Riverbend Journal

  Many years ago when my great uncle died, my uncle inherited the photo album of my great grandfather of his time over in Europe during World War I. Evidently my great grandfather took a camera with him overseas and then took the time to organize those photos in an album and label most of them when he got back home. I view it as a valuable treasure and I'm sure it is probably considered to be a treasure by others as I can't believe many of these probably still exist. Back when my uncle inherited it, he let me borrow it and at the time, I painstakingly scanned all the pictures. I still have those pictures and occasionally look through them but it just was never the same as looking through the album. The album provides context and on many pages, handwritten notes in my great grandfather's writing. My digitized collection is just photographs with some information added to their file names to mimic the writing. As we were sorting through my recently departed grandmother's t...

  Last year, Leigh Tate over at 5 Acres and a Dream got me to reevaluate my tomato processing method. I used to blanche them to remove their skins before cooking them down but that always introduced a lot of water into them that I subsequently had to remove again. So this year, I decided to go back to my roots and just core the tomatoes and put them in a pot, skin, seeds and all, to cook down and then run them through the hand crank mill that I have to remove the skin and seeds. It was then that I remembered just how much work that was and why I had gone with the method that I have been using. But while cranking the mill by hand, the engineer in me realized that it was probably an easy thing to motorize and Amazon confirmed it. So before my second picking of tomatoes, I had one ordered and sitting in a box at my doorstep thanks to Prime.  What took me several hours to do with the first batch of tomatoes took me only about 15 minutes this time around and was much much more eff...

  Two weeks ago, we made the trip up to my uncle's house where my grandma spent the last couple couple years of her life to sort through some of her belongings. I came away with a box of things that had some sort of sentimental, historical or curiosity value to me. The above coins/tokens, a few out of a bag full, were more of the curiosity category. From what I can tell, many were souvenirs, war money, tax credit tokens and a few actual currency coins. The Louis and Clark anniversary medallion in the center is the one that grabs my attention the most. But somewhere in the box is also a 1933 Chicago World's Fair medallion and an Indian head penny that I can't find right at this minute that rank up there too.  Not long ago,  AnvilCloud  wrote a post about cap guns from his childhood. I left a comment that the cap guns I touched in my youth had long ago run out of caps. I don't remember a single cap cap gun either. Mine were always these large silvered ones that shot ca...

  Graduation photo of my grandma My last grandparent, my maternal grandmother, died recently. She was less than 3 months from her 90th birthday so she had a good run.  I am fortunate to have lived as long as I have with grandparents. Many of my peers are losing parents or have lost them already and yet until four years ago, I had three out of four grandparents still alive and kicking. My paternal grandfather died when I was in my last years of college. After that I, I went decades before the losses started piling up with my mom five years ago, maternal grandfather four years ago and my paternal grandmother last year. Now it is my maternal grandmother and it feels like the end of an era for me.  My maternal grandparents going on a date before they were married Above is one of my favorite pictures of my grandmother when she was dating my grandfather. When I found it the first time, it was just a random loose photograph in a box full of random loose photographs but it is now...

  Since we have been completely out of spaghetti sauce, which my two kids go through at a rapid pace, canning some more of that was the first order of business. Awhile back, Leigh from  5acresandadream  made a post about canning tomatoes that influenced me to change things up a bit. For many years, I have scalded off the skins and chunked up the tomatoes to cook down and then used a stick blender to puree them before canning. This method has worked well though my back always aches from leaning over the sink for hours at a time peeling skin and cutting out defects from very hot tomatoes. The seeds while not attractive, really have never bothered me.  Leigh's method, and the one my mom used to use when I was little, is to simply cut out the defects while the tomatoes are raw and then cook them down and use a food mill to separate the skin and seeds from the pulp. I even had an old food mill that I have been carting around for years but have never used. I found my food ...

On a recent trip down to the garden, I noticed some beetles had moved into our peach tree and were clustered around some of the peaches by the hundreds. Fearing a whole scale invasion, we decided to pick a five gallon bucket full of peaches even though they weren't quite ripe and just ripen them the rest of the way at home. A few days later, they were nice and ripe and I canned 16 pints of them.  The old peach tree is a clingstone variety meaning the pits are difficult to remove. As a result, the peaches aren't show quality but I've always felt that their taste is superior. You may not want to serve them in a bowl cold to guests but they work well in pies and cobblers and that sort of thing. Our new peach tree we planted is a freestone variety where the pit comes right out. I'm hoping with modern genetics, that perhaps the taste difference has been rendered a non-factor. The few I ate earlier after planting it seemed to taste really good. Time will tell for sure. This p...

