should paddle like hell to gain enough momentum to make it through the huge sucking hole at the bottom and to be sure and turn the paddle so it wouldn't behead me if it got caught on the rocks. My legs started turning into jelly as I paddled like hell toward what was certain death and drowning number two within a week but damn if I was going without a fight. I gave two final pulls on the paddle, folded it along side the boat and closed my eyes as the water fell away from the boat and it yawed down directly towards the gaping jaws of the monster hole.

The water slammed my chest as I brought my paddle back out and desperately went through the motions trying to find some solid water somewhere in the aerated foam that engulfed me. I couldn't tell if I was going forward or being pulled back but I felt the blade of my paddle sink into some dense water somewhere beneath the foam and I pulled with all my might launching my boat forward and into the bright sunlight on the far side of the standing wave beneath the hole. However, I was slightly askew and my boat surfed right down the backside of the wave and into the shore right at the base of one of my fellow students feet. The nose of the boat slid along the face of the granite boulder with a loud scraping noise before wedging firmly into a crack and stopping me so hard that the momentum of my upper torso kept going slamming my thankfully helmet head against the deck of the kayak. Dazed but still clutching my paddle, I tried for an upper brace as my boat slowly rolled over but it was weak and the boat kept going. Just as my head was about to disappear under the foamy water, the paddle blade hit bottom and pushing up I was able to right the boat.

The boat was upright and I fought to regain my composure as my kayak now hurdled over a couple intermediate drops towards the lower larger drop of ten feet, backwards. This was back when white water kayaking was in its infancy and the short stubby models of today weren't even a thought. The channel was to narrow for me to be able to turn my boat around in time to meet the lower falls head on and so I straightened it up slightly as I went over the lip, backwards. I hit the much shallower and less dangerous hole at the bottom of the lower drop and was immediately flushed downstream. My kayak sickenly tried to roll as the various eddies piled water on the deck but the adrenaline was kicking in and several almost savage braces kept it upright until I finally eddied out in the large eddy along the shore of the manicured lawns of the monastery for which the falls is named after.

My stomach and testicles both assumed their rightful positions within my body and the pounding adrenalin gave way to shaking in my hands and arms as I realized that I had made it through the falls and more importantly, lived to tell about it. I floated there for a couple minutes soaking in the peaceful surrounding below such a violent section of the river and listen to the sounds of my cheering classmates. I regained my composure and with a few strokes, punched out of the eddy right below the lower hole at the base of the falls doing a peel out while surfing the wave to the other side of the river where they were all waiting. The classmate whom legs the bow of my boat almost pinched beneath the upper falls joking told me how large my eyes were as my boat turned backwards and almost upside down. I hid the quivering in my arms, legs and voice and as bravely as I could said, "Oh that's nothing, you should have seen the size of your eyes!"

Kuya's Philippine Journals: A Christmas Story

2011-12-25T06:00:00.000-06:00

Originally posted on January 18, 2006

For several hours that afternoon, my job was slicing up the meat meant for the barbeque grill with the world's dullest set of knives and getting it marinating. Once it had marinated properly, I spent a couple backbreaking hours shoving the slices of meat onto sharpened bamboo sticks. But I wasn’t alone and had good company as everyone was preparing for the big feast that was to happen in less than six hours. Piles of vegetables were chopped, fish prepared, and several other dishes were readied so that upon our arrival home from the midnight mass, the feast could be prepared in the shortest amount of time. Eventually everything was prepared as much as possible and my wife and I snuck up stairs to catch a short nap on “the rack” before the mass.

Dark had taken over the Philippines except for the sparse firework explosion when I awoke three hours later to the rustling downstairs as people prepared for mass. Because Filipino houses don’t have insulation of any kind, sound travels easily. We too started getting ready and then hopped into the family van since at a mere 64 degrees, it was deemed too cold to watch the 100 yards to the church. The van made it about 30 of those yards before stalling out and refusing to return to life so at risk of hypothermia, we emptied out and walked the remaining 70 yards.

The midnight mass starts at ten o’clock and until recently used to last until midnight, hence the name. But Filipinos evidently protested that it didn’t leave them enough time to prepare their feasts when they got home so the local church condensed the service to just an hour and a half. Fifteen minutes into the beautiful service, I found myself looking at my watch to see how much longer I was going to have to sit on the painfully hard pews that had little in the way of ergonomics for tall white guys. My butt felt as if I had just been caned which made it difficult to pay attention to the recreation of the nativity story by the local children. The only good thing about the pain was that it took my mind off the numbing 64 degree chill during the walk home, me in a light jacket and my hosts bundled in heavy coats, stocking caps, scarves and mittens.

The walk home was downhill (in a very steep sense) and the thought of food spurred everyone so that we were soon home and setting about with last minute food preparations. I went to help light the charcoal grill only to find out that no charcoal supplies had been laid in reserve and we were clean out. Now in America at 11:30 on Christmas Eve, you would be SOL or shit out of luck but not in the Philippines. My wife’s younger adopted brother and I first went to the sari-sari store two houses down which is the Filipino version of the convenience store at a gas station. Since there is a sari-sari store about every other house, you never have to go far. They were out so we ended up going to a neighbor two houses up the street in the other direction where we were able to obtain a huge bag of charcoal. Not the uniformly pressed very condensed charcoal that we use here in the states but honest to goodness charred pieces of wood. Normally it would take a cart to haul it back to house but in the spirit of getting some good BBQ into my starving stomach sooner rather than later, I hoisted the 60 lb sack on my shoulder and climbed the 20 feet down to street level and carried it the 20 feet back to our house.

Soon, the grill was sizzling with grilling pork as the men stood around talking about guy things in Tagalog while the women made the final preparations inside and talked women talk in Tagalog. I felt just like I was at an American BBQ except that I only understood about every fifth word. Just enough to get the gist of what was being said and laugh at the appropriate times. Now Filipinos are typically fashionably late in every aspect in their lives but when it comes to celebrations, they are always early. So at five until midnight, it was close enough to Christmas morning for them that we said the prayer and commenced to eating, even though the meat was still grilling. I don't think Jesus would have minded. There are only two rules for celebrations in the Philippines. First you must prepare enough food to feed a small army that has been fasting for a month and two, everyone must eat as it food is going out of style. Both were accomplished.

An hour later, empty bamboo sticks had been denuded of their meaty contents and empty bowls and liters of pop filled the table. Dishes were gathered and washed while non-family members bid their goodbyes and set off into the early morning to some other household where they might snag some leftover food or perhaps receive a present. Perhaps pared down to a dozen family members, we retired to the living room and began to pass out the presents to various people. My wife and I had sent a balikbayan box full of gifts a month and a half earlier plus had brought a huge suitcase full of gifts so it was a very merry Christmas for my wife’s family. Simple gifts of shampoo, Pringles, t-shirts and merchandise from name brand stores here in the U.S. were big hits and much appreciated by everyone. Because finances prevent most of my hosts from buying lots of gifts, my wife and I didn’t receive any which allowed me plenty of time to wander around in the periphery dodging wrapping debris and take plenty of pictures. My gift was just being in their presence and being accepted as one of their own. For that, I was very happy.

Finally at a little after two in the morning and less than an hour before the neighbors chicken would begin his trial wakeup calls, everyone gathered up their gifts and made for the various beds throughout the house. I was able to sleep until about eight when “the rack” forced me to get up or suffer a permanently seized back. The five hours of sleep took just the edge off my senses, which as it ended up was probably for the best since a few hours later I would be fearing for my life.

I've Survived "Pizza and Pepsi On the Brain" Disease

2011-12-24T06:00:00.000-06:00

Originally posted on June 17, 2005

The golden brown crust of the Pizza Hut pizza was leaving behind a slight oily sheen to my fingers but oh did it taste so good. The cheese was starting to turn a dark brown at all the high points just the way I like it and the toppings were crammed onto every delicious slice. The meats and vegetables of the Supreme pizza were creating a harmony that was singing in my mouth. I lifted the frosty red class of ice cold Pepsi and took a big drink to wash down my last bite of pizza harmony. The crisp tingling bubbles of carbonation, washed across my tongue like a jacuzzi, and swept down my throat with an invigorating splash. This was just too good to be dreaming but unfortunately it was because in reality, my body was slowly being tortured.

It was day thirteen of our backpacking trip in the mountains and we were hiking out from the last base camp to the car some thirteen or fourteen miles away. The plan was to take an easy two days and do some fishing along the way but like all well-intentioned plans, sometimes things just don't seem to work out the way you had planned. We had made it up and over the pass in good time and were now going down the backside. Our packs had been lightened of just about all the food making them seem extremely light when compared to the leaden weights on the way in thirteen days earlier. But just because our mind was fooled, our body wasn't and it knew it was still carrying more of a load than normal as we hiked down the trail.

The trail itself was fairly decent for being in the mountains but it was steep and rough. When hiking down such a trail, for every two feet you walk, you also descend a foot and when you are walking fast while carrying a backpack, this can create a lot of stress on your feet and legs. Mine were definitely feeling the strain but I was a young man and our slowest member was leading us out and happened to be female. By putting her in the lead, it insures that the faster and stronger people are behind her and that we all remain as a group in case someone gets in trouble. But it also meant that as a strong young man, I couldn't complain that we were going to fast because it would feminize my masculinity in some way. So I resorted to recalling mental images of hot Pizza Hut Supreme pan pizza and glassfuls of ice cold Pepsi.

Whenever I am in the mountains, these images invade my brain like a worm. Down "there" in everyday life, I can go months without eating a pizza or drinking a Pepsi or even getting an urge to do them. But up "here", maybe due to the lower air pressures of the mountains, or the large amounts brain processing time that I suddenly have available, my brain always seems to dwell on that subject and no matter how I try, I can't rid it out of my mind. I'll be catching a monster cutthroat trout on the edge of a beautiful mountain lake nested in a huge cirque of mountains and I'm thinking of sitting in the air conditioned muted darkness in a Pizza Hut. I'll be eating said trout and I am imagining taking my first bite of that Pizza Hut pizza. On it goes all fourteen days that I am in the wilderness.

Our pace leader was really picking them up and putting them down. She was in high gear and we were way ahead of schedule. In fact, we were so far ahead of schedule that we soon passed our planned evening stopping point and the sun hadn't even reached its apex in the sky. She kept on hiking and the three of us kept on following behind her without a word except for the occasional grunt when one of us stumbled like a faltering horse on a loose rock or tripped on a tree root. We were all suffering from the pizza and Pepsi condition and none of us wanted to seem like the weakling by asking her to slow down.

My brother and I inherited long slender legs from our mother. For my brother, it led to a really good high school cross-country career and for a time, I was unbeatable on a bicycle. All three of us have a natural pace that is a slow trot to those with shorter legs. In our family we refer to it as the famous high leg kicking "Gestapo Stomp" that you see in old films of the Hitler era. Many times I will be walking with someone and notice they are getting out a breath only to realize that I am walking to fast for them. Only after family friend Dick died of cancer, did I learn from his widow that he had given our family the nickname of "Abroids" which is a play on my real last name and robotic like androids. He evidently thought that our sustained high pace was more robotic than human.

Shortly after three in the afternoon, we struggled out of the wilderness and into the parking lot where the vehicle we had left behind was waiting. My feet felt like they had been caned about a hundred times but I didn't care. We were out of the mountains and by nightfall, I would be eating a Supreme pan pizza and sipping on an ice cold Pepsi. Two hours later, we had made it out of the foothills of the mountain and were pulling into a motel parking lot for some hot showers before supper. As I took a step outside the van, I winced and almost cried out in pain coming from the soles of my feet. It hurt so bad, I ended up doing a duck waddle of sorts on the sides of my feet into the hotel room and from there, crawled on my hands and knees into the shower.

The repeated pounding had gradually tenderized my feet until the point where they were deep bruises and I could barely walk and wouldn't be able to do so at a normal gate for almost two weeks. I wasn't the only one. The rest of our group were also limping and my younger brother would eventually lose all his toenails for a time until they re-grew back. Now, years later, we often remember that as our own "Trail of Tears." The girl leading us out claims that she thought we were silent because she was going too slow and the rest of us all think that we were silent because she was going too fast to waste breath on extraneous talking. After we had all gotten cleaned up, we hobbled out to the van where we drove to the nearest Pizza Hut to find the cure for our "pizza and Pepsi on the brain" disease. It sure must have been a site to see four people waddle like ducks, walking on the sides of their feet, come into the restaurant where they proceeded to inhale hot Pizza Hut Supreme pizza and drink enormous amounts of ice cold Pepsi like it was going out of style. They are probably still talking about us.

Riding RAGBRAI and Carbohydrate Induced Comas

2011-12-23T06:00:00.000-06:00

Originally posted July 26, 2005

The Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa or RAGBRAI for short began on Sunday accompanied with temperatures over one hundred degrees for the ten thousand registered riders and assorted five thousand who crash the party. The ride is traditionally held during the last full week of July and goes from Missouri River to Mississippi River, which is an average of 500 miles. Iowa gets a bad rap for being a flat state and unless you have ridden across on a bicycle, you would probably agree. Those of us, who have ridden across on a bicycle, know that this isn't even close to the truth.

I have ridden on every mile of two RAGBRAI's in the past and it really isn't as hard as it seems riding anywhere from 60 to 100 miles a day. We usually get up at the crack of dawn to get some miles under our belt before the heat of morning sets in for good. After five or ten miles, we usually stop at a roadside stand for a stack of pancakes and then it is back on the road. All around us, in front of us and behind us are hundreds of riders stretching from horizon to horizon so there is plenty of company and entertainment. It is these people who keep your mind away from the agony located in your butt and legs as you peddle along talking and taking in the sights.

All along the route, food tents liberally dot the roadsides and about every ten miles or so, there is another town where some sort of entertainment is playing and plenty of libations are sold to cool the thirst. Roadside ditches are lined with sheets of plastic and turned into pools for soaking tired bodies. Huge stock tanks full of ice are loaded to the gills with watermelons, sodas and beers. Some towns graciously open up their public pools to the general masses for what always ends up in plenty of nudity and belly flop contests or both. There are always the ever-present beer gardens set up in drifts of plastic cups of those who have been there before you. There is always live music, talent shows, and plenty of water related activities design to keep you wet and cool. Nobody rides through these towns without stopping and nobody rides slowly. The standard procedure is to stop, get off and walk your bike through town so that you don't wreck while gawking at the carnival like atmosphere.

If we had timed things right, we would get into the overnight host town by about one o'clock to beat the worst of the heat. The group I rode with usually wrote the town's chamber of commerce ahead of time looking for host families who would allow us to sleep in their back yards or better yet, spare air conditioned rooms. This would help us avoid the overcrowded general campground and better suited our early morning bicycling farmer lifestyle. We would set up our gear and then set out to find the all you can eat pasta dinner that some church group always seemed to be serving out of a church basement. There, we would eat mountainous plates of spaghetti chased with loaves of French bread until our spandex biking shorts were stretched to the limit. Then it was back to the shaded tent or air condition room floor to take a siesta and to wait out the heat of the day in a carbohydrate induced coma.

In the evenings, we would usually hop on our bikes and ride around town checking out the entertainment and sometimes partake in it. Up to fifteen thousand bikers and a few thousand onlookers would also have the same idea so it was usually a wild time. Sometimes you would find a nude slip and slide set up on some grassy hill, dancing going on in the park or a pie-eating contest going down on main street. For some, usually the people who didn't get started riding that morning until around noon, the party is just getting started. For those who started early, when the sun goes down and the coolness of the evening begins, we disappear to our shelters in preparation for the next day.

