Riverbend Journal

  I have been commissioned to build an altar for a neighboring church and though a bit nervous since previously, all my work has stayed in my own home or with close family members, I agreed to do it. After some back and forth, the design that was settled on is shown above. It is the CAD file that I created based upon some rendered drawings provided me. Now that my show is clear and the weather is starting to warm up, I thought it time to get started on the project. The first step was to create a template to use in making the ogee arch details on the front of the altar. First I created a dimensioned print of the area in question. To create the ogee arch, I had to learn the geometric tricks involved for creating it which required some YouTube research.  This was helpful in drawing it on some MDF (Medium Density Fiberboard) to create the template. I only need one template and will just transfer it twice to get the proper locations. MDF is great for templating material as it is ea...

  I have evolved a lot over the years when it comes to finishing wood projects and I continue to try and use new methods. I started out finishing a few of the drawers on one of the inbox units with rattle can spray shellac. I have never used shellac but have seen it used by others to great success. It indeed worked okay but it took a lot of time to get into all the nooks and crannies evenly without getting too much elsewhere. In fact, I left the nooks and crannies somewhat baren of finish after the first coat to avoid getting too much that could later run and ruin the finish. Also, my index finger got quite tired of pressing the nozzle down repeatedly. So I stopped. The next day, I remembered some leftover Odie's Oil I had from a previous project. It is the consistency of peanut butter on the runnier side, more like Nutella if keeping with the spreadable food analogy. It is rubbed on and the wiped off so you don't have to worry about running drips. But I feel as if it doesn...

  Above is where I stopped last fall due to cold weather and frustration. You might be able to notice on the inbox drawers on the left, I routed grooves on the sides to fit over the wood drawer slides glued to the bases on the right. For some reason, several of those boxes twisted on me so the grooves were crooked. I also routed a groove on all nine of them when I only needed to do them on six, because the top drawers don't slide and are just screwed permanently in place.  Over winter, I mulled over ideas on what to do to fix these problems but never came up with a good solution. Then this spring, knowing I need to come up with an answer to finish these, I studied the problem one more time. I realized that the grooves on the top fixed drawers weren't really an issue. They won't be visible from the front or even sides of the completed inbox. Only if you look from the back they might be noticed and I'm guessing someone will probably just assume they were supposed to be th...

  After presanding all the drawer parts, on their inside surface anyway, I applied some tape and then glued them together. The tape is to catch the glue being squeezed out of the joint by pressure and so I can easily peel it off and not have to fuss with scraping and sanding lots of inside corners filled with dried blobs of glue. This is something that age and experience has taught me that I wish I had known in my younger years. Above, all nine drawers are glued up and I have roughly sanded the outside surfaces to prepare for the next steps. Because the corners of the drawers are also mitered joints, weak joints for wood, I added contrasting splines to all of them which was a fair amount of work cutting all those splines gluing them into place. I should note, that the drawers are all made from leftover cedar from my porch swing project that I completed a couple years ago. My shop smells so nice whenever I'm working with cedar.

  Above is one of two wooden inbox units that I made several years ago. I have the one above and the other resides at my wife's office. I made them using some scraps of pine and cherry from other projects and it resides on my office desk downstairs to the right of my computer monitor and keyboard. Also next to the framed picture of my great grandparents with the broken glass on my great grandfather's picture that I never seem to find the time to fix. Bad juju? Anyway, late last fall as I was cleaning up the garage knowing I would be making an altar come spring, I thought I should thin out the scrap pile a bit and so thought to myself, perhaps I could make a few more of these wooden inbox units. The lower two drawers slide out on rails while the upper box is fixed in place. Somehow, I lost a few pictures showing the process of cutting out all the parts. I'm not sure where they disappeared to but alas, I can't find them anymore... if they even existed. Above, I have the f...

  Two weeks ago, spring officially arrived behind our house in the form of seeds being planted directly in the ground. It was in the upper 60's that day and by late afternoon, the ground had dried enough to till from the rain we got preceeding the blizzard that followed. With the 10-day weather forecast looking favorable to no more snow or extreme cold events, we rolled the dice and planted some peas, carrots and lettuce.  As you can see from the photo above, I successfully, without concussing myself, pounded in the metal fence posts in the corners and two in the middle to help support the electrified netting so that it doesn't sag so much like it did last year. I put PVC sleeves over the top to insulate the metal posts from the electricity so that things don't short out. Hopefully this will continue to keep the deer and raccoons at bay though I have yet to hook up the solar fence charger yet and probably won't until later on.  I was really pleased with the soil conditi...

A.I. Generated Artwork As I sometimes do, I woke up in the early morning thinking about a particular subject, mulling it over in my brain, perhaps as a way of subconsciously process things. On this particular morning, I was trying to come up with a term for something that I have found is happening more frequently. The subject I woke up to pondering, was why is there a tendency for others, when a single criticism to something they said/posted/shared, to "vomit" up a litany of other grievances that really don't pertain to the single criticism that was mentioned? Most often this is centered around politically oriented posts and it happens on both sides of the political spectrum. It hit me that this need to defend "their team" with a laundry list of grievances is perhaps one of the reasons why anything political is so divisive these days. As a strategy, it can be quite effective as it tends to overwhelm any responses because, really, where does one start when cleani...

