Riverbend Journal

  After our visit with Devils Tower, we still had a fair amount of driving to do to get away from the Sturgis motorcycle rally and find an open motel. We ended up finding a vacancy in Sheridan, Wyoming which is situated at the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming. We decided to do a little exploring after getting checked in and drove up a nearby canyon formed by the Tongue River. It didn't disappoint. We drove as far as we could and eventually the road came to an end due to the canyon walls boxing us in and a small gravel parking lot. There we parked and cooled our heels as dusk fell on the Bighorn mountains. Above us were two natural arches high up on the canyon walls though only one can be seen in the picture above. It was a beautiful place to end our day. Our plan once arriving in Wyoming was to set up a basecamp of sorts at an AirBnB and we had one reserved for us in Riverton, Wyoming near the foothills of the Wind River mountain range. But to get there, we decided to ...

  Back when we were kicking around ideas for my wife's second week off over the summer, we began kicking around ideas to head west. Particularly, my wife, not natively born in America, wanted to see the "Rocky Mountains" from ground level. She has technically seem them in the southwest but I admit, that isn't the same as seeing them further north. We started talking about Montana but ended up deciding on Wyoming. I have been to Wyoming a number of times but mostly in my youth and certainly not since I have been married so I was looking forward to returning to some old sites as well as seeing some ones I have only seen in pictures such as Devils Tower seen above. Wyoming is a big state and depending on where we were heading, we could go different ways. So we ended up choosing to go in a big circle and with Devils Tower being our first stop in the NE corner of Wyoming, we decided to head there via South Dakota. This effected us in two distinct manners. The first: Going ...

I'm hopefully back from vacation and writing upcoming posts this morning but while that is happening, I thought I would post one more picture of my altar build project that I completed earlier this spring. We didn't get back from our first vacation until Sunday afternoon so headed down to the church that I built the altar for which only has mass on Sunday evenings. Above is how the alter now looks in place and with the chairs rearranged to create a central aisle. Before, there was an aisle down either side and the chairs stretched across the middle. You can still see the marks in the carpet where they had sat for years before. I think the altar is a perfect match for this small rural Catholic church. I'm happy I took the project though I must confess, had it been for someone else other than a church, I probably would have declined the project. The priest saw my family in attendance and mentioned that I, builder of the altar was in the congregation, in his closing remarks be...

A reminder that I should be arriving home from our vacation tomorrow afternoon and will hopefully be back to normal blogging by Monday. With the new freezer, I am better able to preserve our tomatoes. Before, I always planted more than I possibly needed so there was always a lot ready when I went to pressure can them. This year I have only four plants and I pick about a half bucket every two or three days. I cut up the ripest ones and put them in a ziplock bag in our freezer for a later date. The ones that need a day or two on the counter to fully ripen do so and then join their brothers in the ziplock bags in the freezer. Then as time allows, I gather all those plastic bags of cleaned and prepped tomatoes and simply dump them into a large stockpot where with some time, the use of a tomato mill, more time and a pressure canner, turn them into tomato products for our pantry shelf. The first batch above was turned into non spiced tomato sauce. As we do most years, we like to try growing ...

Reminder that I'm away on vacation and will return in another four or so days. Deep in our storage/laundry room in the basement has resided a 4.5 cubic foot chest freezer that we've had for probably two decades. It has served us well though it frustrates us frequently. It has been completely full for nearly all of its life with this and that and finding the particular this that you need for your meal means a lot of rummaging around and shuffling things left and right. As you can imagine, over time, things that might have started off neatly stacked get shuffled around to where you can't find things you thought you had but can find things you had forgotten about putting into the freezer many years ago. For several years now, I have been wanting to fix this problem and make the freezer work better for us, namely make it easier to see and access what we have and also get a bit more freezer space so as our fruit crops start becoming more plentiful, I have a way to preserve them....