For seven days, these same scenes are repeated over and over. Riding, pancakes, more riding, punctuated by frequent stops for food and water, more riding, bicycling nudist sighting, more riding and finally pulling into the overnight town, spandex busting spaghetti dinners, carbohydrate induced comas, more walking around town, more fun and libations, sleep of the dead, and repeat. Five hundred miles later, you coast down the final hill to the Mississippi River to dip the front tire of the bicycle into the river completing a journey that began with a rear wheel dipped into the Missouri River. Day two was yesterday and as you read this, day three is almost over for some and just starting for others. So if you are driving through and get stopped for several hours while thousands of bicyclists ride by in the hundred-degree heat, it isn't that all of Iowa has gone crazy, it is only RAGBRAI.

A Mountain Lake Supper

2011-12-22T06:00:00.001-06:00

Originally posted December 20, 2005

The tent was securely staked down, the fly zipped, and my backpack was safely stored inside. The only piece of extraneous equipment was my whisper light stove, a frying pan, and some butter. I picked up my fly rod, a knapsack with some extra tippet and flies, and walked about fifty feet behind my camp on a small peninsula to the edge of a lake nestled high above tree line in a cirque of mountains in the Wind River range of western Wyoming. It was almost suppertime.

As I approached the lake, I crouched down low to the ground to keep as much of an oblique angle as I could between myself and any cutthroat trout lurking along the shoreline. I spotted a large bolder partially in the lake with a nice gravel bar next to it and decided that would be my target. Still crouching down, I drop the knapsack at my feet, unhook the fly and strip out about ten feet of line. Looking behind me to make sure I wouldn’t snag anything, I start the rhythmic count of fly-fishing.

On count one, the fly rod is cast forward and held out in front of you. More line is fed out at this point. You pause holding the fly rod out until you reach count two to allow the line to unroll in front of you. On count three, the fly rod is cast behind you while your free hand gathers up more line. You pause once again, holding the fly rod until you reach count four to allow the line and the fly to catch up and unroll behind you. You have reached count one and once again you cast the fly rod forward. One, two, three, four. One, two three, four. Rhythmic.

With one arm raised high trying to keep the fly and line off the ground, always working the count, I duck walk up behind the bolder and look over the top for potential targets. The water is crystal clear and the shore falls off dramatically so it takes me a few seconds to spot him nearly fifteen feet below the surface and twenty-five feet out. But the large cutthroat trout is cruising from my right to my left paralleling shore, in no hurry but ever vigilant. I reach one in my count, strip out a few extra feet of line, and roll cast my line about fifteen feet in front of my prey, the last few feet composed of translucent line all but invisible in water allowing my dry fly to land on the water’s surface, seemingly unattached to anything on land.

I freeze motionless and continue to watch the large trout continue on a path that will intersect my fly but fifteen feet below it. Ten feet… five feet…. is he going to see it, is he even hungry? With a quick shift of the tail, the large trout suddenly shifts and starts swimming upwards at a sharp angle, my fly now directly in his crosshairs. I watch him swim up from the depths, sharply flipping his tail back and forth as he picks up speed. Three feet, two feet, one… splash. I see the silvery sheen of the trout's belly for an instant before it disappears and all I am left with are ripples hiding the trout now in full dive mode.

I pull back on the fly rod with my right hand as my left hand presses against the reel to apply friction as I set the hook. The rod bends nearly double and I know the fish is on but it is by no means on for good. When fly fishing in the mountains, I always debarb my hooks on the flies. Fly fishing with fragile line means wearing out your opponent and reel him in gently so not to exceed the tippet tensile strength. For the tippet is weak compared to regular fishing line which gives it the invisibility necessary to fish in water almost as clear as air. Because this wears out the fish and I often catch more than I can eat, I want the release to be painless so not to add more stress to a worn out fish. I want the fish to live for another day and for another fisherman to catch. A barbless fly comes out easily with minimal damage to the lip of the trout and it can be held in the water where you gently move water across the gills by moving it back and forth until it recovers and swims off. Fishing with barbless flies also means that you must constantly keep tension on your line so not to allow dinner to slip off. It is all about finding balance of keeping supper on the line while not breaking it. It is all about giving supper a fighting chance to take themselves off the menu.

For the next twenty minutes, the fish and I practiced give and take. He would swim off and I would allow line to strip out while I kept resistance on the reel with my left hand. He would tire and I would gently reel him back in only to have him recover and take off once again. Back and forth, giving and taking, the battle went on until exhausted the cutthroat trout finally gave up and allowed me to pull him to the gravel shallows to the left of the boulder that I had been crouched behind earlier. Careful not to slip in myself, I reach into the very cold water, chilled by a small glacier on the opposite shore in the shadow of a mountain, and gripping the lower jaw, I lifted the trout out of the water.

By fishing standards, the trout was small but by dinner standards he was quite large. About two pounds and a little over twenty inches in length with large vertical blood red gills giving him his name, the silvery body was plump and in very good health. I said a quick prayer of thanks as I removed the fly from the mouth and carefully set my fly rod aside getting ready to exercise the domain over all animals given to us by God. I hit the head of the fish against the bolder stunning him and with a knife that I pulled from my pants pocket, made three quick cuts, one on each side of the gills and one up the belly cutting it from anus to my gill cuts. Holding the trout in my left hand, I stick two fingers into the belly near the anus and start separating the guts of the fish from the belly meat, dragging it up towards the gills. Once my fingers reach the gills, I grab the head and with a quick twist, the head and all the guts come off leaving behind a perfectly cleaned fish.

Not wanting to attract bears, I toss the head and guts out into the water where the birds will eat what floats and the rest will be eaten or decompose naturally beneath the surface. I quickly rinse the fish, my knife and picking up my fly rod, walk quickly back to camp fifty feet inland. I set the fish on a flat rock near my stove which I had previously primed and had ready to go. Within about thirty seconds, it is hissing and my pan is sitting on top with a pat of butter already beginning to melt and slide around. Within five minutes of having pulled the trout out of the lake, it hisses and pops as I lay it in the pan with the tail draping over the edge. I sear the trout quickly on one side and then the other, checking the inside to make sure it was just done, perfect. I turn the stove off, grab my spoon and knife (never bring a fork to save weight) and start eating, now about fifteen minutes from the moment I pulled the fish from the lake.

I quickly ate one half of the trout, flipped it over and consumed the other half leaving behind just an empty skeleton of bones lying in the bottom of the fry pan. Because I had caught the fish almost immediately, I was able to do the dishes, walk back out to the bolder, this time making no attempt to hide this time, and sit on top as the sun sank behind the mountains. The sky quickly fades of light, there aren't many places to see a sunset in the mountains, and with the last of twilight, I walk back to camp, well fed and happy.

Gone!

2011-12-21T06:00:00.000-06:00

This has been a busy year in my life and with family life being as complicated as it is with my wife going through her final months of residency, a long vacation just hasn't happened. Until now. I am headed down south to a sunny gulf ocean shore to relax and perhaps do some fishing, which ever seems easier. In the past I have just boarded up the old blog and let it sit but this year I thought I would try something different. Instead I culled through my eight years of archived posts and pulled out some of the better ones, dusted them off, and added them to the automatic posting thing-a-ma-bob. You should see one a day from now until I return sometime in the early parts of January. I hope you all have a merry Christmas and a happy New Year and I will see you all on the flipside.

Talking With Chickens

2011-12-19T06:00:00.002-06:00

BR: John Henry Baker, Frances Ellen Baker, Robert James Baker Chicken, Charles Webster Baker; FR: Lena Heppenstall, Frances Ann Bolton Baker Heppenstall, Thomas Heppenstall, Mary Jane Baker

As my long time readers may recall, I've written about the Baker family numerous times in the past as I beat my head against the genealogical brick wall that is my 3rd great grandfather Joseph Baker who is not pictured above. His wife France Ann Bolton would remarry a few years after Joseph's death at age 35 in 1882 to Thomas Heppenstall and go on to have one more child, daughter Lena, to go along with the five she had with Joseph. You may also recall, that after Joseph died, two of the children, Robert and Charles would go to live with the Robert and Prudence Chicken family. Charles would officially change his name back to Baker but Robert would keep his last name as Chicken even with frequent visits with his mother and siblings until the day he died and is buried under the Chicken surname.

In an effort to someday break down the brick wall of Joseph Baker's past, I thought I might try tracing down some descendants of Robert Baker/Chicken again. I had tried in the past but never could get farther than his deceased children for whom I hadn't been able to find obituaries. There is a large black hole of records between records considered historical and thus scanned into online databases and modern day records that are immediately part of the digital record that makes searching for information hard to find without trips to distant places. This time around I found an online obituary for one of their children that was only three years old and it listed the three surviving Chicken children. A quick online search and I had the phone numbers for two of the three.

I called (George) Chicken first because he lived only forty miles away and it was certainly interesting trying to start that conversation. How do you introduce yourself to your 2nd cousin 2x removed and tell them that their last name technically might not be Chicken but Baker. Fortunately George informed me early on in the conversation that his sister and he had always wondered about their ancestry and how the Baker family was related to theirs. He wasn't the keeper of family information but he said his older sister was and as it happened, she was the other phone number I had found.

I called up (Mary) Chicken after a couple days so that I could give George time to call her and prepare her for my call so she wasn't surprised. We had a long talk about our ancestors and how the Bakers and the Chickens were all tied together and in fact, were one and the same. We exchanged email addresses and I spent a few hours writing her half a dozen emails filling her in with what I knew and sending her pictures of her grandfather Robert Chicken/Baker for whom she didn't have a picture. She has some information along with more that her other sister is mailing her that she is going to send to me via email and snail mail, most likely after the holidays, so I'm excited to receive that but now have to practice waiting patiently, something I find very hard to do when waiting for genealogy stuff. She didn't know of either Joseph Baker or Frances Ann Bolton Baker Heppenstall so I'm not expecting anything that will shatter my brick wall but perhaps if I'm lucky, I might get a clue that I can pursue to create a crack in that wall.

A Child of the Farm Crisis

2011-12-16T06:00:00.001-06:00

I was a child of the farm crisis that struck the Midwest in the early 80's and probably the largest reason why I am now an engineer and my brother a wildlife biologist. We grew up through a terrible time when our parents struggled to survive and most of our neighbors didn't. Our family survived because we were a small farm operation with little debt, survived off the land by raising a lot of our own food and had outside income in the form of my mom working as a computer programmer in the town I currently reside. The ironic thing about being one of the sole survivors because we were small was that the family farm got a lot larger as those who didn't survive sold off and moved away.

Researching into the many families that used to live in and around section 7 (a section being 640 acres) which is now almost wholly owned by my parents has caused me a lot of time to think about the crisis and its effects. I suspect that some of my readers might not be as familiar with it as I am having lived through it first hand, so I am going to spend a little time and summarize those events that shaped my life so much.

In the 1970's, prices of American grain soared due to record purchases by the Soviet Union and generally lowered trade barriers. American farming incomes soared. Increased incomes and low interest rates drove farmland prices to records highs. Farmers bought land, assumed mountains of debt that were no problem for paying off due to the high commodity prices that they garnered from selling the grain from the newly purchased land. Then the 1980's arrived.

The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and President Jimmy Carter set up a trade embargo to punish them and essentially stopped those record grain purchases. Even when the embargo ended, the Soviet Union had learned its lesson and future grain purchases were diversified through many other countries. Corn piled up, prices plummeted, money tightened, farmland values plunged and suddenly millions of farmers couldn't pay their debts. Those small farmers such as my parents who didn't have mountains of debt and outside income were able to eek by. Those huge farmers which didn't exist in that part of Iowa at the time could also survive just due to their large cash stockpile. But the middle sized farmers, those that had been using their new found wealth to expand, were decimated.

Those that survived, gradually absorbed the remnants of the farms that were vacated. Much of my childhood was spent salvaging lumber from old farmsteads on farms that my parents purchased for use elsewhere. Of the six farmhouses that used to stand on section 7, only my parents farmhouse remains. all the other surrounding sections suffered similar losses. It is something that sticks in a young man's brain and surely subconsciously affected many of my career related decisions as the time came to make them.

Perhaps the scary thing is that history appears to be repeating itself. Increased demand for corn to be turned into ethanol mandated by the government has driven up corn prices to records highs. Low interest rates and farmers flush with cash have caused land prices to soar to record highs. Recently some land here in Iowa sold for a record of $20,000 per acre or nearly $1.5 million for a 74 acre tract. Farmers trying to expand are incurring mountains of debt that probably can be reasonably paid off if prices stay the same. But what will happen if they don't?

I suspect my parents will survive another farm crisis should one occur because even though their farm is nearly 10 times the size it was in the 80's, it is paid for with no debt owed and still it is considered small to farm sizes in the north central part of the state. Land it not as valuable down here though it is still garnering record prices in the $5000 to $6000 per acre range. Although they have given up their source of outside income, they still raise a lot of their own food so combined with no debt, their expenses are minimal. Their survival lessons from the 80's through today remain in me as I refrain from debt, live beneath my means and was able to weather this passing economic storm that we have been through these last few years. Living through the farm crisis both scarred me and prepared me for life. I still am a child of the farm crisis.

House Genealogy

2011-12-14T06:00:00.020-06:00

About a month ago, I was looking to add to my blogroll as quite a few of those which I used to read have disappeared. When adding a blog, I try search blogs of those who have written about things that interest me. I have added blogs that have built their own houses, built boats, visited or live in countries I am familiar with, and share an interest in genealogy, etc. I hadn't searched for blogs on genealogy for awhile and so I did and discovered a blog by someone who describes herself as a house historian. I wasn't familiar with that phrase but essentially discovered it is someone who researches the history of a house and its occupants and surroundings.

It got me interested in researching me homestead roots. The hard part was knowing where to start because the first seven years of my life were anything but constant as my parents divorced, we moved around to several different towns across the state and my mom eventually got remarried to my father who lived on a farm exactly one mile south of where they live today. When my grandfather died in my early teens, we packed up and moved to his house a mile north since most of the associated buildings and storage bins that go along with farming were there along with a house that was a good half century newer. In the end, they say home is where the heart is and so I chose the place where my parents currently live and where my heart is when I think of 'home'.

I started off by researching previous owners of that farm and just doing some cursory research into who they are and where they came from. Because I'm a member of Ancestry.com, I went on there and found other's who had those particular people in their family tree. As a starting point, I copied some of their records to my tree that I had created and was sifting through that a week later when I got an email from the owner of one of those trees who essentially asked who I was and why I had copied information from their tree. I think they were hoping for a long lost cousin but when I explained who I was and why I had copied their information, they dug around their records and sent me the above picture of my family's farm, before it was in my family.

How awesome is that? I had always heard that the house I grew up in a mile south was very similar to the original house that used to be where my parents live now and I must say, that the rumor was true. In fact, they were apparently identical at one time. The only difference between the house where I grew up in and the house pictured was that instead of a porch on the right side of the house, an addition was made for a laundry room, wood storage are and a place for coats, boots, etc. Instead of the little addition on the left side of the house in the photo, there was a larger addition where a more modern kitchen was installed. Otherwise, the central house shape, window locations, roof pitches, etc., were all exactly the same.