  My youngest daughter came home from school recently and promptly notified that there was a creepy furry thing looking at her by the door. Somehow she made it inside without the creepy furry thing attacking her so it peeked my curiosity. I went outside and found the creepy furry thing not in the corner at the base of the door but in the corner above and to the left of the door. Turns out it was a bat. I have seen a lot of bats over the years but this one appeared to be more wooly mammoth than bat. I have never seen quite so much fur/hair on a bat before. Do they shed or thin out their coats like other mammals do when warmer weather arrives? This was the day after an artic blizzard with 50 mph winds, rain and then snow fell on us so perhaps it got caught "out" from where it normally shelters and made do in this rather light exposed part of our covered porch.  When I found it, and photographed it, the eyes were closed and it was motionless, most likely asleep and waiting for n...

  A couple week ago, while eating a quiet lunch with my wife, we started musing about garden season approaching and after checking the weather app on my phone, determined that we had a fair chance of not seeing below freezing temperatures at night in our unheated greenhouse. The highs were forecasted to be well into the upper 50's which meant that during daylight hours, our greenhouse might be approaching temperatures in the low 80's, warm enough to grow something. So we rustled through our leftover and saved seeds and each planted some things. Above is my contribution, six Amish Paste tomato plants from my saved seeds of last year. I've never planted any tomatoes this early before but I have about a thousand seeds so I'm calling it an experiment with minimal repercussions for failure. About five days after planting the seeds, we got a blizzard with fairly low temperatures. The water in the greenhouse wasn't frozen but it certainly was pretty chilly when I checked o...

  My wife was really interested to hear Scott Hahn, an American Catholic theologian, speak at a church in the urban jungle, so we drove up there one morning not long ago. There were a lot of others with the same idea but we were able to get some "good" seats for the lecture which was three hours long with a 20 minute break in the middle.  Mr. Hahn is a gifted speaker for sure but just not in a format that was easy for me to digest. His rapid fire bombardment to the audience, of points in his two lengthy speeches, was just hard for me to latch onto. I would have been better served reading the speeches at my leisure. My wife enjoyed it all though and I guess at the end of the day, that is what counts.  The seating however, was in your typical wooden pew style seating, only these particular pews had no contours to them. Just a flat wooden board to sit on and a slightly reclined flat board to rest your back against. By the end of the three hours, I was "stove up" as my ...

  Verifying the object we were seeing was a bird and a bald eagle at that. With my wife off work for a few weeks to heal, we've taken to going to morning mass on a nearly daily basis. On this particular day, we were almost there when the priest texted us that his mother had passed away earlier that morning after a 7 year battle with cancer. Besides being a priest, he is a personal friend of our family and has been for some time so the news was a blow to us. After mass, my wife and I went for a walk on the river levee to clear our heads a bit. Along the way, we saw something on a log and weren't quite sure what we were seeing. My wife kept thinking it was just a branch jutting up into the air. I was pretty sure it was a bird but not sure what kind. So I pulled out my iPhone, zoomed in as far as I could and snapped the above picture which was the result without cropping. It was good enough to assure me that it was indeed a bird and that it was actually a bald eagle looking for fo...

A.I. Generated Artwork Once again, cancer has snuck into my life and clenched it's ugly jaws onto another person I love. The first time it grabbed my mother some six and a half years ago and that battle ended up in a draw with the death of both my mom and the cancer. This time it has chosen my wife to pick on. I hope this time, it will be a clear loser. As far as cancers goes, this one is the one I would chose if a gun was aimed at my head and told to pick one. My wife didn't get to choose and was merely told by the doctor she had breast cancer. As we have learned in the months since, it models low aggressive growth, was caught at an early stage, Stage 1A as they say in the cancer world, has hormonal receptors which means hormonal blockers are effective treatments, and has no bad genetic markers for cancers know to spread virulently or to offspring. We were given two different treatment options and though they have the same overall prognosis, they both lead you down much differ...

A.I. Generated Artwork I had the dream again last night. In it, I am sorting through the relics of an inheritance I received separating things into piles and eagerly anticipating researching and looking at each and everything carefully to identify the story behind it and why it is so meaningful to me. But at the end, the people in the room helping me sort them into piles leave and I'm left with this sad feeling of what to do with these things. The memories of them are what make them valuable to me and I know they create no memories for anyone else. I woke up with a generally sadness of trying to figure out what to do with all the physical items. This is probably the third or fourth time I've had this dream now. Having received similar inheritances in the past, I'm guessing it is my brain's way of processing subconscious thoughts, although writing this post brings them out to the forefront of my conscious. As I have sorted through things in the past, I have indeed writte...