Riverbend Journal

Not too long ago, back in February, I blogged about what Footloose the song and what the album meant to me.  In short, in case you don't remember, I have a fond memory of putting an entire roll of quarters into a jukebox and playing the embedded song in the video over and over and over while we ate pizza.  Totally by coincident, a friend whom I used to know about 25 years ago, recently put the above video in his Facebook feed showing Kenny Logins and Daryl Hall playing Footloose together. Not only does the song bring back memories, but the first part of it where they are discussing the various parts and when each of them are to come into the song makes me realize how incredibly talented they are in their craft. I could never begin to do such a thing though I think I would be as happy as a clam if I could. But I guess my talent is shaping wood and theirs was shaping sounds.  Anyway, seeing the video and hearing the song come together made me feel so good, that I just had t...

  With my extra pieces made, I worked on knocking out the handcut dovetails for the middle two doors of my cabinet. The process went a lot faster and the results a lot better. In fact, any gaps were very minimal and hardly noticeable after going over everything with some coarse sandpaper. I glued up the first middle door and everything went perfectly. When the glue had set an hour later, I undid the clamps and glued up the second door and that is when disaster struck. Despite having everything meticulously labeled so I could match the correct tails to the board with the correct pins, in the rush of gluing, I got a board turned around. As a result, the tails didn't quite align to the pins and I had to use the mallet of persuasion. That ended up splitting on of the top boards completely in half before I figured out my error. I was able to pound the board loose using the same mallet, spin it around and put the two pieces back in place easily, as it should have been had I not gotten th...

  A week or so ago, a fellow blogger was talking about handmaking cards and I made a comment about how such things are disappearing these days. The last handmade cards I can remember receiving are actually ones that a local nun used to give my girls on holidays before mass. They were made from various construction paper shapes or cut out pieces from purchased cards sent to her and glued to pieces of cardboard from cereal boxes. I don't particularly remember what was written inside them but I remember the effort that went into making them. For some reason, that always struck me more as I know a lot of effort went into creating the cards and that my girls were worth that effort. Buying a card, signing it and giving it just doesn't carry the same weight. That nun died probably 8 or 9 years ago and I'm not sure I've seen a handmade card since.  The blog author to whom I made that comment too, saw that comment and sent me the above handmade card. I blurred out her name and w...

  As I write this nine days ago, France is in an imminent financial crisis. Their debt is now forecasted to be around 116% of their GDP (Gross Domestic Product) which is essentially everything of value that they produce in any given year. In other words, they owe more than what they sell and are running a deficit. They are forecasted to lose nearly 170 billion Euros this year. The will likely see a credit downgrading by the time this post is published on blogger which means that debt payments will increase only making their deficit worse. If it gets bad enough, other countries will stop lending them money and they will default and collapse much like Greece did back in 2009. When Greece collapsed, their unemployment surged to nearly 25% for adults and 55% for youth. 111,000 companies went bankrupt overnight causing their GDP to plunge by 26%. Public debt doubled overnight. Over a third of their population lived in poverty. Many government subsidies were cut or stopped altogether. Ri...

  The problem with designing things largely in my head is that it is unfortunately fallible and prone to making mistakes. Disregarding the back panels of any of this doors on this project, there are five boxes to make. Each box has four sides. I used up for of the sides when making the largest back box so when I went to start the middle two doors, I needed eight sides. Two mistakes immediately became obvious. As you can see, I only had four boards for the middle doors and four boards for the outer doors. Half as many as I need. The second mistake is that I had cut the top and bottom boards at the same length as the top board of the first box I built. This made sense in my mind since both of those added up would equal the width of the first box but it makes it kind of hard to open said doors.  The second mistake was easy to correct. I could merely cut each board directly in half. I would lose the width of the saw blade in material, in this case 1/8" which will result in a gap i...