The house in the picture was torn down probably sometime in the late 40's because my grandfather purchased the property and built a new house in the same place, perhaps just on the backside of the original house as viewed in this picture, sometime around 1950. The barn or outbuildings are no longer there but the lay of the land is unmistakably the same as it is today. The area where the barn was is simply an empty lot for parking wagons, augers, etc when needed nearby but not in the way. Where the outbuildings were on the left side of the photo is where the current shop complex is where my father works on his equipment and stores some of it.

I'm not sure if the two large trees that bracket the house are still the same ones that are there today. The large tree to the right of the house in the picture above appears to be on the backside of the house and would be the one right in front of the house my grandfather built that is still there today. It is a large chinese elm tree if it is the same. The large tree to the left of the house and behind the barn is probably the one that fell down in a big wind storm when I lived on the farm a mile south. This compares well to the aerial photographs taken by the Iowa DNR in August of 1951 & 1930.

Mary Mayer Kuck

2011-12-12T06:00:00.000-06:00

Mary Mayer Kuck

I don't know much about Mary Mayer because she lived just a short life. All my knowledge lies in just a handful of records. I have her marriage certificate from Galena, Illinois where my 3rd great grandfather John Kuck met and married her while doing an apprenticeship at a harness shop, I have two census records in 1860 and 1870 that list her and I have a newspaper clipping detailing the tragic death of Mary at age 42 and five of her seven children in a diphtheria epidemic.

As often is the case, my search into who my 3rd great grandmother was begun with the record of her death. Mary Mayer was born in Switzerland on 7 January 1837. The date and oddly enough her country of origin comes from her gravestone shown above though the latter is listed in both census records I have on her. I haven't seen another gravestone that announces the country someone was born in before but this one lists two different countries, Germany and Switzerland as well as the United States by default when it lists the towns that five of their seven children were born in. I have no records for her before 31 May 1860 when she got married and the following marriage certificate was filled out.

I have done quite a bit of looking into who her parents could be but have never been able to conclusively identify any. Part of this problem is that there are a lot of Mayers in the area at the time, the part of Switzerland that she was from may have been on the border with Germany and thus listed that way on census records and that there are a lot of spellings for Meyer, Myer, Mier, Mayer, etc. Her first born daughter was named for her mother-in-law, her first born son after her father-in-law. Her second daughter was named Lydia and thus by naming conventions present in the family, I suspect that could possibly be her mother's name especially since Lydia was a name I've found on her husband's side of the family. The second son born to Mary was named George. By naming standards, this could be her father's name but it is also the name of her husband John's youngest brother who died ten years earlier. The third son was named Edward which again, isn't a name used by John Kuck's family. I have spend time searching for a George & Lydia Mayer or an Edward & Lydia Mayer but to date, haven't found any that could match up as parents to Mary.

Most of the information I have on Mary was found in this old newspaper article that was in my 2nd great grandmother Elizabeth Cogswell Kuck's scrapbook and that isn't much. My hope for future research is to scan the newspapers during the months that her children died to see if perhaps I can glean a clue or two from anything written about them. For that very reason, I made a trip up to the nearest state historical library a month ago which has newspapers from that time frame but alas, the newspapers from Charles City were absent during that year. I have since asked a local genealogist to that area whom has looked up information for me in the past to check out the local library to see if they have newspapers from that time frame. He said he would but due to the time of year, I may have to wait for the first of the year for my answer. Sometime waiting is the hardest part.

I Want to See My Boy Toy

2011-12-09T06:00:00.002-06:00

Classify the title of this post under things that make me uneasy when coming from the mouth of my daughter. The only reason I didn't go totally berserk is because she is five and a half years old and not say sixteen. In this stage, age and innocence make a huge difference. My wife and I had just eaten lunch of takeout Chinese at the hospital where my wife was on call for 24 hours, and my daughter hadn't eaten anything. Because several colleagues of my wife were also enjoying the Chinese food, I didn't force me daughter to eat it and avoided any parenting scenes. As a result, the daughter and I were on the road back to rural southeast Iowa and she was hungry. Wanting her to nap and not make my life unpleasant for the next two hours (I am a big proponent of picking my battles), I swung through a McDonald's drive-thru for a happy meal. Because this was the third time in two weeks for one reason or another, the choice of happy meal toys was a Hello-Kitty doll which she already had two of and which were just pieces of plastic that offered little in the realm of future imaginational episodes or the toy for boys which was some sort of transforming beast. My daughter of course asked why I said she was a boy and I had to explain that I just told them that to get a toy for boys since she already had the one for girls and besides, I thought she would like to play with something different. She accepted that answer and when her happy meal was handed to me, the above demand was made. It will be close as to whether I will have hair left to turn gray or it will just fall out first. Either way, I'm not looking forward to those teen years.

On a totally unrelated note but probably not long enough to truly deserve a post of its own, the wife, daughter and I attended the musical Wicked this past weekend. The musical, set as the 'behind the scenes' happenings of the Wizard of Oz musical, was excellent but we learned that our daughter was not ready for such things. With intermission, it was three and a half hours long and our daughter sat still for approximately fifteen seconds of the musical. It was really distracting to have a child literally bouncing around in her seat and the aisle space in front and I spent lots of time hissing at her to sit still and trying to contain her annoyance factor from those around us. Fortunately, we got our tickets at the last instance and were way up in the cheap seats but still, I felt embarrassed. There won't be a next time for taking her to a musical anytime soon. But if you have a chance to see Wicked, I'm pretty sure it was an excellent musical. However, if the people sitting next to you look from out of town and have a five year old, try to find someplace else to sit.

How do you know when you are getting older?

2011-12-07T06:00:00.002-06:00

Cleaning out my cellphone camera folder for blog posting fodder, I found this picture which I had snapped on my commute home at the first of only two stoplights between where I work and home at completely opposite sides of town. It always gets me seeing young men driving these trucks all decked out in stickers, shiny balls hanging from the rear bumper to apparently compensate for smaller ones elsewhere, and chromed alloy wheel that were not visible here but which I saw when he turned left without using his blinker. What I see is a truck owned by the bank that probably has yet to hold a load in the bed which couldn't be hauled in a much smaller, less costly version of this truck. No wonder so many people are suffering in this economic down turn. They have the intelligence of somewhere between a rock and a fern and yes I am judging him by his truck and where he decided to display his balls.

One More Time...Hallelujah!

2011-12-06T09:32:00.000-06:00

I thought my Monday's were going to be free now that the Sing-Off was off the air but alas, it wasn't meant to be. Taking their cue from so many shows, they came up with a holiday special. For some reason I'm not big on Christmas music or Christmas specials but I turned it on anyway in the background as I played with my daughter. Even when this year's champions and my favorites Pentatonix came out, it failed to move me. Then my favorites and second place finishers from last season, Street Corner Symphony, came out on stage and sang this song by Leanard Cohen which totally blew me away. I haven't heard of Cohen or his song Hallelujah but a quick Youtube search and listen proved that I wasn't missing much. But Street Corners Symphony's version I could listen to all day and never tire of it.

How do you know when you are too close?

2011-12-05T06:00:00.001-06:00

The day after Thanksgiving, while the world was thronging to outlets of cheap crap made in China for deals, my daughter and I decided to visit the local zoo and were rewarded by having the entire place to ourselves for the better part of our stay. As a result of the lack of people perhaps, the lions happened to be right up against the window and it was free of oily hand and nose prints which allowed me to take the above picture with my cellphone with no cropping or zooming. My camera lens was perhaps a scant three feet from the nose of the male lion and his pride, much too close had there not been a substantial (I hope) piece of glass between us. Notice how he wasn't even looking at me but at my daughter cowering right to the left of me who probably would have made a good snack for this fellow.

My Kuck Research Takes Me Over Seas

2011-12-01T06:00:00.001-06:00

Hinrich Kuck Homestead

Sometimes it is funny how life works. After a recent push to write and learn more about my Kuck ancestors due largely in part to a visit from some distant cousins along that line, I had pretty much put things to bed for awhile. I wasn't completely finished because as I do more in genealogy, I have come to realize a genealogist is never done. So after organizing all my newly obtained pictures, data, etc., I closed the folder and filed it back into its proper place.

When I had first started researching the Kuck line, I had taken a shot in the dark and filed off an email to a genealogical society in Adolphsdorf, Germany where my ancestor John Kuck was born inquiring at to who I might contact to learn more about the family. In a rare event, I was actually put in touch with a historian for the church where my Kuck ancestors attended who was putting together a book on emigrants of the congregation and where they ended up at. She was able to give me another five generations back beyond John Kuck. I posted all that information on my family tree online and several years later, it would be seen by another German citizen who was writing a historical report on the area and its inhabitants. We communicated back and forth for awhile and then drifted apart.

Then on last week he wrote me an email asking if I would update the first person, the church historian, with some info on the other Kuck siblings who immigrated here and after affirming that I would I happened to ask if his report had ever been completed. The answer was no but he sent me some satellite pictures of the Kuck family farm to tide me over.

Up until now, I had only the picture at the top of this post that related to their homestead in Germany. Besides the vague description that they live in or near Adolphsdorf, I knew not where they lived. I had hoped that one day I may be able to visit Germany and see the town for myself but I never thought I would actually be able to see the place where John Kuck had been born along with three more generations before him. Now that has all changed. The satellite picture sent to me wasn't the best quality but it provided enough details through the road labels that within two minutes of firing up Google Earth, I was able to find it and produce a much better quality satellite photo.

Satellite view courtesy of Google Earth of Hinrich Kuck farm 44 WSW of Hamburg and only 14 miles NE of Bremen where young John Kuck caught a boat to America at age 16.

What you see above is that photo with John's father Hinrich Kuck's farm outlined in white. Not being a student of German topographical divisions, it struck me how long and narrow the family plots were. They were living on the farm yet having neighbors next by almost like living in a city. Fortunately, the historian sent me a link to the Wikipedia article that talks about the history of the area which explains why these farms are long and narrow.

My conversation also confirmed what I had previously only suspected in that John's older brother Johann had died in early childhood along with the three other children of the family who did not immigrate. This meant that John as eldest son, was in line to inherit the family farm and he gave it all up to try his luck at the American dream. It just reinforces how strong that dream was during those times. As the historian commented after reading some of my ramblings on the family, John Kuck made the right choice. When John's mother Anna Gerken Kuck died, the remaining two siblings sold the farm, caught a boat to America and joined their two older brothers.

A satellite 'closeup' view of the Hinrich Kuck farm

This photo is a closeup of the buildings on the farm. I'm not sure it gives me anything to go on but it is kind of cool to see where several generations grew up. Perhaps the best thing about locating the Kuck family farm via Google Earth is that I can precisely figure out that the mapping coordinates are Lat: 53.23587 Long: 9.008270. Now someday when I am in Germany, all I have to do is enter those coordinates into a GPS device and I have instantaneous directions to get to their form on the eastern outskirts of Adolphsdorf. How cool is that?

...And the Winner Is

2011-11-29T06:00:00.000-06:00

I thought I might as well carry this series through since I'm having a mid-life crisis and actually voted (for free) for the group that won this years Sing-Off. Pentatonix amazed me from the get go and I felt they deserved to win. I hope they make good on it. Now I will have two hours of my life back again every Monday night.

Cat Has My Tongue

2011-11-28T06:00:00.001-06:00

I'm not sure if it is my dread of the holiday season due to the huge crowds everywhere or my being very busy at work or this being the season of lots of family obligations, but I am behind on my blog post writing and I have nothing in the reserves. Maybe I'm just burnt out.

Whatever the case, my blog posts might be light for awhile until I get my blogging spark back.

Miscellaneous Ramblings

2011-11-23T06:00:00.002-06:00

The last polls that I read say that only 43% of Americans agree with the Occupy Wall Street movement and yet they claim to be the 99%. Shouldn't they change their name to the 43%?

I heard a lady of 27 being interviewed in New York. She was up to eyeballs in debt for a degree in History and couldn't find a job. Go figure.

Although I consider myself a political Constitutionalist/Independent, the last election cycle I changed my voter registration from Independent to Republican so I could take part in the first in the nation caucus. With this crop of candidates so far, I'm thinking about switching back just so I don't feel obligated to participate this time around.

I heard a political ad on my way to work yesterday morning telling me that I should vote for someone who is a political outsider if I really wanted to fix Washington. I couldn't think of who that might be until the fast voice at the end told me it was paid for by Rick Perry. Really? He is a governor of a state, a large one at that, and that makes him a political outsider? A large portion of our presidents have been governors. Besides, our current president was about as much as a political outsider as Perry is and look where he has gotten us. But at the end of the day, Perry could probably be the best candidate who meets my every desire in a President and I'm not sure I could vote for him. The last governor from the state of Texas left my hide feeling more than a little chapped and I'm not sure I want to take a chance on another one anytime soon.

People are already camped out at Walmarts and other big boxed stores to be first in line on Thursday. Why? I just can't imagine it being worth it to camp outside for two or three days to rush into the store and be the first person to buy some cheap crap made in China all to save what.... a few bucks? My Christmas shopping is all done because I did it early and did it online so that I could try and find the gems among so much Chinese junk being sold as consumer goods these days. I'm sure I paid more than those people sitting in the rain right now will pay on Thursday for the three doorbusters that they actually have in stock but at least I will have time to spend with my family on Thanksgiving.quality.

The Supper Committee failed? Did anyone think they would succeed? I sure didn't. I'm actually glad because their will be mandatory cuts now regardless of political affiliation. The only problem is that there are already attempts to undo the legislation mandating these cuts. I hope that fails as big as the Super Committee did.

I'm smoking a turkey tonight for the feast tomorrow. For some reason smoked turkey, or any meat for that matter, tastes much better the second day than the first. I'm also smoking a whole pork loin and a chicken or two while I am going through the effort in the dark of tonight. I look forward to cold smoked meat sandwiches for the next few months. Lunch just doesn't get any better than that. Fortunately my wife will be home and I'm spending it down on the farm with my parents. I'm thankful for that.

I hope everyone out there has a great day tomorrow and spends it with families where they should and not sitting on pavement waiting to be the first in line to buy crap sent to you by those Chinese who care so much about you.

Blown Away Yet Again...

2011-11-22T06:00:00.001-06:00

I know they are good before I turn into the program. I know I am going to be blown away whenever I hear Pentatonix perform. I get goosebumps when I hear the name of the song they will perform and it is one familiar to me. So one would expect that I am prepared every Monday night. But dang, they blew me away again and with a song of which I have never heard. It was a performance to end on and now the voting is underway. I honestly am about as excited to see who wins next Monday night as I was waiting for Christmas as an eight year old. No matter who wins, this has been a season that I frankly can't believe will ever be topped.

And in a first for me, I actually logged into the website and voted.

Your Help Is Needed

2011-11-21T06:00:00.036-06:00

I've stared and stared at this marriage license and I finally decided I need help. There are a couple parts that I would like you, my reader to take a look at and tell me what you see. The first part is what it says on the second line down in the upper right hand corner before the words '18 years of age'. I'm also at a loss for what the first word on the third line in the same area says. The final area is the name of the 'Minister of Gospel' on the fourth line up from the bottom and again on the bottom line.

