Riverbend Journal

  I thought I would do a bonus post with my daughter's pumpkins displayed, oldest on the left, youngest on the right. I do the knife work but they do all the gutting and design work, drawing their faces on with erasable markers.  Halloween for us has always been a simple holiday. When I was young, we carved pumpkins and our mom would drive us around to a few of the neighboring farms but we never got bags full of candy like our urban peers did. I seem to recall the occasional Halloween party where we had to bob for apples but those were few and far between.  Likewise, with my kids, we keep things simple. We take them to a dozen or so houses in our immediate neighborhood on the edge of town where traffic is always very light and call it a day. Unlike me, my girls rarely eat much of their holiday candy. They will eat some on that first night and then generally I will throw the rest away in a month after picking out a few for myself. My eldest stopped going door to door with ...

This rather poor excuse for a photo is for AnvilCloud who suggested I take a picture of deer in the remains of my radish patch rather than shoo them away immediately. As the saying goes, the best camera is the one you have on you when needed and so while eating dinner in the low light of dusk, my phone camera in my pocket fit the bill. While it can take beautiful pictures, at dusk and of a moving target is not an area where it excels.  Until the radish patch planting, the deer mostly stayed down at the base of the hill up next to the trees as this sizable buck is doing. At this time of year, they mostly stay within the trees, but I think they have gotten careless during their dining sessions in my radish patch. The neighbor across the road, barely visible through the gaps in the trees above the buck's hindquarters shoots deer but he died earlier this year. However, the neighbor who lives just a couple hundred yards in the direction this buck is hunting, also shoots deer and is stil...

When I was a young teen, a farm pond was most likely going to freeze dry over winter and so my family obtained a seine and drug it through the knee deep water. We drug out a lot of bullheads which we cleaned and ate and also a number of bass which we put in buckets and transferred to another larger farm pond that we had. What had always been a bluegill pond, slowly transformed into a bass pond and the bass grew quite large. Although I never fished there often over the years, it was nice to catch some of those big bass and toss them back in for someone else to catch. I was content to eat the smaller bass and the bluegill. Now, decades later, the outflow pipe to that pond has rusted out below the bed of the pond causing the water to spill out to that level. What was probably six feet deep or more in the middle is now maybe two feet deep and the pond is a tiny fraction of it's original size. Essentially the pond is unfixable at this point without fully draining it and at that point, i...

When we first moved into this house, I built a long built in workbench along this wall and hung cheap cardboard like cabinets above it. This worked okay for awhile but had it's issues. The biggest one was that I had no place to assembly anything. It usually meant taking a sheet of plywood and laying it across saw horses which worked well until it was time to clean up and run the cars inside. Plus the workbench was always clutters and I was forever shuffling things around to make room for what needed done.  I decided that my next shop would all be on casters so it was easy to pull out from the wall, use and then push back next to the wall as the end of the day. I tore out the built in workbench and those cheap cardboard big box store special overhead cabinets and started over. I'm not sure how long ago that way but it was probably five years ago.  With no workbench with drawers to store things, I ended up with a huge pile of stuff in the above corner of my garage. It extended o...

  As you can see from the side facing you, I have the drawers now installed in my workbench and I am very happy. It will probably take me quite a bit more time to organize everything into the right drawer and make some dividers for them but it will be a labor of love at this point. More than likely, this will be the last project I'll work on in the garage until possibly next spring so the drawers will have to wait for a good workout.  You might notice the square frames on top of the work surface. I left them there to demonstrate that I do make mistakes. Those frames constitute the top inch of the larger lower drawers. For some reason, the dimension on my story stick that I used to calculate drawer heights and gaps, was written down wrong though it measured exactly right on the stick. As you might guess, the dimension was an inch larger than would fit in the allotted space. Fortunately this was an easy fix as I could just run each side of every drawer through my table saw and l...

Above and below are pictures showing some of the drawer construction. It is just simple dadoes and rabbets (rebates to you non-Americans) with plenty of glue and a few nails to hold things together until the glue dries. The assembly went well and I got all of them assembled in two partial days and then sanded off the excess glue. This left a large stack of drawers on top of my table saw awaiting for me to apply drawer pulls and the other half of the drawer slides to make them actually behave like drawers.  A keen eye might notice some errant nails protruding out of the sides here and there. Because plywood is composed of layers of wood in various grain directions, nails can and sometimes do go in weird directions. It is a reminder of why one doesn't keep one's fingers anywhere near the area where a nail/brad is being applied with an air gun which is what I was using. But as I have said before, this is shop furniture so once the glue dried, I just ground them flush with a grinde...

