Riverbend Journal

  My mother-in-law is a fairly religious person and at one time considered giving up her two children after her husband died and becoming a nun. A nun talked her out of it and told her to care for her children and later I would marry one of those children so it worked out. Thus whenever we are near a grotto on one of our travels, we tend to stop for a look see. After the family reunion trip to Pigeon Forge, we had four days to kill before another event that happened to fall at the tail end of our planned vacation days and so we drove south to see my brother who lives in Northeast Alabama. That trip south wasn't uneventful as I would like as we had a tire come loose and nearly fall off after nearly 10,000 miles of driving it since I had new tires installed last fall. Fortunately it was caught before it fell off and after a three hour delay, we were able to complete our trip. The following day we drove to see this grotto which is called the Ava Maria Grotto. A brother of the nearby m...

  My wife had schedules two separate weeks off this summer for vacation and we didn't have any definite plans for either week since they have to be scheduled a week in advance. So when some of my wife's relatives from the east coast said they had books a rental house in east Tennessee and asked if we would like to join them, and we saw if fell at the start of one of those weeks my wife had filed for, we said heck yeah! So that is how we found ourselves in a mountain top rental a mile outside of the tourist mecca of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee last week.  Most of our time was spent doing family centered things so I don't have a lot of pictures that aren't personal in nature. We did go for a hike in Smokey Mountain National Park one morning taking some of the family who had never hiked before with us. We did a short trail up Porter's Creek to see the waterfall you see above.  The younger folks went into Dollywood one day but I stayed back and spent a relaxing day reading,...

  As it worked out, we had just enough straw stored underneath our deck from what I had hauled up a couple years ago to just mulch this year's garden. But I still had quite a number of bales still down on the farm that I had to bring up for future years. A couple people from down there were headed my way so I asked if they could bring up what they could fit in the back of their trucks and they obliged. I helped them unload it during the hot part of the day so just stacked it in our driveway. The following morning while it was still cool and the sun was behind the trees, I lugged it all down and stacked it up underneath our deck and tarped it. There it will overwinter and allow us to mulch our garden next year and possible they year after.  I love using mulch as it makes the garden much easier to keep clean of weeds and with our poor depleted soil, helps us to build up organic matter quickly in the soil. More organic matter will add more nutrients for our plants and will also m...

   I am away on a road trip and will be back in a week or so. I love the part of a wood build project when I start the finishing process. For many years, at least up until the recent altar I built for someone else, I have eschewed the use of stains and instead prefer to retain the natural colors of wood. Thus I have forgone the use of stains and film finishes and instead just apply oil to my wood projects. In this case, I am using a hard wax oil finish which penetrates into the wood to provide protection from moisture and allows the richness of the wood to be visible. Above is the lower shelf of the coffee table which I made out of read oak boards planed down to an inch thick. Next up, I applied the same finish to the base minus the three vertical walnut pieces on each end. Since I still have a decorate element to make (and haven't yet started on it) that will adhere to those three pieces, I don't want to apply oil to them just yet so that the glue will stick well. When I get ...

  I am away on a road trip and will be back in a week or so.  At long last, we finally have some bluebirds that have hatched out. It has been a tough start for them. Despite being bigger than sparrows/wrens, the bluebirds kept being fought off every time they showed interest in nesting in our bluebird house between the house and the garden. The sparrows would attack the poor male bluebird until he gave up and flew off and then throw one of their quick built nests up inside the bird house. Every day, I would go remove the nest and toss it in our compost bin. This went on for TWO MONTHS! Evidently the sparrows got the hint at that point and either built a nest somewhere else or moved on to someplace with less picky humans. After a week or two of inactivity, suddenly I saw the bluebird pair had come back, built a nest and laid four eggs. Typically they lay five but this was during a heat wave and late in the season which may have limited them. It was so hot, I was worried that th...