My translation of this document is as follows:

John Kuck Issued June 1 A.D. 1860
and (???????????) is 18 year of aged
Mary Mayer (?????) he is 23 years of age

Jo Daviess County, Illinois, June first 1860
I, Christian Nery, Minister of the Gospel hearby certify that on
this day I joined in Marriage Mr. John Kuck
with Wife Mary Mayer agreeably to the authority given in the above License.
Rev. Christian Neary

The reason I ask is that in my hunt for whom my 3rd great grandmother Mary Meyer was and where she came from, I gave her marriage license a second look. When she was married to John Kuck in 1860, he was 23 years old and she was also 23 years old, if the date on her gravestone is to be believed. John was one month and two days older than Mary. If Mary was actually five years younger, that might explain why I am having a hard time tracking her early life down.

Another clue I found recently was her obituary that listed her as being a member of the German M.E. church for 25 years which means that she was most likely in the country by 1954. But that got me thinking about the Reverend listed on her marriage license whom I've only glanced at previously. I'm pretty certain the first name is Christian but the last name is obscure to me. I did a search of all Christian's living in Jo Daviess county in 1860 and that was no help in tracking down this mysterious person.

All of this is my attempt to go back to some of the hard evidence that I have of my ancestors and to look at it with a fresh set of eyes. I'm trying to pay attention to details and track down clues that may not even be pertinent to my ancestor in hopes that it might get me through a couple of the brick walls, the biggest of which are the 2 nameless sets of 4th great grandparents out of my total 32 sets. Finding Mary Meyer's parents would increase my knowledge up to 31 out of 32 sets.

Another Photo Mystery

2011-11-18T06:00:00.069-06:00

By now you've probably come to recognize the picture above which I have included in numerous posts on the Kuck side of my family tree. Written on the back of the photo in non-period ink were the words John and Mary Kuck with son George. No mention on who the fourth person in the photo is. Because of the tragic early death of Mary and five of her seven children, possible ages rule out that the older boy is my 2nd great grandfather George so I assumed he was the one in the dress sitting on father John's lap. The woman on the right looked Swiss to me though I would be hard pressed to define what that means and with the ink on the back informing me that it was my 3rd great grandmother Mayer Meyer Kuck, I accepted it as so. That is until I received the below photo from my new Kuck cousins who descended from Mary's brother-in-law Frederick Kuck. On the back of it is written, in more period looking pencil script, that this is John Kuck's first wife Mary Meyer and as you can tell, these appear to be two completely different people which leaves me with a mystery.

My inclination is to believe the picture above provided by my distant cousin because the writing was much older and the fact that my grandparents who gave me the first picture, have been confused often when referring to this side of the family. Then my cousin had an interesting theory that I hadn't thought about before. Perhaps the first picture is of my 3rd great grandfather John Kuck, his son and my 2nd great grandfather George Kuck, his wife Elizabeth Cogswell Kuck and their only son, my great grandfather Victor Kuck. A three generations of Kuck photo with George's wife thrown in to boot. Intrigued, I flipped back and forth through pictures but eventually created the montage seen below to help me do side by side comparisons with known photos of each on the right and clips from the first photo above on the left.

Starting with the assumption that the baby is my great grandfather Victor and is around two years of age, George would have to be around 29, his wife Elizabeth 23 and John aged 60. I guess I can buy the ages being about right to fit the theory. The pictures of the unknown lady whom I had been told was my 3rd great grandmother Mary Meyer looks very similar to my 2nd great grandmother Elizabeth Cogswell Kuck. However, the deep set eyes (or overhead lighting) of George Kuck in the known photo I have of him does't reflect the eyes of the unknown man in the first photo. The ears do match, definitely the jaw line does to and even the mouth but the eyes just look different. The eyes of the young man look more like those of George's older brother Henry Kuck seen below who would have been 34 years old at the time his first son was 2 years old. The eyes and jawline however don't look the same. I have no picture of his sons or his wife to compare.

So for now, I'm inclined to believe that the only picture of Mary that I had until recently is not of Mary. Whether it is actually of John Kuck's daughter-in-law Elizabeth Cogswell Kuck is up in the air. The good side to all this is the second picture from the top is probably Mary so I still have a picture of her and she is still a mystery to me but more about that in a later post.

Saddle Shops and Houses

2011-11-16T06:00:00.003-06:00

You may recall the above photograph of the Kuck Harness Shop that I posted in this blog post a couple weeks ago. Although I didn't say specifically, I believed at the time and led readers on that this Harness Shop was originally that of my 3rd great grandfather John Kuck in Charles City. After reviewing some recently obtained pictures, I now think that this harness shop was actually one that was started up by John's younger brother Frederick (although some articles in old newspaper suggest John owned it too) after John trained him in the art of harness making. That is Frederick in the photo above standing in front of his store and an unknown couple standing on the balcony above.

My 3rd great grandfather John Kuck's Harness Shop can be seen in the above picture. It is the fourth building back on the right with no awning and no sign up on the top of the shop. From my research, this is the third shop he worked in. The first one in Galena, Illinois he most likely apprenticed and learned the trade. Coincidentally, a rival saddle shop in Galena was owned by Ulysses S. Grant's father and the clerk was none other than our future 18th president . John set up his own shop shortly afterwards in Lansing, Iowa which only lasted for two years before he moved to Charles City, Iowa and started his last shop.

This is a frontal view of the shop which provides lots of fascinating details. The sign above the door says J. Kuck Harness Shop while the window on the left says Leather Store and the one on the right repeats Harness Shop. I believe the smaller sign to the left of the door and below the window says Cash Paid For Hides and I'm speculating that the hide tacked to the door is probably a buffalo hide since on the back side of the photo it is written that buffalo skins hung along the wall to be chosen by customers and made into lap robes. Who ever wrote that was also confused as to the location and wrote that it is either in Charles City or just down the road in Rockford and still stands as of 1953. It most definitely is in Charles City and it still stands as of last month because below is a picture of it in its current incarnation. One more word on the picture above though before I move on is that is if you zoom in and look closely in the center window, you can see someone looking out. Perhaps it was my 2nd great grandfather George?

This is John Kuck's Harness shop as it stands today. I'm guessing buffalo robes are out of the question but a stiff martini would be a safe bet.

When my 3rd great grandfather John Kuck decided to retire from the business, Frederick bought his store in Charles City and ran it a few years before he died and his sons sold it to the highest bidder at a public auction. Frederick's sons also sold all his possessions and house since they lived elsewhere. Above is a picture of Frederick Kuck's house just a block from his brother John's house in Charles City. On the back is a paragraph written about Frederick's son Herbert who at age 12, climbed out of the window, slid down the pillars and joined 'the gang' for a 4th of July celebration until 2:00 a.m. and received a good hiding when his mother found out three weeks later.

Finally, above is a blurry picture of John's house at 802 Ferguson Street in Charles City that is still clear enough to tell that it was a nice house. Both the houses of John and his brother Frederick were nice so I must assume that the harness shops were money making ventures. Unfortunately John's house on Ferguson Street is gone and over top has been built the Port Charles Assisted Living center and Frederick's house is underneath a parking lot for a YMCA.

In Case You Missed Last Night... WOW!

2011-11-15T07:23:00.004-06:00

Pentatonix

Taken from last night's Sing-Off. Try to remember that this is a capella meaning they make every sound you hear.

Minty Chocolatey Cleanliness?

2011-11-14T06:00:00.001-06:00

I like mints and I like chocolate. Heck, I even like them together in the form of chocolate bars or ice creams but I must confess, I never thought of them in the form of hand cleanliness. For a few days one week, I detected the faintest hint of chocolate whenever I was brushing my teeth at the sink in our main bathroom. Because we were fresh from Halloween and I am brushing my teeth alongside my daughter to encourage good hygiene, I just assumed that it was coming from her mouth. Then one morning in the wee hours just after midnight, I stopped in at that bathroom for a little business after getting a drink downstairs for an exceptionally parched throat, and while washing my hands was overcome with the smell of chocolate and mint. I knew where it was coming from but couldn't really understand why. A gag from my wife? I finished washing with warm water and went back to bed. The next morning upon investigation, I found the bottle you see above. I just can't understand how anyone would think this was a good combination for hand soap.

Leaving Everything Behind

2011-11-11T06:00:00.004-06:00

Kuck Immigrants: L-R John, Frederick and Anna

I've pondered this quite a lot simply because it is beyond what I can imagine. I find myself asking the question, what would it take to leave everything you knew behind, parents, culture, siblings and move to the far side of the world with nothing but the clothes on your back? I'm not sure I can fathom an answer.

John Kuck, my 3rd great grandfather, was the second son of Hinrich Kuck, born in 1836 in the swampy lowlands of Adolphsdorf, Germany. On an early summer day in June of 1853 at the ripe old age of sixteen, he would board the ship Arnold Boninger in Bremen and set sail for Baltimore on the far side of an ocean. The Boninger was built and named for a tobacco company in Duisburg only the year before but two years later would be in the midst of the Austro-Prussina War against Denmark. Perhaps it was the looming war which drove John to immigrate or the lack of land in an area brimming with large families or the promise of the American dream. Fortunately for me, he went, he met his wife to be and the rest is history.

Arnold Boninger

At the time of his departure for Baltimore, John Kuck left behind both parents, Hinrich aged 45 and Anna Gerken Kuck aged 40, both in the prime of their lives. Since John's Germanic name was Johann, the same as an older brother, I assume the older brother died in or shortly after child birth and the name was recycled as often was the case making John the oldest sibling. Still in Adolphsdorf were younger brothers Hinrich Jr., Dietrich, Frederick and Wilhelm along with younger sister Anna. John would never get to meet younger brother Georg who wasn't born until a couple years after his departure.

As I wrote in a previous post about John's life, he traveled westward from Baltimore making several stops, raising capital and finding a wife before settling in Charles City, Iowa and opening up a saddle and harness shop in 1864. That was the year that John most likely learned through a letter back home that his father had died at age 56. John had two children by then and by 1868 was up to four with the birth of my 2nd great grandfather George. I'm guessing the American dream must have been realized because he sent for two more of his siblings, Frederich and Anna who arrived around that time. I have yet to find their immigration papers with certainty but from other clues, I'm fairly certain they came in that year. Both went straight to Charles City, Iowa and shacked up with big brother John for a time according to the census of 1870. Both Frederich and Anna would marry in the next year, Frederich to Katherine Brandau older sister of John's future wife and Anna to Frederick Tubbesing, a name I only recently learned. Frederich would move to nearby Rockford to start his life and Anna would move up to Redwing, Minnesota to begin her life. Back home in Germany, older brother to Frederich and Anna, Dietrich and the two remaining brothers Wilhelm and George would bury their mother Anna Gerken Kuck the following year.

Anna Gerken Kuck

By the death of his mother Anna, Dietrich Kuck had been married seven years to wife Meta and had one daughter Anna with another child, Martin on the way. After Martin was one and ready to travel, they too packed up their bags and in 1874, sailed on the ship Oder for New York City. They went straight to Charles City and set up their home. I have no information as to what became of the remaining two siblings Wilhelm and George.

With most of the family now safely together on American soil living the American dream, life was good for a few years until the winter of 1878 and 1879. In that year John would lose five of his seven children and wife Mary Meyer Kuck to a diphtheria epidemic. Mary was only 42 at the time. John would remarry again to Elizabeth Brandau, younger sister to Frederich's wife Katherine Brandau and life would resume.

Dietrich Kuck, the last Kuck member to immigrate would be the first to die at age 51 in 1894. Sister Anna would die five years later in 1899 at the age of 49. Frederich Kuck would die in 1907 at the age of 61 and with him, Kuck's Harness and Saddle shop would close its doors and open no more. John's eldest surviving son Henry Lincoln Kuck would carry on the tradition halfway across the country by joining forces and opening the Kuck & Bonny Saddle shop so I suppose John was gratified to know that though his saddle shop was closed, his saddle making legacy continued and indeed, Kuck saddles fetch a high price on the internet.

John's second wife Elizabeth would die in 1910 at the age of 53 and once again at the age of 74, John would find himself alone in this world once again. Except now instead of penniless and owning nothing more than the clothes on his back, he was a product of the American dream and a quite prominent man around town. He had two sons from his first marriage who were both successful, married and had kids of their own. My great grandfather Victor Kuck born in 1895 was fifteen years old and living in nearby Rockford must have known his grandfather quite well. John had three more children with his second wife Elizabeth Brandau Kuck and the eldest was married though childless and the other two still lived with him so he did have some company. Daughter Clara would later be quite the independent lady moving out west to Montana and then on to California. She would at one point take a ship all the way through the Panama Canal, stop over in Havana, Cuba and continue on to New York City though she would soon end up back in California. Big moves for 1931. At that point she was 48 years old and still single and I lose track of her until her death in 1966 at the age of 83 still living in California. She married a Herbert Foot sometime after the age of 48 but never had children.

Clara Elizabeth Kuck

John would die on the first day of November in 1916 at the age of 79. My great grandfather Victor, a man whom I remember well and have wrote about before, would have been 21 years old and undoubtedly attended the funeral. Had I only knew of John and been as interested in his life as I am now, I would have loved to ask questions of Victor about his grandfather. I don't have an obituary for John so I don't know what those left behind had to say because the local paper has a gap at that time in the online records that I have access too. I don't know if it was due to a fire or just a lack of a publisher but someday I hope to dig into that area a little bit more and see what I can find. His house at 802 Ferguson Street is now under the back lawn of a retirement home. I am only left with a few pictures, thankfully now more than just the one, and my question of what drove him to leave everything behind for a chance at a new life.

Crab Rangoon Pizza: My Way

2011-11-09T06:00:00.000-06:00

Being inspired after eating at Fong's Pizza that I mentioned in an earlier post, I decided to try making my own version of Crab Rangoon pizza at home. My first attempt was almost right on the money so I decided to post the recipe for all to enjoy.

Dough
I make my own dough because it is really easy to do and it tastes so much better than any premade refridgerated or just add water versions.

Add a package of yeast and a tsp of sugar to some warm water and let it sit for about ten minutes until there is a lot of foam on top. Add it (and additional water to get a total of around 1-1/4 cups) to four cups of flour, a tsp of salt and a couple Tbsps of olive oil and mix. I use a stand mixture here. Knead a bit and place in oil smeared bowl to rise in a warm place for an hour.

Crab Rangoon topping
Mix together an 8 oz package of cream cheese, an 8 oz can of crab meat that has been drained, a splash of soy sauce, pepper, 1/4 cup minced red onion, 1 minced green onion and 1 minced clove of garlic. Spread on rolled out dough.

Top with strips of crab rangoon wrappers that you cut with a knife. This worked out well but I may try baking them ahead of time next time and adding them after the pizza was cooked. Place in oven set to highest temperature (mine goes to 550 F) on a baking stone and cook until done. Pull it out and drizzle it generously with some sweet chili sauce which is found in most Asian grocery stores. It is sweet and spice and perfects the pizza.

The final product tasted almost just like Fong's version though the wontons on top weren't as evenly golden brown which is why I suspect they precook them and add them after the pizza was done. Good eats!

Date With Death

2011-11-07T06:00:00.004-06:00

Not sure what to think about this posting I saw on a bulletin board. Are they trying to motivate people into adopting the puppies with the threat to kill them if nothing happens by tomorrow or are they trying to make people sympathetic to their situation so that they fill better about killing them after trying 'everything' they could to adopt them out? Whatever the case, I'm guessing that leaving their face out of the picture was deliberate.

Singing On Steroids

2011-11-04T06:00:00.144-05:00

I don't talk about television shows very much because frankly none of them are very good, at least since Seinfeld went off the air. Mostly I watch the evening news and some shows on PBS but that is about it. However, two years I happened to come across the Sing Off already half way through the first season and was blown away.