  As you may recall, our newest vehicle bought about four weeks ago, was involved in a deer suicide about a week later that messed up all that white plastic that covers the front bumper area. I took it to get it fixed, a four day job I was told, and here I am three weeks later and it still isn't in my possession though you can see from the picture of the damaged area I took this morning, it looks brand new again. Our local dealership doesn't have an autobody shop and so all repairs have to be shuttled to a larger city miles away or to use one of the other autobody places here in town, including one at another dealership that sells Chevrolet and Jeep products. I chose the latter because I wanted to end up with OEM or parts made by the Original Equipment Manufacturer versus cheaper knockoff parts that seem to flood the market. It was repaired in about five days and just needed to be buffed and an error code cleared.  Then silence ensued. I kept stopping in applying pressure and ...

 I guess you can say it was love at first sight. On our trip last month to the east coast and back, we stopped at a Filipino Community Center in northern Chicago that was having a display of local Filipino art work. I learned about it through an artist friend of mine that I have known for nearly 18 years. Our goal was to just see my friend's work, she is an extremely talented artist, and to check out others with ties to the Philippines. There was a lot of great work hung up on the walls but the one above was the one that grabbed my attention and that of my wife as well. It is an oil painting entitled Mambabatok which is the name of a traditional Filipino tattooist from the northern Philippines. Not only that, but the person in the painting is none other than Whang-od, perhaps the most famous of them all and is still alive and doing these traditional tattoos at 106 years of age! We admired the painting with embroidered tattoos and then moved on but kept gravitating back. I noticed t...

  Above is the face frame that will cover up the raw plywood edges of the cabinets and provide mounting points for the doors. I have four coats of wipe on polyurethane on at this point and it was looking quite nice I though for rustic furniture. I just thought I would add this photo for your amusement. I went out to grill up some supper on the back deck and found a toad inhabiting the space between the work surface and the grill brush. Not wanting to grill the toad, I flipped him off to the deck and he landed in a spot where snow had piled up last winter and caused some fungi to grow. The toad was jet black, the color of the work surface when I flipped him off and a few minutes later when I looked, I could barely see him due to his color matching skills. What I would give to be able to have that as a skill.  Where'd Ed go?

  As it worked out, my wife had an extra day of vacation to burn and so we took a three day weekend to recover some old territory for us. My wife's aunt, who also went with us on short notice on our prior road trip, is still with us and hadn't been to this part of the country. The six of us loaded up in the mini-van, emphasis on the mini after having driven a 15 passenger van over 4000 miles recently. We drove at a leisurely pace down to Bentonville, Arkansas, home of the very beautiful Crystal Bridges Art Museum. We checked into our motel room and after looking around, found an interesting place to eat supper called "MELD kitchen + sandwich bar" (using that same punctuation and letter sizing). It is a small place with a limited menu but I decided I was in the mood for a burger and saw Carlito's Way listed on their menu. The menu said it had sautéed portabellas, oyster mushrooms, caramelized onions, swiss cheese, garlic aioli and served on a brioche bun. I noticed...

  Every morning before the heat, I have been progressing on the cabin cabinet project. I made the doors for the lower front of the cabinet. They aren't your traditional style with a panel in the middle but will instead have hardware cloth for a more rustic look. Before I put the hardware cloth in though I am applying finish to the surfaces. Above I have 2 or 3 coats of a wipe on polyurethane and as I write this, I just applied the fourth coat and will probably do a couple more yet today before calling it good. Although not a real big fan of polyurethane, it has its uses, including high wear surfaces that will see a lot of water and wiping action. Unseen on the backside of the door frames are lots of joinery I had to do to make pockets for the hinges and a rabbet for the hardware cloth.  I wouldn't go so far as to say the drought here has broken but since returning from our vacation, we seem to be getting a shower every two or three days that will leave behind another 1/4 or 1/...

  I made the base and the face frame which will pretty up the ends of the plywood and give the doors and drawers someplace to rest against. I had cleaned everything up for the day when I got a call asking for a change order. Evidently the plumber had messed up and put the hookup for the water heater essentially where the far right cabinet will be. It will be a small water heater that will fit underneath the countertop but obviously, there can't be a drawer or storage space there. So I'm going to have to remove the last cabinet on the right and somehow make everything still work. Right now, I'm thinking about cutting the face frame (already in two pieces for transportability) into three pieces, the face frame where the water heater will be as it's own separate piece. This will allow me to install the face frame later, without the cabinet, and with a fake drawer face and two doors on the lower part, it will look like it is an actual cabinet. The carcass of that cabinet ca...

  As I wrote about before, a wind storm during our vacation blew over our old wedding orchard peach tree. There is a weak spot in the trunk and it bent at that point though not breaking it. We are hoping the peaches that are still plentiful on all the branches will still continue to ripen but I'm guessing, winter or pests will surely do it in and this will be the last year for it. Our local garden center had a promotion all spring where if you bought something, they gave you a sealed envelope with a randomized coupon in it to be opened at a specific week in July. Well that weekend came and one of ours was 30% off anything and so we used it to purchase a new peach tree for our home orchard. The home orchard consists of four apple trees, two sour cherry trees, a plumcot tree and now this peach tree. I planted it near the two apples trees I planted earlier this year. As an added bonus, this new peach tree was loaded full of ripe, ready to pick peaches which we did. The ate the damaged...