  I drew up the plans for my drawers on a scrap piece of plywood. I usually do that after making the carcasses in case things change as far as size goes. By doing it this way, I can measure between the installed drawer slides and get an exact measurement for width as well as depth and height. I laid out my joinery and necessary dimensions for cutting all the various parts out.  Before I started cutting, I reviewed all those dimensions and found one that I distinctly remember being off by a half inch. I corrected it and was thankful for having caught the mistake ahead of time before I wasted all that plywood, in this case a full sheet and part of another. I cut out all the pieces and did the joinery on those that required it and did a dry assemble to verify fit before I proceeded to the glue stage of assembly. My drawer bottom panels were short, by half an inch. I went over to my scrap piece of plywood and sure enough, the dimension I corrected was the one that was a half an in...

Well my radish experiment was a bust, I guess. I had an excellent stand of them and they looked so nice and green in my urban garden plot and then we had a week of very hot weather, in October, a time when we aren't supposed to see such weather. That really stressed them out and they began to wilt. Around the same time, I saw my first deer in the patch and just shooed it off. I didn't see that deer for nearly a week. Looking back, he must have been running all over the county telling all his friends about the excellent salad bar he found growing behind this house near a pond. Soon, I would look out the window and see not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six but sometimes up to seven deer browsing hungrily on my radish tops. There was even an eight point buck among them and I rarely see the bucks out in the open. I chased them off but they kept coming back multiple times a day sometimes when I was not around or staring out the window. They made quick work of the ...

The very day last week that summer left and fall blew into town on a cold windy day with just a spritz of rain, I got a couple more sheets of plywood to make some cheap drawer boxes. It is all going to be rabbet joinery with glue and nails.

  I subdivided each of my carcasses into three equally sized spaces for a bank of three drawers, two shallow and one deep for each bank. Then I added some drawer slides that I think I bought at least two years ago for this project and then never got to it. I'm pretty sure it was during the height of Covid in '21. I blew off the dust and after opening them up for the first time, verified they were the right size and got them installed. I even got the scissor jack out of the ban and got it ready for the next step which is to install them underneath the work surface.  The installation went smoothly, thanks to the car jack. Although there is a lot of drawers to make and assembly, which will take a fair amount of time, just having those carcasses in place feels like the hard part is over. 

  I'm not sure I'll complete this project right away but I'm at least getting it started. It might not be obvious but those boxes on top of the table are the same size as the cavity below the table. Another same sized cavity is on the other side of my assembly table. Currently, my woodworking tools are scattered about in three cabinets and two wall units, which require a fair amount of time spent walking back and forth to accomplish any task. My goal is to build drawers underneath my assembly table to hold all those things, perhaps joinery on one side and assembly on the other. Not only will this be incredibly convenient, but it should make room for the pile of odds and ends I have laying in a corner because there isn't room for it anywhere else.  My hope is to build the carcass of the units and then utilize my car's scissor jack again to get the unit held up in place until I can get it fastened. My previous plan was to just turn everything upside down, install the ...

  My grandmother's final wishes were to be cremated and put in the side by side urn with my grandfather's cremains. Also part of her wishes were to have a bit of my mom's ashes added to both hers and my grandfathers ashes. The funeral home was able to comply and this past weekend, we met to complete the last step of a simple ceremony followed by the cremains being buried in a plot next to my grandfather's parents, the same ones whose names are now honored in my daughter's middle names.  The ceremony was definitely simple and short. My daughter kicked it off with Amazing Grace played on her violin, a few scriptures were said and my daughter finished with Jupiter on the violin. After that, we walked around the cemetery where I pointed out three generations of graves beyond my grandmothers. Later we met up at a restaurant for lunch and conversation before making our way home. I met some distant cousins whom I hadn't seen since I was probably less than a teenager an...

  Last year, I canned apple pie filling and dehydrated the remaining apples. The apple pie filling is essentially a dump and serve and one only needs to do the crust and baking parts of making a pie. It is a big hit but I made like 50 or 60 pies worth which is probably more pies than we eat in five years time. So with this year's crop of apples, I was looking to do something different. My mom used to make jellies when I was young and I remember her strawberry jelly quite well. I thought perhaps making jelly out of apples would be a close second so I looked up several recipes from various trusted sources. The first recipe I made was a pectin less jelly from a source that I get 95% of my canning information from and is run by a government agency. I have never had things go wrong following their formulas. But my first batch looked like apple soup still more than 24 hours after canning. I looked elsewhere and about all the recipes I found were similar except they used pectin. So I dump...

Taken less than a week ago, the radish patch as I've been calling it looks great. I've had to chase the deer from it a few different times and I'm sure they've been in there more times than I've caught them, but any damage they have caused has been minimal thus far. In the short term, I've bought a net fence that can be electrified if necessary to install around it next spring. Since the radishes will die in a matter of weeks, I didn't think it was worth installing the fence when I would only have to take it down again in the spring to more easily till up everything. Thus why I have been chasing deer manually. Also on my list of things to do is to dig up and remove that old fire pit in the foreground. It had seen it's better days before we even moved into the property and it certainly hasn't gotten any better. Weeds grow up requiring me to constantly spray and pull them at various points during the summer. The pit itself is falling into rubble and is...