If you aren't familiar with the Sing Off on NBC, it is a cappella competition where groups compete with no background music. Yeah that sounds real boring which I suppose is why I never caught an episode until halfway through the first year but when I did, I knew I wasn't in Kansas any more. These groups lay down music that bar none, I enjoy much better than the original recorded tracks.

During the second season, a group by the name of Street Corner Symphony took the competition to a whole new level and really set the hook. They ended up placing second to another equally talented group who just didn't sing songs that were as familiar to me but resonated with the public. I thought at the time that no other group of groups could top the second season, that is until the third season arrived.

This season, already half way over, for lack of better words is OFF THE HOOK! Earlier this week while watching the two hour episode via DVR so I can watch it in just over an hour, I actually teared up more than once because the songs they were singing were so awesome. The round this week was all about Superstar Medleys and the groups all delivered. I am very thankful that I am not a judge on that show trying to determine which group to kick off.

By far, my favorite group of this season is Pentatonix which with five people, kicks out the most complex songs I have ever heard. If that weren't enough, their sound is at least ten years into the future of a cappella if everyone got on board with it today. This week they sang a medley of Brittany Spears songs which was mostly lost on me but it certainly was still a pleasure to listen to even if I have never heard the original songs. Another outstanding group which actually moved me to tears last night are the Dartmouth Aires which did a Queen medley that would have made Freddie proud. Their rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody was spot on. Another group the YellowJackets with their large size and evidently years of entertaining experience always blow the roof off the joint when they sing and this week was no exception with their Billy Joel medley. They took something very familiar to me and made it their own in a way so unique, I would rather have their version of the album if they ever made one.

I could go on and on but I won't. But I do ask that perhaps next Monday night if you haven't already done so, tune into the Sing Off and listen to a group or two. I promise you that you have never heard an a capella group like any of these groups.

Fleshing Out the Family Tree

2011-11-02T06:00:00.002-05:00

Almost a year ago, after lots of research and sifting through a file of records, I wrote a blog post called The Life and Times of John Kuck which was supposed to be my final record of 3rd great grandfather. It contained the picture above, the only picture I had of either my third great grandparents John and Mary Meyer Kuck and one of a couple of their son and my 2nd great grandfather George Kuck sitting on John's lap. It was a good blog post and I still read it every now and then when I ponder about my genealogy journey thus far. It contains the best and worst of it all in one photo. The best being that I found the immigrant ancestor for my living Kuck ancestors and set the story straight. The worst being that Mary Meyer is one brick wall that I have hit repeatedly with research and have gotten no farther than her maiden name, she immigrated from Switzerland at some unknown time and that she died young with five of her children in a diphtheria epidemic in late 1878 and early 1879. Beyond that, I know nothing of her.

Over the years I have searched for Kuck descendants of John and three of his siblings who immigrated to the United States but without success. Most of the lines end abruptly due to childless deaths of unmarried descendants. A few would survive only to have no male offspring which makes tracing them with any certainty very hard. Only one of them allowed me to find the name of someone who may still be living but because she was born of an age before computers and is old enough now to avoid them altogether, I can find no trace of her. I was stuck to waiting for the 1940 census to come out, which it will sometime next year, to hopefully find more clues on possible missing distant cousins. Then out of the blue, I received an email from a distant Kuck cousin who is a descendant of John's brother Frederick and had seen my Kuck posts on a genealogy forum and asked if I knew of anyone researching this particular family. Boy did I.

We ended up emailing each other a few times setting up a visit in mid October, then a few months away, to compare notes and meet each other since she was from Tennessee and I was from Iowa. The short version of a long story was that I had lots of information on a side of the family, John, that she didn't know anything about and she had lots of pictures of a family that I had never seen outside of the picture above. It was a genealogical match made in heaven.

Above is one of the pictures in her collection of my 3rd great grandfather John Kuck and his second wife (not my 3rd great grandmother) Elizabeth Brandau. She also clued me in on a factoid that I had every opportunity to know since I had the evidence already but had never put two and two together. John Kuck's second wife Elizabeth Brandau was the younger sister of Katherine Brandau who was married to Frederick Kuck, John Kuck's younger brother. Kind of forms a big X of ages and families when traced out.

John Kuck was the original immigrant in the family and after he got himself established after thirteen years, he evidently sent for three of his siblings, Frederick, Dietrich and Anna Kuck to join him. For years I suspected they were siblings because they all resided nearby or in John's house in the census records but eventually I got proof when I made contact with a German genealogist doing a project for the church they belonged too in the old world who had lots of information on the family including the names of his siblings. John Kuck ran a harness shop for years in Charles City, Iowa and trained his two surviving sons George and Henry in it and at least one brother Frederick. George and Henry would work in it for awhile until they became of age and at that point, George traded leather for general merchandise and Henry would move out west to The Dalles, Oregon and become a saddle maker of some note whose saddles still fetch high prices on Ebay and the likes. I always assumed the saddle and harness store went with Henry but I recently learned that Frederick eventually took over the store to allow John more time to become involved in being a 'leading citizen' of the community as he is often lauded in old newspaper accounts. Frederick is seen in front of the Kuck Harness Shop below.

It did however end with Frederick's death in 1906 when a newspaper article stated that his son's Herbert and Orlando (who would both go with the last name of Cook) decided they had no interest in it and sold the business and family house before returning to their own homes in Galesburg, Illinois and Seattle, Washington respectively. On a side note, the article made mention to some 'outlaw notes that bore the Civil War stamps' found among Frederick's possession, a reference which I know nothing about and need to research. Below is another photo of the Kuck Harness Shop of the inside taken the year of Frederick's death of heart disease and the last year the shop would be in business as it turned out.

So once again, I find myself in awe at adding more old photos of my ancestors to my growing collection which started out at the round number of zero about a half dozen years ago. It is days like this that keep my hopelessly addicted to researching my family tree. I will probably add a few more posts with more photos of this branch of the family to my blog over time just so it gets chiseled into the internet stone for future researchers to stumble upon and perhaps wonder how Ed from southeast Iowa figured into all of this.

The Tale of the Brick Planter

2011-10-31T06:00:00.058-05:00

I must admit that I had naively believed that if I ignored it, everyone else would too and so I kept putting off what I had should have done ahead of time. What you see above was someone's idea of making lemonade out of lemons. The builders of our house, back when I was just three years old and had no concept of home ownership, poured the foundation of the house too close to the property line and thus had to shift it all uphill a couple feet to get it within specification. So with a slab protruding from the east side of the house, someone along the line had a brick planter built and installed several rose bushes in it. The photo above shows what this planter looked shortly after we bought this place.

What the previous planter builders/owners didn't do however was install any sort of drainage system into that planter and as it turned out, it was basically a fishbowl. A few years back the water did it's thing and caused the bricks to crack on each end. Suddenly this planter had a date with destruction but the crack never got any wider and my procrastination got stronger. Then this year hit where we have only gotten enough rain since June to just retain the knowledge of rain in our memories. I'm guessing since June we have only had around an inch and a half of rain. This caused huge cracks to form in the lawn that still remain and for some reason the crack in the brick planter went from a crack to a gaping six inch gash at about the mulch line in the picture above causing the top edge of the planter to lean out over the lawn.

This happened in June and all summer I procrastinated hoping the thing would fall over on itself and I would then just pick up the pieces. Then summer turned into fall and we decided to sell our house. Knowing the mess it would create (according to the side of my brain in charge of procrastinating) I thought I would just sell the house and it would become someone else's problem. Worst case, if someone brought up the subject, I would just downplay it saying that I was going to haul it off before possession switched hands and then the new owners could redecorate it as they saw fit. Everyone that walked around the house noticed it and would shake their heads disapprovingly and whisper. I'm not sure if that is why I got nary an offer from my initial advertising blitz but it certainly didn't help. So one day after mulching up the leaves with the lawnmower, I grabbed a hammer on the spur of the moment and whacked a few bricks. They came off pretty easily. Within minutes I had broke enough off around the downspout that it wasn't going to be damaged in anyway and I walked to the middle of the wall. I put one hand on the edge and with just a minimal amount of effort, pulled the whole wall down. Like the pig for breakfast, I was wholly committed at that point.

After getting all the bricks carried out of the way and the dirt removed, some of it still muddy due to lack of drainage, I found that beneath that planter was the ugly mess seen above. Not only was the concrete stained, but there wasn't a slab per say underneath as I had heard from the previous owners. Instead there was a footer with a shoddy slab poured beneath it and the new footer that had to be put in and whoever poured it didn't even bother to clean the forming sand from the inside edge of the original footer. So with time, the sand filtered down underneath of the slab, again due to the fishbowl effect, and what remained was a rather large rough looking slot that to most people would look like a giant crack. It certainly wasn't the impression I wanted to leave with a prospective home buyer.

So I started thinking of options that A) weren't going to cost be a lot of money that I wasn't going to get back out of the house, B) wasn't going to take me a month's worth of weekend's to complete, C) would make it look somewhat planned and D) cover up that horrid 'crack' to keep a prospective home buyer's mind at ease.

The right way to fix it would be to rent a concrete saw and cut the offending concrete off from the house, dig it all up and dispose of it along with some serious re-landscaping efforts. The cheap way would be to rebuild another planter in it's place without solving the drainage issue or anchoring it in a better way to the house's foundation. In the end, my wife came up with the above idea which I thought turned out decent. I cleaned up the foundation wall and gave it a fresh coat of paint to cover the stains. They I laid down a row of paving blocks and back filled with some landscaping gravel. That was what I was in charge of doing. Phase two which my wife is in charge of doing is to buy a few large landscaping pots/half barrels/etc to put on top of the rock and create the effect of a urban garden or flower bed. It was cheap only setting me back around $180 in materials and a quarter bottle of Advil for the sore muscles. It also took only three days of effort to do, two to deconstruct and one to repaint and reconstruct. Not to bad. So now phase two of our home sell effort is going into effect with a 'For Sale by Owner' sign in the front yard with perhaps a much cheaper classified add in a couple of the local papers and (thanks to Kymber) perhaps an open house slated for later this year when my wife can be home for moral support. I may get this house sold yet.

Fong's Pizza

2011-10-28T06:00:00.001-05:00

Fong's Crab Rangoon Pizza

One of the real perks about spending time in the Urban Jungle is finding little hole in the wall cafe's in the heart of downtown. Fong's Pizza is one that my wife found with one of her coworkers and my only introduction to it has been once in the over two years we've had this apartment when my wife brought some of it home with her. Whenever my daughter and I are up there on a Friday night, it is always crowded and parking is such a hassle that we go to other locations. Saturdays are my wife's on-call days so those are usually out and Sunday's we are doing our thing to get ready to head back home. However, the last handful of weekends my wife is taking her turn being the head doctor in charge and providing direction to first and second year residents. This means she has to round for a morning on either Saturday or Sunday morning and that is it for the weekend. She sometimes does this on Saturday morning and then drives home for the rest of the weekend but this particular weekend, we decided to drive up Friday evening so we could have more time together before she rounds on Sunday morning. Finally we had a Saturday free for an early lunch (before the crowds) in the heart of the Urban Jungle and we chose to eat at a seafood place called Splash. Fortunately it was closed so as we were debating where to try next, it hit us that we were only about a block and a half from Fong's Pizza and the rest as they say was history.

Fong's Pizza is a very small restaurant that has five or so booths up front along with some bar seating and another five seats in the back and that is it. It is easy to see how seating is very limited and shortly after we got there a little after eleven, it was standing room only for the duration of our stay. The thing I like about Fong's Pizza is that it isn't your standard pizza place. You don't go there for a pepporoni pizza or a mushroom and cheese. Instead you can choose between a Moo Shu Pork, Crab Rangoon, Loaded Baked Potato, Beef & Broccoli, Kung Pao Chicken or a handful of other pizza varieties. About as run of the mill as it gets would be ordering the Taco pizza. I've only had the Crab Rangoon and the Loaded Baked Potato but both have been outstanding, the Crab Rangoon was to die for and that is the one pictured at the top of this post.

I think if I lived in one of the apartments nearby, I would have quickly tried every pizza on the menu and loved them all. They only come in two sizes, small and large but that is perfect. I recommend getting several small pizzas of different flavor and passing them around to maximize the experience. Since I had the crab rangoon pizza the time before and loved it, we got one of those and the loaded baked potato version which came with sides of sour cream. My wife and I ate one slice over a small pizza so we had most of a small pizza in leftovers to take home but that was alright with me.

Hippies sign that I liked hanging on the back wall

They Look Like Skittles

2011-10-26T06:00:00.004-05:00

Obviously from the picture you know that these aren't skittles but that is what my daughter said and since I found that funny, I thought you might too. What you are looking at is a Ziplock bag full of Chinese hot peppers that were the fruits of my parents labor back on the farm. They were given two plants by a friend, planted them and they did very well this year. The only problem was that my parents aren't people who like spicy food and so I inherited them.

I liberated them from their earthy toil one Sunday afternoon and brought the bushes, peppers and all up to my house so that I could leisurely pick the peppers off in the evening at my convenience. I did just that about six o'clock one evening and immediately afterwards, gave my hands a good scrubbing to remove any oils from the peppers. By about nine o'clock when my fingers felt like I was holding a burning match head, I knew I had been unsuccessful. By the next morning, my fingers felt fine though whenever I touched something, I could only do so for a few seconds before the pain would return. It took a full two days before I was able to hold a pen in my fingers properly without pain.

I'm not sure how many Scoville heat units those peppers contain but I'm guessing if I could convert them into BTU's, I could heat my house for this entire coming winter. But for now, they are in that plastic bag safely tucked away in my freezer to be doled out in very tiny amounts in food that only I will be partaking in.

The Ackerson Family Revisited

2011-10-24T06:00:00.001-05:00

The Joseph and Lucy Card Ackerson Family
Back Row: Ira, Edith, William
Front Row: Julia, Lizzie, Joseph, Lucy, James, Emma

Last year, I wrote a blog post on my 2nd great grandfather Ira Ackerson whom I laid out evidence that he was the World's Most Unluckiest Man. In that post, I had the only picture of Ira, father Joseph and mother Lucy that I have found which is the same as the one above but not in nearly as good of shape pixel and physical wise. After getting in touch with a distant cousin from the same line, she was able to make copies of the original and also sent me some other pictures of the family which I am posting here for future reference and perhaps future descendants of this family to find in the course of their genealogical research.

Ira Ackerson standing in front of the ponies

Although this picture carried only the label above, I suspect that the man with the bag ready to get in the carriage was Ira's father Joseph Ackerson who was a veterinarian. Somewhere among my stuff, I have a story of Joseph and his pet parrot that could talk. Joseph came home one afternoon to find the doors open and the bird cage empty. Everyone aided in the search of the farm but couldn't find the bird anywhere. The next morning as Joseph was enjoying the sun rise, a voice started calling out to him from a nearby tree. A very cold and thankful parrot was returned to his cage.

Joseph and Lucy Card Ackerson

Joseph and Lucy are my 3rd great grandparents. Joseph came from Ohio with his parents and crossed into Iowa around 1855 and settled in Butler county in northeast Iowa. Shortly afterwards, the Card family immigrated to Iowa from New York via a stay in Wisconsin and settled in the same area. Joseph Ackerson and Lucy May Card were married in Butler county in 1872 and would live out there lives there. Joseph died in 1928 and was buried in Oak Hill cemetery in New Hartford, Iowa and his wife joined him in 1944. Several years ago I was preparing a visit to the cemetery to visit their grave when an EF-5 tornado his the month before and was documented (along with the Card family name) in this video. An ongoing project to restore the cemetery is in progress and someday soon in the future, I hope to complete my trip.

