Riverbend Journal

Long time readers of this blog will know that towards the latter parts of April and the first week or so of May, I descend into madness. Morel madness that is. I find myself wandering the woods of southeast Iowa, picking off ticks before they can attach themselves to me, all to find a lot of what you see above. However, I find myself quickly approaching the time where I will have to find something else to consume me and will go mushroom hunting no more, at least purposely. I've been hunting for morels in the same wooded draws for more than 40 years. In the large majority of those 40 plus years, I have found enough to sate my appetite even though these delicacies only grow for a couple weeks a year. But the last handful of years, I've found fewer and fewer mushrooms. Probably a large part of it is just me. My eyes aren't any better than they were when I was younger and living 40 miles away from the areas I hunt, I certainly don't get down to look as often as I did when I...

  I have reached what feels like a pretty significant milestone. I have the base of the altar completed for the most part. All the trim and bead work has been added and I spent an entire day of nothing but sanding it down through two different grit levels. I still have one more finer grit to go so another half day. It takes a lot of time to get into all the nooks and crannies and to do the sanding I have two different sanders plus a few wood blocks and good old fashioned elbow grease. At points during the assembly process, I felt discouraged about a few defects but I was able to get them all repaired and they are no longer noticeable at all. In fact, as I was wrapping up my second grit of sandpaper, I was quite pleased with how everything had turned out. As I have told several people, building this thing was above my paygrade but somehow, I think I may be able to pull it off. After taking these pictures, I put a padded blanket underneath it to protect all my sanding efforts and was...

  After the delays of looking at flowers and trying to stop radon from entering my life, I decided to get back to my altar project. When I left this thread last, the beading had been clamped to the scraps cut out to form the double ogee arches above to assimilate the rough shape so that it would be easier to fasten in place. After a few days of hanging out around my forms, my beading that will be used to cover up the plywood edges and provide some detail interest had warped enough to allow me to fasten it on easier though it would still require a lot of clamping to hold it until the glue dried. So I spent a day applying the beading, waiting for the glue to cure and then continuing with another vertical strip. The bottom beading will be applied maybe tomorrow and then the real fun of lots of sanding can begin in earnest. 

  As everyone already knows, we Catholics have a new pope as of Thursday afternoon. I was shocked as most were that an American born pope was elected but happy to see that he seems (on paper anyway) a lot like Pope Francis in many regards. However, I see a lot of people, especially non Catholics on the far political left, celebrating him, as they did Francis, as someone who is changing the church. To be clear, Pope Francis and most likely Pope Leo XIV, did and will not change any of the church's core beliefs. All Pope Francis did and from what I have read about Pope Leo has said, is teach us to follow the gospels. That includes a lot of loving our fellow people around us. They did not suddenly say homosexuality is not a sin. We can still love and care about homosexuals while not condoning the act. They did not say we encourage people to break laws to enter our country illegally and cause strain upon our system of care. We are to love immigrants and welcome those that do come throug...

  After the radon man left, he told me that the levels of gas that our detector was detecting should drop after a few days due to radon having a half-life of around three days. He also said he would be back in a couple of weeks to place a state certified radon detector/recording device in the basement for a few days to put in our file for auditing purposes. Well only one of those things really happened. While the radon did come  back with his detector/recorder and set it up, our levels displayed by our reader never really changed all that much. They might have gone down just a little but not nearly enough as promised. Thinking it might be just a calibration issue since mine was cheap and purchased (probably from China) over the internet and the radon man's recorder probably cost as much as a cheap new vehicle, I hoped it would display different results.  Three days later he came back to print out the results and pick up his device and while they were slightly less than wh...

A week and a half ago, while our youngest was away on an overnight school trip and we were experiencing our first true empty nester experience, we decided to occupy our minds by going to a nearby town that is known for their tulips. They have a very well attended festival celebrating their tulips the following weekend, but we wished to avoid the crowd and as an added bonus, the majority of the tulips were already at their peak or just past their peak. There were still a lot of people out and about photographing all the blooming tulips of various kinds. There was even a young lady in a fairy tale looking dress being photographed in front of various tulip beds and seemed to follow us around as we saw them multiple times. Since we have a fairly vibrant hispanic culture around and she looked of hispanic descent, I suspect it was a quinceanera photo shoot. I just had my phone camera and wasn't really taking a lot of pictures though I did take a few. Others were there with full blown lar...

  Recently, I discovered a video on our security camera of a fox crossing our driveway. Since there is no sound, I was unable to answer the question of, "What did the fox say?" I haven't seen that fox whom lives somewhere down in our ditch, for many years so it was nice to see it is still there. I just wish it would step up and kill more rabbits plaguing our garden. I also noticed that one of my cameras was offline, the same camera that I had to unplug to reroute it around a pipe on another project I was working on and then plug it back in. I knew immediately what had happened. Whenever the power blinks or I have to unplug and replug in a wire, my router randomly assigns a computer address (known as an IP address) to the camera. Unfortunately, the software that deals with the cameras to allow me to view and record what they see requires that the address be constant. As a result, every time the power blinks or I temporarily unplug the camera cable, I have to remember how t...

Above is the nearly completed base. I have added another layer of trim around the bottom perimeter of the base and have all the cove molding cut and laying in place on top of that. I am too worn out today to glue it in place so will do so tomorrow. I also have to install the beading that will go around the perimeter of the double ogee arches to cover up the plywood edges and give it a bit of panache. Then there is a lot of sanding followed by figuring out how I am going to install the top to the base and get those attachment points mounted. Then somehow, I need to get said base, some several hundred pounds worth of wood, off my workbench and down on the ground so that I can start on the top. I still haven't figured out how to do that. Perhaps there may be pizza and beer bribes to get some manual labor involved. Above is a close up of the beading that I spent a fair chunk of time this morning making. I made it out of scraps, cutting in the bead detail and then ripping them from that...