Riverbend Journal

  Over the years, I've always heard that it is better to burn brush piles while they are somewhat green. Usually they say it is because they burn a bit slower and more completely when you have bigger pieces in it. I attempted to do just that awhile back but failed miserably when the fire wouldn't stay lit. Afterwards, I guessed that it was just because the kindling I had used to start the fire, (newspaper and a handful of dry twigs) just wasn't enough to get the surround wood dry enough to burn. I really wanted this pile gone as it is in the area of my lawn where I mow. The suitable days to burn however disappeared, i.e. days where I had a large chunk of time to monitor the fire that wasn't extremely cold, windy or blowing directly at the houses of any of my neighbors and where we had snow cover to help prevent the fire from creeping into my nearby woods and burning my entire place down. Finally, the Wednesday after Ash Wednesday, I had an open window and the conditions...

 As the title suggests, we are on a vacation somewhere out there in the great beyond. We have a general idea of where we might go but no set agenda, my favorite kind of vacation. It is also a non-traditional area of our country to go to on vacation and since I have only driven through the outskirts of the area a handful of times in my life, I would like to fill in the white space of my mental map. This time, unlike other times in the past, I do have a pad device so I might check into your blogs while out and about but I'm not about to type a post into the pad (especially since I don't have any auxiliary keyboard devices) and so my blog will remain dark and shuttered for a time.  There is war and atrocities being committed in Ukraine. I hope they are resolved during the next 9 or so days that I will be unplugged from the news cycle. It would be nice to come back and know the news is about sillier things, like what one side is sticking it to the other in Congress. Also, because ...

 March 1st was a beautiful sunny day with a high temperature in the middle 60's. March 2nd the same but in the low 70's. The saying goes that it either comes in as a lamb or a lion and goes out the opposite as it came it. Well March for us was an hours old fuzzy lamb, immaculately groomed, smelling like sweet hay and with ribbons adorning it.  It has been a lion ever since. Saturday we were getting ready to go listen to our regional orchestral performance which happened to be doing a side by side event with the local high school orchestra which my oldest is part. As we were getting ready, tornado sirens in town were going off and I was keeping close watch to the television and my cellphone to keep tabs on things. On a side note, our county made the "wise" decision to sound the tornado sirens whenever there is a severe storm of any kind in the area. So when it goes off, you don't know whether you are expecting heavy rain or a tornado. So now residents largely ignor...

 Because of the nature of the event which took place over a handful of years, I have literally well over a hundred news articles on the subject of my future book. Many are hard to read and in very small text common in the newspapers at the time. Awhile back I sought to make them easier to reference by digitally breaking up the newspaper articles into page sized chunks that could be printed off. This helped but many articles were still of such length and such small script on paper darkened with time that I would need to break them up into smaller, say paragraphed sized chunks, in order to print in such a way to be readable. This equates to a huge stack of paper that would be hard to find anything in for reference. So a few weeks back, I set forth to transcribe these articles into text typed into a Word document. Not only does it make things more readable, but I can now make copies if necessary in the future and reference them by search function and with an index. I have done it in t...

 I wrote a post that was published yesterday but discovered it wasn’t showing up in blogrolls. So evidently Blogger decided it was not worthy or it had to do when I wrote it several days ago and me fat fingering things and accidentally posting it a month back. I discovered my mistake immediately when it appeared to disappear into thin air so I went back and corrected it to publish yesterday which it did. However, a bug was created so that it now doesn’t show up in blog rolls.  So to stick it to blogger I’m writing a new post and linking the old post below. Take that Blogger! http://riverbendjournal.blogspot.com/2022/02/a-digital-rainy-day.html