Joseph Ackerson

Eventually Joseph traded in his horses and wagon and bought a 'horseless carriage' to carry him around the county at he made calls for his vet practice.

Frank Ackerson, Orinda Coulter and Willard Card 16 Oct 1913

This final picture most likely contains some cousins though I have yet to prove it. I have found a grandson of my 4th great grandfather Willard Card who was also named Willard and married a woman nine years his senior named Orinda. They were 39 and 48 in 1913 if the date on the back of the photo is to be believed. I could buy that. The only Frank Ackerson I have thus far in my family tree could be the grandson of Joseph Ackerson mentioned above though he wasn't born until 1914 according to the census records. I have another one born in 1870. But I also have lots of branches of Ackersons that I haven't put a lot of time researching yet. The curious bit is that I have a census record in 1920 of Willard and Orinda Card that lists an Edward Ackerson as their son with the Ackerson part crossed out. Perhaps they 'adopted' an Ackerson at some point and this Frank belongs to them. It is a mystery that will remain for another day.

Euphemism

2011-10-21T06:00:00.004-05:00

I've walked by this little sign posted on our doors for a long time now and it has always struck me as a bit funny. Funny enough anyway that I finally had a camera with me and took a picture of it for your amusement if you understand my sense of humor anyway. Our doors lock if that pin in the picture is removed allowing people to freely exit but requiring a key to enter. On most mornings when I get to work, the pin has already been put into place by some of the maintenance staff and since this sign is on the inside of the door, I never see it. However, at the end of the day when you are tired and ready to go home, the little sign is always noticeable and the chains dangling. I usually feel as if my chain is dangling too.

Chopsticks

2011-10-19T06:00:00.000-05:00

Contrary to what the packaging on the chopsticks says, we were eating supper at the new sushi restaurant (not either of the two Chinese restaurants) that opened in our rural southeast Iowa town. While it is nice to get fresh sushi outside of the urban jungle without buying it at the local box store, I don't think this place will last too long. They are charging urban jungle prices which eliminates most of us poor folk here in rural Iowa from eating here with any kind of frequency. For what it costs to eat sushi there, they could eat three meals at any other restaurant in town. But the point of this blog isn't really about that, it is about the lost in translation misspellings on the chopstick packaging. You would think that the Chinese might run their translation by someone whose native tongue is English before finalizing the wording. I would bet most 2nd graders these days could catch the misspellings.

Hershey's New Scam

2011-10-17T06:00:00.005-05:00

Hershey's Air Delight

Am I the only one looking at this ad and seeing a way for Hershey to put less chocolate in their product while keeping the same pricing structure? The bar in this picture contains 1.4 grams of chocolate while the regulation Hershey milk chocolate bar contains 4 grams. That is a 65% reduction in the amount of chocolate per candy bar. I'm sure some board room full of management material in Pennsylvania got hefty bonuses for thinking of this gem of an idea. I hope this one is more of a flop than New Coke.

The Primary War

2011-10-14T06:00:00.053-05:00

No I don't mean the first war, the biggest war or the war to end all wars. I am referring to the war to see who holds the first primary/caucus for the Republican presidential nomination which Iowa has traditionally had in the form of a caucus since 1972. By now the dust has settled (although yesterday Nevada was kicking up more dust) and once again Iowa has moved the date of their caucus to January 3rd to retain the kickoff state status. Personally, I wish we would give the trophy to another state.

Being first means you get lots of attention which is why even in this small town in rural southeast Iowa, we get our share of political candidates swinging through town. Four years they were Democrats and this year it is the Republicans. It is nice in the sense that it gives me the opportunity to go listen to a candidate in person and perhaps shake the hand of the next president. But I quickly learned that little is gained by listening to them in person because they promise the same crap they never can deliver when they are elected.

Despite this shaky benefit to having first in the nation status in determining the president, which by the way is actually not true since we don't choose our voting delegates to the very end of the nomination season, it is mostly a negative in my eye. The biggest drawback is that now a days our television commercials switch from fit women using an ab-blaster and men with erectile dysfunction to political ad blasters and politicians with mental dysfunction. It is a close decision but if I have to watch an ad, something I don't do much these days with a DVR, I would choose the former over the latter.

It wouldn't be so bad if the political system left it at television advertising because that can be avoided but they don't. I'm starting to get daily phone calls asking me to endorse a certain candidate, take a short political poll or some such thing. My snail mailbox is packed full of slick material listing out reasons why I should vote a certain way. Also, cardboard signs are starting to sprout up everywhere I look giving peaceful neighbors reason to elevate their blood pressures when looking across the street at a neighbor with what is to them, the anti-Christ posted on theirs. Perhaps worst of all, this all started almost a year ago and we still have a year to go before elections meaning that it is this way 50% of the time. It's for the birds and someone else can take it in my opinion.

Reading the comments across the web, it seems like the most common solution people propose is for everyone to have it on the same day. This is a terrible idea. It dilutes any benefit one gets from having frequent visits by would be politicians and eliminates any message that they might get from people who didn't vote for them in one state so that perhaps they change their tune a little before getting into office. The second most common proposal is for everyone to take turns which means that each state would get their chance at being first once every 200 years, also not very practical. Besides, who cares about Rhode Island?

No I think the only solution is to divide the U.S. up into regions such as the east coast, south, west coast, plains states, etc so that each region has perhaps ten states or so and allow the regions to rotate who gets first dibs so that you get it once every 20 years or so. By making the region bigger than one state, you dilute the power Iowa has in selecting the future president, if we ever had any power, but you keep it politically small enough that politicians can capture the flavor of its citizens and how they regard the politician's ideas. Each state can still keep their primary/caucus system to vote the way they see fit and almost everyone is happy, except for the politicians of Iowa and New Hampshire. But happiest of all, is one native southeast Iowan who is tired of seeing political ads even as he fast forwards his DVR from one blissfully political absent television show to another.

It Hit My Eye Like a Big Pizza Pie

2011-10-12T06:00:00.052-05:00

Crescent Moon

On a recent trip up to the urban jungle, my daughter and I hit the local science center for a morning of wasting time while mama was at work, and there happened to be a couple booths set up with all kinds of information about space. While my daughter was making a spaced theme picture by gluing on various stars, moons and space shuttles onto construction paper, one of the nice ladies gathered up an entire armload of literature and freebies to give to me for my daughter. Among the literature was a little magazine about the phases of the moon and the names of various lunar features and it really caught my eye.

First Quarter Moon

I don't spend nearly as much time as I should gazing up at the moon, or the stars for that matter, and I can probably county the number of times I have looked at the moon under magnification on one or perhaps two fingers. I just haven't been in the right place at the right time, i.e. knowing someone with a nice telescope that has time on a clear night to set it up. But if I ever get a chance, this guide would be a good thing to take along in my back pocket.

Waxing Gibbous Moon

One of the big things I learned by reading through this magazine was that if you want to see the features of the moon like craters and such, you need to look at the moon sometime when it isn't a full moon. One would think that when the moon is at its fullest and thus brightest would be the best time but as it turns out and is pretty obvious on retrospect, looking at the moon is just like photography. If you want to see the features of something, you can't look at it when the light is shining straight at it and thus washing out all the detail. Thus when you look at all the pictures, the most feature detail is on the side of the moon closest too being in earth's shadow. This magazine didn't contain a picture comprised of superimposed images of that sliver overlaid on each other to give a 'full' moon view in full detail but I expect it has been done.

Full Moon

The full moon does make for some useful viewing though if you are into looking for ancient lava flows and rays of comet impacts. Tycho seen above is especially visible during the full moon. Evidently one of our lunar rovers landed on the rim of Tycho and found the dark circle immediately around the rim to be glassy impact-melted rock. It also says that the rays are only temporary and disappear in only a billion years or so as the shattered and pulverized rock in the ray darkens with prolonged exposure to sunlight.

Waning Gibbous Moon

Looking at these pictures has reawakened within me a call to remedy my situation of living in town where all nights skies are washed out with the general light pollution. It always startles me a bit when I am down on the family farm after dark and see how bright and intense the stars and moon appear in the darkened sky compared to in town where you can only see the moon and a handful of the brightest stars. Perhaps when my daughter is just a little bit older and less restless, I need to schedule a star/moon gazing trip down to the family farm.

Last Quarter Moon

Dispatch From the Real Estate War Front

2011-10-10T06:00:00.000-05:00

Going into the process of selling my home, I knew several things. I knew that it was a buyers market out there because there is a large surplus of homes for sale and only a few buyers approved for the loan it takes to get one. I also knew that selling your house privately would be a lot more difficult that selling one via a Realtor because they can get lot more exposure. I also knew that it would be inconvenient for me having to stop what I'm doing, race home, make sure things are in order and smile while people invade my sanctuary. Well I'm here to report that my knowledge was spot on.

What I didn't foresee was the huge roller coaster ride I was in for. The very morning my add hit the local papers, I started receiving calls. Couple 1 showed up that afternoon to look at our house and walked though it talking about where all their furniture and trappings of life would go. They also said that they wanted to buy a house first before selling theirs so that they had plenty of time to get moved. Both made me happy and I was sure I would hear back from them. Couple 2 looked at it the next day and seemed to like it but made no commitments. Person 3 looked at it for Couple 5 who lived four hours away and couldn't make it down to look at it for a couple days. Person 3 told a story about how Couple 5 had made an offer on another house here in town only to be rejected because they wanted to make the purchase contingent on the sale of their house. They backed off, sold their house and went back only to have the seller decide they weren't interested in selling the house anymore. Desperate for a house since they would be without one in six weeks, they were hoping to give me my asking price if I was willing to move out in six weeks. I said I would do what it takes. Another plus seemed to be that the wife's mother lives two doors down from me and a brother and a sister both live within half a block. They said they would visit in two days and begged me to give them a call if I got an offer in the meantime. I was floating on cloud nine. Group 4 was a group of teachers from the nearby school being what I suspect was just nosy as they really didn't seriously have a look or ask any relevant questions. The day arrived when Couple 5 arrived and they seemed to like what they see. Then as we were wrapping up the tour, the wife of Couple 5 let me know that they were first going to try and meet with the owner of the first house they had tried to purchase and see if they could get things rolling and if not, perhaps give me a call. Man the air came out of my balloon in a hurry.

That was Friday and as of this morning, I haven't heard a word. My ads have run out and other than a few online sites that are still relatively obscure to the masses of home buyers, my ads are fading into obscurity. I feel as if I've been through the wringer after having spent a couple nights wondering if I could get out of this house and perhaps into another one in under six weeks to now wondering if I have it in me to continue showing my house to masses of people when I really don't have to move for another year. For now, I think I am just going to take a break and relax for a bit. Perhaps I will let a stray sock hang out in the middle of a bedroom floor for a day or two unmolested. If I don't feel like opening the bedroom drapes I won't and for Godsake, I can leave the toilet seat up while I'm away at work.

When Your Daughter Is Crying

2011-10-07T06:00:00.003-05:00

I can't think of anything harder to do than to leave your daughter who is crying behind at daycare on my way to work but I've had to do it three times this week. The first time happened the day of the last blog post after she had gone through the emotions of expecting several painful shots and not receiving any. I expected that one. But the very next day when we were back to our normal routine, she started crying as I was leaving and I had to go back and try to unsuccessfully comfort her. In the end, I had to leave her screaming and crying while the lady in charge gently restrained her. In the afternoons when I picked her up, she was always happy and even reluctant to leave. I gently probed her to make sure there wasn't some reason other than what I suspected, a bad case of missing mommy. I couldn't get any reasons out of her and so we went about our normal routine.

This morning, day three, as we were getting ready to walk out the door my daughter got all teary eyed and as she began to cry told me what I thought was that she didn't want to go to the daycare place. Instantly my hackles went up as I asked why she didn't want to go to the daycare. She said, no daddy, I don't want to EAT at the daycare place. Huh?

So as we got ready and drove to the daycare, I began to piece what the problem was. I feed my daughter a small breakfast before we go and when we get to daycare, a lot of kids there haven't eaten and I think they suspected my daughter is one of them. They would encourage my daughter to eat which my daughter, who has been taught to listen and obey her elders in situations like that, took as a demand. So I assured my daughter that she wasn't being forced to eat if she didn't want too and that I would talk with the 'teacher' at daycare to set things straight.

I did and in doing so found out the rest of the story. On the recent failed vaccination attempt day, since we had a leisurely start to our morning, I had fixed my daughter a bigger breakfast than normal which she had eaten. The daycare lady, not knowing this, had told my daughter a couple times to go down to the cafeteria to get something to eat. Her reasoning was that on that day, the school starts late and thus skips the morning snack time so it was going to be a long time before lunch. My daughter didn't know she had the option to say she wasn't hungry and thus sparked this incident.

Despite getting everything all out in the open, my daughter was still crying when I left which breaks me heart. I normally listen to the morning news on my way across town to work and this morning I forgot to even turn on the radio as my mind was focused on my daughter. Fortunately we are headed out of town this afternoon after school for a weekend of mommy time and I hope a weekend will repair things with my daughter emotionally. It is tough on her with her mom being away during the week but we are down to less than nine months and then never again for this long of time. When we were deciding to do this temporary split thing, we hypothesized that it would be easier on our daughter when she was younger than older and that is certainly proven to be true. I can't imagine how hard it would be if we were looking at the next three years.

[Post addendum: She was a little teary eyed on Monday and repeated that she wasn't hungry as we walked through the doors of the daycare. The teacher had her 'help in the kitchen' while she cooked breakfast for the other kids and that must of assured her that she wasn't being forced because there were no tears at all the rest of the week.]

The Joy of Red Tape

2011-10-05T06:00:00.004-05:00

I'm not sure what to call this other than a big hassle. My daughter had her checkup before starting school and among the things the doctor looked at was her immunization schedule which he declared up to date. Really? I asked him again if he was sure because I thought all children entering school needed booster shots for various things and once again he confirmed that it was up to date.

Less than two weeks later, I received a card from the local public health office saying my daughter needs some booster shots for various vaccinations and a week after that, the school sent me a letter stating the same thing. So I called the clinic and asked them to re-check her records which they did and verified that the doctor had been wrong. So I told them I would like to schedule an appointment to do so.

In our school district, the public health center only vaccinates on Tuesdays right after lunch necessitating that I would have to take time off from work, take my daughter out of school to go get the necessary shots. Yet every Wednesday, school is delayed and doesn't start until 10:00 in the morning. Could I get an appointment at the public health center to do it on Wednesday morning when my daughter won't have to miss school? That was a big NO. So I set up an appointment at the clinic for the shots since they could do so on Wednesday morning.

So after prepping my daughter for two days on the fact that she was going to get some shots and that they would hurt a little, something that five year old children are not enthused about, we showed up at the appointed time, the first appointment they schedule in the day. Twenty minutes after our scheduled appointment, we finally get called into the room where the nurse tells me they can't give my daughter the shot unless I want to cough up $500! WTF? Evidently health insurance doesn't cover childhood vaccinations which I still have a hard time believing. Does that mean everyone has to get vaccinations at a government public health office?

So we walked out and my daughter still does not have her shots for which she was happy but now I have to take time off work, pull her out of school so that for the two hours a week they give free vaccinations, she can get hers. I also now have another week to answer her questions, address her fears and deal with the pre-shot trauma all over again. Oh what fun.

