Riverbend Journal

  Many years ago when my great uncle died, my uncle inherited the photo album of my great grandfather of his time over in Europe during World War I. Evidently my great grandfather took a camera with him overseas and then took the time to organize those photos in an album and label most of them when he got back home. I view it as a valuable treasure and I'm sure it is probably considered to be a treasure by others as I can't believe many of these probably still exist. Back when my uncle inherited it, he let me borrow it and at the time, I painstakingly scanned all the pictures. I still have those pictures and occasionally look through them but it just was never the same as looking through the album. The album provides context and on many pages, handwritten notes in my great grandfather's writing. My digitized collection is just photographs with some information added to their file names to mimic the writing. As we were sorting through my recently departed grandmother's t...

  Last year, Leigh Tate over at 5 Acres and a Dream got me to reevaluate my tomato processing method. I used to blanche them to remove their skins before cooking them down but that always introduced a lot of water into them that I subsequently had to remove again. So this year, I decided to go back to my roots and just core the tomatoes and put them in a pot, skin, seeds and all, to cook down and then run them through the hand crank mill that I have to remove the skin and seeds. It was then that I remembered just how much work that was and why I had gone with the method that I have been using. But while cranking the mill by hand, the engineer in me realized that it was probably an easy thing to motorize and Amazon confirmed it. So before my second picking of tomatoes, I had one ordered and sitting in a box at my doorstep thanks to Prime.  What took me several hours to do with the first batch of tomatoes took me only about 15 minutes this time around and was much much more eff...

  Two weeks ago, we made the trip up to my uncle's house where my grandma spent the last couple couple years of her life to sort through some of her belongings. I came away with a box of things that had some sort of sentimental, historical or curiosity value to me. The above coins/tokens, a few out of a bag full, were more of the curiosity category. From what I can tell, many were souvenirs, war money, tax credit tokens and a few actual currency coins. The Louis and Clark anniversary medallion in the center is the one that grabs my attention the most. But somewhere in the box is also a 1933 Chicago World's Fair medallion and an Indian head penny that I can't find right at this minute that rank up there too.  Not long ago,  AnvilCloud  wrote a post about cap guns from his childhood. I left a comment that the cap guns I touched in my youth had long ago run out of caps. I don't remember a single cap cap gun either. Mine were always these large silvered ones that shot ca...

  Graduation photo of my grandma My last grandparent, my maternal grandmother, died recently. She was less than 3 months from her 90th birthday so she had a good run.  I am fortunate to have lived as long as I have with grandparents. Many of my peers are losing parents or have lost them already and yet until four years ago, I had three out of four grandparents still alive and kicking. My paternal grandfather died when I was in my last years of college. After that I, I went decades before the losses started piling up with my mom five years ago, maternal grandfather four years ago and my paternal grandmother last year. Now it is my maternal grandmother and it feels like the end of an era for me.  My maternal grandparents going on a date before they were married Above is one of my favorite pictures of my grandmother when she was dating my grandfather. When I found it the first time, it was just a random loose photograph in a box full of random loose photographs but it is now...

  Since we have been completely out of spaghetti sauce, which my two kids go through at a rapid pace, canning some more of that was the first order of business. Awhile back, Leigh from  5acresandadream  made a post about canning tomatoes that influenced me to change things up a bit. For many years, I have scalded off the skins and chunked up the tomatoes to cook down and then used a stick blender to puree them before canning. This method has worked well though my back always aches from leaning over the sink for hours at a time peeling skin and cutting out defects from very hot tomatoes. The seeds while not attractive, really have never bothered me.  Leigh's method, and the one my mom used to use when I was little, is to simply cut out the defects while the tomatoes are raw and then cook them down and use a food mill to separate the skin and seeds from the pulp. I even had an old food mill that I have been carting around for years but have never used. I found my food ...