Riverbend Journal

  A view of one half of our garden taken just over a week ago. Thus far everything is looking great, especially the potatoes. Thus far we have been just weeding what few weeds grow this time of the year but plan on mulching everything in the next few weeks before we leave on our trip. Above is the other half of the garden and mostly the warm weather stuff starting with the tomatoes with the cages. There are also a couple rows of beans we just planted and two rows of sweet potato slips beyond that before one gets to the garlic and strawberry bed.  Our radishes did pretty well but were starting to get big and heat up spice wise so I picked all that was left in the garden, thinly sliced and cold pickled them along with a couple old carrots in the fridge. We like to eat this on bibimbap or other similar dishes. Besides that, we've already been eating lettuce fairly regularly as well as pulling the occasional onion. It won't be long before we can start harvesting new potatoes....

  With the main frame of the dresser assembled, I did some touch up sanding and applied a coat of oil all over the exposed wood. Since this project will take some time to complete and summer humidity will be arriving soon, I wanted to seal up the wood to prevent it from absorbing some of that moisture and expanding in ways I don't want it. Here is a close up of one of the end panel with showing some of the walnut grain and the finish it will have. I applied a second coat of hard wax oil to the front and sides that will be visible but not the back or inside. Likely I will add another coat or two to the visible parts at some point but that can wait for now. Above are the components of the next pieces I am going to build. The drawers have slides that allow them to glide in and out of the dresser when you pull on the handle. The slides are what connect the drawers to the rest of the dresser that doesn't move and my slides need some wood structure to fasten too. Above are the pieces...

I thought with two weeks before we leave for our vacation, that I would update you all on my wife's status. For those who missed the last post, which was actually just a paragraph embedded in another post, my wife's clinic shut down and she joined the ranks of the unemployed. After asking for her to retire and her saying no, she began a job search.  As a seasoned veteran of job searching, I thought I could be of help but really wasn't. I was used to searching. Because she has an excellent reputation, she never really searched. She had to fend off offers near and far. Also not in my skill set, I helped her set up a matrix to review all of her many offers to narrow them down and eventually she chose the one that just felt like the right amount of cultural, benefits and gut feeling. My gut also agreed with her. After verbally agreeing to work with the new place, what happened next was a week of waiting before they sent us a contract to sign. Of course there were a couple of ch...

  Due to possible wood expansion due to changes in humidity and temperatures, I applied a coat of oil on the floating panels before assembly. This allows things to change and you won't see any unpainted parts of the side panel. With that done, I was able to glue up both end assemblies and let the cure. Despite having tons of clamps, I didn't have any clamps long enough for the next step. But not too long ago, while watching a YouTube video about something, I saw someone just put a coupling between two of their pipe clamps to turn it into a much longer pipe clamp. Realizing that I had plenty of pipe clamps that I rarely use because they are heavy to wield without damaging a project being clamped and can easily exert enough pressure to damage whatever is being clamped, I decided that perhaps with some care, I could just repurpose them as long clamps. So I purchased some couplers for ninety-nine cents each, much cheaper than a clamp that was long enough for this project by a good ...

  Does anyone remember that song "Age of Aquarius" by 5th Dimension? Anyway, that was what was in my head when I came up with the title of this post. I thought it likely a bit obtuse for anyone to catch it. To recap the above photo, I ordered 24 asparagus plants from a seed company on the west coast and despite me stating where I lived and what zone, they never arrived when it was prime planting time. Only after complaining did they finally sent them and thus they went into the ground a couple months later after they are normally done producing for the year. I tilled the soil and added some better soil but admit that they didn't get planted in optimum conditions at the optimum time.  That was two years ago. You are supposed to wait two years before picking your first asparagus to give them time to get established so we didn't pick any last year. We did have some sprigs come up last year but it definitely wasn't from all 24 plants. I'm guessing maybe only 10 or...

Moving my phone photos to the hard drive, I realized I probably didn't do an update on my winter Lego project. After assembling all the Space Lego kits that I could, including the more "modern" space shuttle set, I took individual pictures of them, disassembled everything down to single pieces and put them in labeled plastic ziplock bags with any instructions I had. For those without instructions, I printed off a picture of the assembled set and stuck that in the bag. Pricing out everything using online sites that listed what various sets had sold at in the last six months, I figured I had around $1700 worth of Legos. I listed them for $2000 and told myself I would accept anybody who offered me $1500 or more.  They say online for a couple months and I renewed the listing a couple times. There was a smattering of interest but nothing really solid. Then as we began our spring break journey out west to recover Clara Kuck's things from the salvage shop and do spring break...

  Despite all the information I have on this family, there are still huge gaping holes that will likely never be filled. As I have written many times over the years, my third great grandfather John Kuck had 7 living children by his first wife, the oldest being named Anna, likely after John's mother also named Anna. I found her name first etched into the marble of the family tombstone along with most of his other children, and have since found a small scattering of newspaper clippings of her and her siblings. But a diphtheria pandemic would kill five of them and their mother in the space of about six months. Anna was 17 years old at that time. I don't have a single picture of Anna or any of her four other siblings that died of diphtheria. I have only one picture of their mother, or at least the writing on the back says it is their mother. Where are all those photos? Without proof, I will guess they were inherited by the two surviving sons including my great great grandfather Geo...

AI Generated Image A couple weeks back, the topic of cursive writing was brought up twice in one week. One of the blogs I read mentioned it in passing in a blog post and then later, a blog reader mentioned it in a comment on one of my blog posts which had a bit about using AI to transcribe cursive. All this reminded me that I have fully changed my thoughts on teaching cursive writing in school in the matter of just a year or two. A year ago, I felt that school not teaching cursive writing anymore was a travesty of a major order. We were going to bring up an entire generation of kids who couldn't read documents of the past or even present as there are many who still write in cursive daily. I am one of those people. But a thing called Artificial Intelligence started making a splash and now I can't think of a good excuse to continue teaching kids cursive writing. The biggest reason for my changed viewpoint is AI itself which can easily ready cursive writing and spit it out in type...

  Among the stuff that I received belonging to Clara Kuck were all her various certificates of degrees that she received. They were all tightly rolled up like the hand drawn family trees but the cookie sheet and magnet trick allowed me to photograph them all for posterity. Above is her high school degree and below is another specifically for completing the curriculum in Latin. After that, she evidently went to a local college first as you can see above and then traveled north to Minnesota where she attended Carleton College as well as you can see below. Below is perhaps my favorite of them all from the Boston School of Expression where she got a degree in Public Reading, a lost art these days. I have dozens of newspaper articles of her doing various readings at different events and everyone always seemed happy to have such a performance. If I could only go back in time to listen to a few of them... However, typed onto a piece of paper that is wrapped around the roll of diplomas is ...

While going about spring doing spring things, I have also managed to squeeze in some shop time. Because I don't have a great source of walnut, I had to order mine online and because that means I can't choose my boards, I generally have to order some extra too. It certainly isn't efficient and I wish I had a better source but for now it will do. It also doesn't hurt to have some extra lying around for a small project or accent on a larger project. Above is most of the walnut pieces for the 12-drawer dresser project with the joinery already completed. I still need to order walnut for the top but that can be further down the road. This project is more old school because I'm using traditional mortise and tenon joinery. You can see some both in the above photo. Because wood varies to some degree, I always cut things so the joint is a bit too tight and then fine tune each joint individually using chisels to get the proper fit. Once that has been achieved, I label the join...