[Post addendum: Five shots and a flu mist were given yesterday afternoon resulting in a child with some sore legs this morning. She was a real trooper though and we don't have to go through this again until she is 14.]

Staging

2011-10-03T06:00:00.002-05:00

I like my home like I like my jeans, comfortable. That means I am not so concerned with how it appears to others but how it functions for me. Our home is comfortable but compared to some of the 'staged' homes we have recently looked at, probably cluttered in the mind of a real estate agent. So my wife and I spent a busy weekend recently boxing up stuff that we moved into a storage room downstairs and essentially staging our home to perhaps look more appealing to someone.

I cleaned out the fireplace and laid in a nice fire just itching to be lit though I didn't put any newspaper in it to help start it like I normally would do. When I first moved into the house, the large voids on either side of the fireplace held a rickety plywood desk of sorts and another equally rickety stand made of two by fours for a large television that the previous owners wanted to leave behind but didn't when I didn't offer them any money for it. So I tore both those things out and built custom made bookcases. The south bookcase held all me books that I hope to read someday and a few collections of books and the north bookcase held all the books I had read, some ready to be sold, given away and other to be held and possibly reread in the future. But things were lopsided and to even it out, I had to transfer books from my unread shelf to my read shelf. It took all my willpower to do such a thing but with encouragement from my wife, I was able to do it. I can't wait until we get moved so I can work on building more bookcases.

We have a bedroom in the basement which has always been our storage room since we didn't need it as a bedroom. Awhile back we cleaned it out and organized it a bit for this very day when we started boxing up more of our worldly possessions and moved them in there. Now the bedroom is about half full of boxes which I'm sure isn't ideal to a realtor. They would rather have it out of the house altogether but I'm too frugal to pay for a storage unit just for that. I just hope people will look past the boxes and see it for what it really is. A recently remodeled bedroom that hasn't been used since the day I finished painting.

The house is now staged and I've spent $200 in an advertising blitz in the local papers. I hope it sells quickly because I'm not sure how I can live in a house that appears only half full of stuff for very long.

Inked

2011-09-30T06:00:00.002-05:00

Well it finally happened. After numerous interviews, the same number of job offers, lots of consideration, soul searching and what have you, my wife has inked a contract and will officially be working at a regional hospital in the area by the end of summer next year. Although she is already a doctor, she will at last walk around in a white uniform that just says doctor instead of resident doctor. It is her dream come true and I'm proud of her.

But it does mean some changes will be in order. Although she doesn't need to live within any proximity to the hospital, when she is on call, she has to be within fifteen minutes of the hospital at all times. That means that if she wants to go home during that time, our being about 25 minutes away puts it out of range. They provide nice little hard beds in a small room for just such an occasion but it doesn't beat sleeping in your own bed if you have the option. Secondly, there is a nice Catholic school in that town that we would like to enroll our daughter in that is renown for cranking out top notch students. Finally, I am ready for a change in location. All this means that our house will likely be for sale soon if not already by the time you read this.

Since we have a lot of equity in in our house and not much left to pay for it, plus it being a buyers market right now, we've decided to sell our house first and then try to find a temporary house to buy close to my wife's work. I say temporary because our next planned step will be to buy some land where I can live out a dream of mine, building our own house. I'm so excited that I just can't believe that we are finally making progress towards living this dream. My hope is to use the equity in our current house to purchase the temporary house and within a few years, finish paying it off so that we are debt free. Then we will accumulate money to go towards building our dream house on a cash only basis. Once that is done, I would like to consider my second dream of 'retiring' and starting up my boat building business.

That is well into the future and right now there are a lot of things on my plate that need my immediate attention. Since we really don't need to move until late summer and even then, we really don't need to move if we just resign the fact that once a week my wife will have to sleep at the hospital, I have decided to try selling our current house by myself. We bought it privately without realtors involved and it was pretty painless so I would like to try selling it especially when it means I could save myself 6% commission fees. I am also going to list it with a 'make me move' price which is quite a bit higher than I would actually accept. I think I have a 50/50 chance of getting a bite even at the higher price which is about smack dab in the middle of the prime market here in town. We have hundreds of houses for sale in town but they are either at the low end or the high end. Anything in the middle, the price I'm pricing our house at, doesn't stay on the market for very long. Not to mention that I live in a highly desirable part of town in one of the cheaper houses of the area. Hopefully all this translates into an offer meeting my 'make me move' price.

If we get it, I then will have around 90 days to vacate the premises. We've already looked at quite a few houses in the new area that meet our requirements but just don't 'speak' to us. When we bought our current house, it 'spoke' to us as soon as we saw it and less than six hours later we had a signed offer on it. We didn't get that same feeling on these other houses but being they would hopefully be just temporary, I would be willing to give them a try. All of these houses are currently vacant and have been on the market for awhile so we could probably close on one and move in within the 90 days. That is plan A. Plan B would be to perhaps rent if we couldn't get a price acceptable to us on those houses and couldn't find another one that we like. If we find a place but can't close on it in time to move directly from house to house, well then we would have to go to Plan C which would involve living our of a hotel room for a few weeks, not something I want to consider but would do over living in a cardboard box.

So the ball is most definitely rolling and despite all the work this will require of me outside of my day job, I'm looking forward to it. Now if I can just get someone to give me the 'make me move' price...

Real, Honest to God Books

2011-09-28T06:00:00.000-05:00

As a couple of you may know or remember, I grew up into adulthood without a television. The first television I ever had in the same building where I slept at night was in college in the early 90s and it belonged to my roommate. I bought my first television in the mid 90's and still have it as a matter fact though it is relegated to living in a small apartment deep in the urban jungle with the full intention of never returning. It was a suicide mission of sorts that I sent it on but I'm okay with that. It was replaced with one of those new LCD flat screen models. But this post isn't about television. It is about books.

Most people ask the same question when they hear the above factoid, "What did you do with your spare time?" Besides living on a farm and working to sundown when not in school, I usually answer that I read. But that is really an understatement if you don't know the full scope. Beginning at age 8, I got an exception to the local library's policy of only checking out 7 books at any one time. Because they knew how much we read and how far we lived from the library, we were able to check out a paper grocery sack of books at a time which lasted us for around two weeks. As you can imagine, I eventually read the entire library and got a special library card to a larger library in a neighboring county. I worked on it diligently until I graduated and moved to college and probably read a good 50% of all its books.

In college, it felt wrong to read for pleasure instead of for class so I mostly just read the new releases of my favorite authors and kept to my class text books the rest of the time. When I graduated from college, I returned to my old ways but slowed down a bit. First, the libraries had gone from catering to people want to read books and switched over to movies, music and bytes as their preferred media to stock. Now I walk into a library and see shelves of books that I have read, reference type books and little else beyond the occasional new release that is never there because there is a waiting list a year long. I basically have given up going to libraries unless I am looking at reference books. Second, I started to find quality television programming that got my attention and filled my thirst for knowledge. Shows on the History Channel, Discovery and PBS started filling that craving I had that always attracted me to non-fiction books. I still get through books though now it takes me a month instead of an evening to finish one.

An unread book on my shelf feels the same to me as having money in the bank. It guarantees a future of entertainment and enlightenment. When I pick up a book and open that first page, it is like stepping onto an airplane destined for some exotic locale or sitting down with the author in a quiet restaurant and hearing about their experiences first hand. Although I am not a highlighter or a margin scribbler, I am constantly flipping back and forth through pages looking at the maps or pictures being referenced or on occasion, turning on the computer to fill in an area not addressed. When I finish the book, there is a moment of satisfaction followed by a longer moment of sadness that the book didn't continue in some never ending story. The most notable example of the latter was back in my fiction reading days when I read Alex Haley's 'Roots'.

It should be no surprise then that perhaps one of my favorite places to go to are book stores where it was my four large built-in book shelves times 10 or 50 or even 100. So many books, so little time in life. When libraries began to fail me, I would hit auctions and garage sales where I could pick up used books for pennies on the dollar but for every one of those where I found books that I liked, there were ten others full of romance novels or westerns or other genres pumped out for the masses without a lot of thought put into the content. So I graduated to buying books at half priced bookstores where I could get that grocery sack of books for $20 or the small independent book store where the owner would order any book I would like or off the top of his head list five other books I would like knowing I liked the last one I bought. Sadly, those stores were driven out by behemoth box bookstores that were beginning to make an entrance.

I wasn't too sad at the time because those big box bookstores carried tens of thousands of books. I was happy and could walk out with lots of new reading material but the price went up by double and gone was the service. I was willing to make that trade and did but after I had made the switch, they did too only a lot more subtle. First is was the appearance of CD's being sold but more non-book related stuff ranging from games to even stuffed toys began to appear displacing shelves of books that once stood there. Then coffee shops began to open in corners and more shelves of books vanished. Magazines and computer software came along displacing more shelves. Now you can walk into a big box bookstore and perhaps only a third of the floor space is devoted to books and of that third, large portions are taken over by self help, cookbooks, [insert name here] for dummies, etc., what I call the soft side of literature. If you aren't into romance, westerns, serials, etc., you are left with perhaps a half dozen shelves of books that interest you and those are only the newest releases that fit on the shelf because you have to special order any book that is now considered 'classic' and worse, I find myself scanning those shelves for the books I HAVE NOT yet read and not finding many.

The bookstores have deserted their core constituents and are ultimately paying the price. Borders is no longer at the end of this month. Those that remain, aggressively try to sell anything but books. If you have walked into a Barnes & Noble, you can see what I mean. Only a few independent bookstores remain and those are few and far between. Right now, the only option seems to join the electronic book reader club and "rent" those books in the form of bytes. Yes you technically can buy them and own them forever but you could also do that with Betamax, Laserdisc, cassette and VCR tapes. These have all been in my lifetime so I would bet lots of money that those of you with a collection of books on your Kindle or Nook won't be able to read them in another decade or so after having been replaced by the next big thing. I have a shelf of books that I re-read from time to time and have owned some of them several decades and I wasn't the original owner. Not to mention that a Kindle or Nook full of downloaded books doesn't have the same feel as a bookshelf of books. It is sterile, requires electricity or proximity too it at all times and is fragile. I would bet there hasn't been an e-reader on top of Mt. Everest but there has been many books and in fact, two of them are buried at the summit.

I'm not sure where the future of books lies but I suspect they will always be around in the 'hardcopy' format. Media formats have come and gone by the dozens but books have been around for centuries. I suspect that the large box bookstores, that claim to sell books will sell less of them and more of other stuff that they now sell, a la Amazon dot com, and the hardcopy bookstores will come again in their original format, small shops well stocked with books and nary a coffee counter or music rack to be seen. I will be there waiting and hunting for that next book to take me on an enlightening adventure.

Global Warming

2011-09-26T06:00:00.000-05:00

National Snow & Ice Data Center

I've been called a liberal and I've been called a right-winger over the years. I always pegged it to being to far towards the center and thus left or right of the extremists giving me those labels. Regardless of the labels, I have always believed global warming as a fact. I just don't see how you can't believe it with the reams of data available including the graph at the top that I just found thanks to an article on CNN reporting that the arctic ice is at the second lowest level ever and when the final data is taken next month, could perhaps even be the lowest level. If you average it out, we lose and have lost 9.3% of ice ever decade since satellite records have been taken.

Now I haven't pegged global warming on man yet but if I had to bet, I would say that we are perhaps in a natural global warming cycle as has occurred throughout the eons and man is exacerbating the problem as we tend to do. In fact man may even be helping to prevent us from frying by slowing down global warming. Regardless of the fault, global warming is happening and we are going to be forced to deal with it. If it were me, I wouldn't be buying ocean front property as an investment to pass onto my kids. If I were looking for investment property to pass on to my descendants, I would start looking around 69 meters above see level.

The Miscellaneous of Madison County

2011-09-23T06:00:00.000-05:00

At the end of all these posts, I ended up with a handful of pictures that really didn't fit in anywhere else but I still wanted to put in a post so here they all are in one. The above picture was in the city park of Winterset right near one of the covered bridges whose railings can be seen in the background. Old snarly trees always seem to speak to me because I have a lot of pictures of them.

The bridge in the park was spanning a nicely mowed shallow ditch so I could inspect the underside of the bridge and see some of the original wooden dowels.

For lunch we tried to locate a few places that had sounded good on the internet but evidently were no longer in business. So grasping at straws, we drove back to a little shack of a restaurant that had a lot of local cars parked around it, always a good sign. Rudy's did have some decent food but what caught my attention was that they had 'happy fries' as well as french fries on the menu. Our daughter got the happy fries which turned out to be what you see above. She had a good time eating them and leaving the eyes for last. She was happy but I don't think the fry was.

A device that was in the museum that doctors supposedly used to charge up the capacitors and give patients shocks to 'liven' up sore muscles. Liven up indeed!

The Other Things of Madison County

2011-09-21T06:00:00.000-05:00

These days, when people mention Madison county you most likely think of the covered bridges. If you mention the county seat of Madison county, Winterset, which came to a man in a dream and can't be found as a town name anywhere else in the world, you probably draw a blank unless you are Iowan and then you probably think John Wayne. Marion Robert Morrison, later Marion Mitchell Morrison, later John Wayne was born here in 1907 and spent less than four years of his life before moving onto California where he lived, became famous, died and was buried. But we Iowans cling to those few years.

Although I like the 'Duke' and have seen many of his movies, I wasn't a big enough fan to spend the $12 it would have cost me to visit his birth home that judging from the outside, was all of 400 square feet of real estate. Instead, we walked around to the back yard to have a look around and eventually went into the gift shop seen in the background in the adjoining lot. I'm not sure why I snapped this picture of the old pump in the Morrison's backyard but it called to me and I obliged.

I'm guessing this wasn't the outhouse ever used by John Wayne but it was back behind the house. I'm guessing this was in a joining lot that used to have a house but had long ago been razed so they could fashion a little seating area for folks visiting the house. The outhouse and walkway were probably added later in the fashion of 1907 as was the rest of the house according to the literature in the gift shop.

Never the less, my daughter had to go check it out as she does any restroom where ever we go.

We didn't come to see this fountain nor did we even know it was here. But it was on the grounds of the Historical Center in front of the mansion seen below.

The Bevington-Kaser Mansion built in 1856 sits on top of a hill overlooking Winterset. Charles Bevington built it there upon returning from the California goldrush though I haven't seen word that his wealth came from California gold. The last occupant of the house June Kaser who was a historical society president, donated the house and grounds to the historical society who built a museum on the grounds and transferred old buildings from all over Madison county to the site for preservation. But all this information came from their website and not from the lady who gave us the tour of the mansion. When I asked her who owned the house originally, she didn't even know. In fact, if it weren't for some laminated cards held together with a large silver ring, she didn't know anything and she only half heartedly mumbled a few words off of each card as we entered each of the nine rooms. I suspect she wasn't too thrilled about being there for some reason. Now the rest of the historical society members over at the museum were very nice and went out of their way to fill me in on details but the lady who gave us the tour of the mansion was a piece of work.

This was the 'outhouse' behind the mansion and definitely one of the most luxurious ones I have ever seen. Besides spots for three individuals at once, it also had...

... heat and...

... a urinal. So I guess technically it could hold four people at once though I suppose it was plenty cozy with only two people.

