Riverbend Journal

  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...