Normally I just love historical museums so we paid full fare admission for both the mansion and the museum ($10) and went to both. The mansion was disappointing mostly because of our tour guide and sadly the museum was also disappointing. It was more of a collection of a few families things that had been passed down through the years and didn't really have anything on the history of the area. If you were interested in period dress, a pencil collection and a huge rock collection, this is the place to go but if you are interested in local history, find someplace else. Despite this bad sounding review, there were a few things that caught my interest, one of them being the big Buick above. I can just picture myself driving that with a long black trench coat and a black fedora.

If this were the view you were seeing while standing in the road of this Buick speeding towards you, might as well kiss your ass goodbye.

The museum also had a corner with a large collections of medicine and some posters seen above and below.

There were about a dozen outbuildings on the site that were most likely moved there from throughout the area for preservation. There was a post office, law office, gas station, black smith, train depot, mercantile and more. They begged to be explored but sadly were all padlocked so all you could do was walk around and look in the windows. Since the museum and mansion were open, I'm not sure why they were locked. Perhaps they only open them up for special occasions. I think the picture above was of the corner of an old post office.

When we pulled into the place, my daughter shouted that she saw a deer. I thought she was referring to this tin one but she actually was looking at the flesh and blood variety over in another direction.

The deer in the preceding picture was grazing in the pasture of this horse which obviously made the farmer upset.

Normally I see old barns with more red wood than stone but in this case, the opposite was true. Since the owner of the mansion was wealthy enough for the mansion, a luxury outhouse and four thousand acres of land, I guess it shouldn't be a surprise that he needed a stone barn on the property. After walking around looking at all the locked buildings, we finally decided that we got our $10 worth and left to finish our covered bridge tour in the rain which had started again.

Silhouettes of Madison County

2011-09-19T06:00:00.001-05:00

Standing inside Roseman Covered Bridge, trapped by the pouring rains outside, I started noticing how when at the far end of the bridge, the light at the other end seemed straight out of the movies beckoning me to heaven.

Then my daughter anxious to depart started running back and forth from one end of the bridge to the other and back again disappearing briefly into that light and coming right back out of it towards me. That gave me an idea.

Angels appeared to me...

The end result was a picture that I will treasure for the rest of my life.

Poverty Looks Nice To Me

2011-09-16T06:00:00.015-05:00

Listening to the nightly news this past Tuesday, I was flabbergasted to see their news segment on poverty after a new report showed that poverty levels increased for the fourth year in a row and there are more people in poverty now than ever before since records tracking it began in 1959. Over forty-six million Americans or 15% of the population now live in poverty. To emphasis their point, they interviewed the Anareese and Angel Hidalgo family from Florida who are now living in 'poverty'.

According to the video report where these screen captures were taken, the Hidalgos lost their job a year ago and now the four of them are living on $189 a week while their house is being foreclosed upon. Here is a family who has a very nice house, nice appliances and designer decorations, all of which are much better than my own and my income is nowhere near the poverty level.

All I can see is a family who spent WELL BEYOND their means to live a lifestyle not supported by their income when they had it and now that they don't, they burnt through their $40,000 savings and their house is being foreclosed upon. Cry me a river. Around here we call that paying the piper.

The questions that should have been asked to the Hidalgo family are: how on earth did they blow through $40,000 in less than a year when they both knew they didn't have a source of income and if they wanted to live the lifestyle they were living which is their right, why didn't they have an appropriate level of money in their savings account to support it when the economy got tough AS IT DOES ON A FAIRLY REGULAR CYCLE? The Hidalgo family are not the face of poverty, they are the face of stupidity.

The Graffiti of Madison County

2011-09-14T06:00:00.042-05:00

The covered bridges were neat to see with all their history, especially the three that were still in their original locations on the back roads of Madison county. But I have to admit, they all looked almost identical in the way they were built and after seeing one, there wasn't a lot to do at the rest other than to photograph their locations to document that you had been there. I suppose that is why people resort to graffiti in their effort to document their visit to the bridges. The heavy interior planks were scarred with old words and initials that had been carved into the over the years and weathered until they were virtually unreadable. So in order to stem the removal of wood to carve initials, the care takers of the bridges had lined the first eight or ten feet of each bridge's interior walls at each entrance with smooth wooden boards that they then painted white to encourage people to leave their mark their in a non-destructive manner. Judging by the dates, I would guess that every year before the covered bridge festival in October, they were repainted to allow more people to leave their mark. It seemed to work well. So after taking my pictures and looking out over the creeks and watching the rain, really the only thing to do was to read the graffiti and see what people had to say. There were hundreds of unoriginal '[name] was here' and 'for a good time call...' but there were a few that caught my eye and they are posted below:

The Bridges and Rain of Madison County

2011-09-12T06:00:00.002-05:00

Due to my wife being on call on Sunday of Labor Day which means she worked from early Sunday morning straight through to mid-Monday morning, we spent the weekend up in the Urban Jungle and had Saturday free to do something. We decided a day trip was in order and finally after all this time, we decided to head to Madison county and see those covered bridges that Clint Eastwood made so famous in the movie which I have yet to see or the book by Robert Waller I have yet to read. Unfortunately, Saturday rained on us off an on all day with periods of heavy down pours and even the off times still producing a light mist so none of the pictures are the greatest.

The first one we saw was Hogback which we had to ourselves. It was built in 1884 and is 97 feet long. As I would later learn, it is in its original position, a trait shared with only two other of the five remaining bridges where were among 19 that once graced this county. The bridge is named after the limestone ridge that forms the west side of the valley.

The next bridge we arrived at during a heavy downpour of rain was Cedar. It was the only bridge that you could actually drive across and I was actually leery to drive across a bridge originally built in 1883. But I needn't have worried because the Cedar bridge was actually burnt by an arsonist in September of 2002 and this was a replica. Not only was it a replica but it is actually 1.3 miles east of where it was originally located. For those who have have read the book it is the bridge where Francesca meets Robert to take some pictures. Because it was raining and close to a main road which meant that it got more traffic than many of the others, we just drove across pausing only to take this picture and drove on to the next one.

The Cutler-Donahoe covered bridge can be found in a city park in Winterset which obviously was not its original location. It was built in 1870 and originally located near Bevington, Iowa which straddles both Madison and Warren counties. I'm assuming this bridge was on the Madison side of the county line but wouldn't place money on it. It is the only hyphenated bridge of the six.

Lightening was snapping through the sky when we pulled up to the Roseman covered bridge and I had just enough time to hustle down the river bank to snap this picture before the rain came down in buckets. We ended up spending lots of time on this bridge waiting out the rain and taking shadow pictures which I will probably make the subject of another post. The Roseman bridge was built in 1883 and is said to be haunted because in 1892 two sheriff's posses trapped a county jail escapee in the bridge. Legend says that the man cried out, rose up straight through the roof of the bridge and disappeared. I didn't see any ghosts during our extended time there. It is the second of three bridges that are in their original location and was the main bridge seen in the movie. I guess since it had been recently renovated before the movie, crews were sent down to 'age' the bridge for the movie and then 'un-age' it afterwards.

Because it was pouring rain, we drove back into Winterset for an early lunch and to cross a few more non-bridge site seeing items off our list before returning to our covered bridge tour. The next bridge was Holliwell and was built in 1880. At 122 feet long, it is the longest of the covered bridges remaining in Madison county and is built over the Middle river and remains at it's original location. I should mention that the biggest reason these bridges 'moved' was that although they were good for horse drawn vehicles and even today's gas powered vehicles one at a time, they were hard for farmers to drive through with tractors and equipment. So lots of pressure was put on the county to move these bridges which they did to three of them. The other three all had a bypass built around them complete with modern concrete bridge for the farmers to use and allow the covered bridges to remain unmolested.

The last bridge located very near I-35 was the Imes covered bridge which was built in 1870 and is the oldest of the surviving Madison county covered bridges. This bridge began life over the Middle river near Patterson but was moved in 1887 to a spot over Clinton Creek. Where it is now is over some no name ravine on the east side of St. Charles.

The insides of all these bridges were built with massive timbers which is exactly why they were covered bridges to begin with. The locals found it much easier and less expensive to build and maintain roofs over the bridges than to replace all those massive timbers every few years due to natural weathering. I suspect the sidewalls to all the bridges kept the horses focused on the road ahead instead of what was underneath them. Whatever the reasons, the walls and roofs had done their jobs because I could still see original wood doweling holding the boards together throughout the bridges.

Amazing Grace

2011-09-11T11:23:00.000-05:00

Below are the lyrics to the song that I usually turn too in times of remembrance.

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I see.

'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed.

Through many dangers, toils and snares,
I have already come;
'Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.

The Lord has promised good to me,
His word my hope secures;
He will my shield and portion be,
As long as life endures.

Yea, when this flesh and heart shall fail,
And mortal life shall cease,
I shall possess, within the veil,
A life of joy and peace.

The world shall soon dissolve like snow,
The sun refuse to shine;
But God, who called me here below,
Shall be forever mine.

When we've been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We've no less days to sing God's praise
Than when we'd first begun.

Not Yours To Give

2011-09-09T06:00:00.004-05:00

I ran across this excerpt from The Life of Colonel David Crockett by Edward S. Ellis (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1884) a couple weeks ago and found within it many paragraphs that could well apply to modern day politics. If today's congress realized what Davy Crockett realized when confronted by Horatio Bunce, we would not be in the economic pickle we are now. Food for thought.

In the early 1800's Congress was considering a bill to appropriate tax dollars for the widow of a distinguished naval officer. Several beautiful speeches had been made in support of this bill. It seemed that everyone in the House favored it. The Speaker of the House was just about to put the question to a vote, when Davy Crockett, famous frontiersman and then Congressman from Tennessee, rose to his feet.

“Mr. Speaker, I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased and as much sympathy for the suffering of the living as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity, but as members of Congress we have no right to so appropriate a dollar of the public money. Some eloquent appeals have been made to us upon the ground that it is a debt due the deceased. Sir, this is no debt. We cannot without the grossest corruption, appropriate this money as the payment of a debt. We have not the semblance of authority to appropriate it as a charity. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week's pay, and if every member of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks.”

There was silence on the floor of the House as Crockett took his seat. When the bill was put to a vote, instead of passing unanimously as had been expected, it received only a few votes.
The next day a friend approached Crockett and asked why he spoken against a bill for such a worthy cause. In reply, Crockett related the following story:

Just a few years before, he had voted to spend $20,000.00 of public money to help the victims of a terrible fire in Georgetown. When the legislative session was over, Crockett made a trip back home to do some campaigning for his re-election. In his travels he encountered one of his constituents, a man by the name of Horatio Bunce. Mr. Bunce bluntly informed Crockett, “I voted for you the last time. I shall not vote for you again.”

Crockett, feeling he had served his constituents well, was stunned. He inquired as to what he
had done to so offend Mr. Bunce.

Bunce replied, “You gave a vote last winter which shows that either you have not capacity to understand the Constitution, or that you are wanting in the honesty and firmness to be guided by it. The Constitution, to be worth anything, must be held sacred, and rigidly observed in all its provisions.”

“I take the papers from Washington and read very carefully all the proceedings of Congress. My papers say that last winter you voted for a bill to appropriate $20,000.00 to some sufferers by a fire. Well, Colonel, where do you find in the Constitution any authority to give away public money in charity? No Colonel, Congress has no right to give charity. Individual members may give as much of their own money as they please, but they have no right to touch a dollar of the public money for that purpose.”

“The people have delegated to Congress, by the Constitution, the power to do certain things. To do these, it is authorized to collect and pay moneys, and for nothing else. Everything beyond this is usurpation, and a violation of the Constitution. You have violated the Constitution in what I consider to be a vital point. It is a precedent fraught with danger to the country, for when Congress once begins to stretch its power beyond the limits of the Constitution, there is no limit to it, and no security for the People.”

“I could not answer him,” said Crockett. “I was so fully convinced that he was right.” I said to him, “Well, my friend, you hit the nail upon the head when you said I had not sense enough to understand the Constitution. If you will forgive me and vote for me again, if I ever vote for another unconstitutional law, I wish I may be shot.”

After finishing the story, Crockett said, “Now sir, you know why I made that speech yesterday. There is one thing now to which I will call your attention. You remember that I proposed to give a weeks pay? There are in that House many very wealthy men, men who think nothing of spending a weeks pay, or a dozen of them, for a dinner or a wine party when they have something to accomplish by it. Some of these same men made beautiful speeches upon the debt of gratitude which the country owed the deceased, yet not one of them responded to my proposition. Money with them is nothing but trash when it is to come out of the people. But it is the one great thing for which most of them are striving, and many of them sacrifice honor, integrity, and justice to obtain it.”

The Post Office May File for Bankruptcy: Is This Really a Surprise?

2011-09-07T06:00:00.006-05:00

In the real world, if a business keeps spending more money than all their competitors to do the same function, they eventually price themselves out of the market. The post office has been doing that for over a decade but since it is considered an essential government office and perhaps most importantly is funded by our tax dollars and thus not readily accountable, they were subsidized so that their services were cheaper despite their higher costs. Had they kept that business model under control, they still could have used it successfully for many decades to come but they couldn't even do that. Now they are in a spot where they have spent so much future money that they couldn't possibly raise the price of a stamp enough to bail themselves out.

One of the reasons why is that they give out generous salaries. The average Federal Civilian employee made $81,258 in 2010 which is a 61.5% increase in the last ten years. The average private sector employee made $50,462 in 2010 which is only a 33.3% increase in the last ten years. If you add in their benefits, the average Federal Civilian took in $123,049 on average compared to the private sector employee who received $61,051 for 2010. This is a pretty significant chunk of change when multiplied by the 2.1 million Private Civilians employed by the government in 2010.

So why are government civilians' salaries growing at such a fast pace? Well federal compensation is legislated on by Congress and those raises have occurred regardless of economic factors these last few years. Tack on increases in locality pay, a wide expansion in benefits, a growth in the number of high-paid jobs (the number of six figure jobs more than doubled between 2007 and 2009) and routine adjustments that move workers into higher salary brackets regardless of performance and it really isn't surprising.

Is this increase in pay really just an indicator that there are more highly skilled jobs in the government than in the private sector? Pulling out of the 2011 Federal Budget for example, the USDA's office of Communications paid out $9 million in benefits and wages in 2010 for a total of 77 employees. That averages out to $117,000 each. Or if you look at the 62 employees of the USDA's office of Chief Economist, you will find that they earned on average of $177,000 in 2010. I have never worked in an office comprised entirely of highly skilled individuals, I'm guessing the same applies here. Even if it were true that there are more highly skilled employees per capita than the private sector, what has changed since 2000 to merit the 61.5% increase? The simple truth is that they just pay more despite what the government claims. A USA Today analysis of 200 jobs that cross between the private and federal civilian sectors confirms this by showing that on average, working for the government garners a 20% premium over your private sector counterparts. Not to shabby.

The average private sector person garners $10,589 worth of benefits every year while the federal civilian garners $41,791. Why the discrepancy? Well according to the USPS website, the new hire immediately gets 13 days of vacation and 13 days of sick leave for the first three years and then their vacation time goes up to 20 days. This doesn't even count the 10 federal holidays that they get. The federal employees also get retirement health benefits, a inflation protected pension, a retirement saving plans with government match, all of which are rare these days out in the private sector world. Then there are those that are just as valuable but hard to put a price on like job security. If you work for the private sector, you are 4 times more likely to be laid off than a federal employee. Only 1 in 5000 federal employees on average are fired for poor performance each year.

So the Post Office is going broke. Does this really surprise anyone?