Riverbend Journal

  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...

I wrote earlier as an intro to a different blog topic that my spouse had lost her job. Her entire clinic had closed, the second one in the last year in our town and one of thousands all around the nation. Back in 2010 when the Affordable Care Act passed over 60% of physicians worked in private practices. Fifteen years later that number is under 40% and falling according to latest estimates. I'm not surprised, not because I dislike the ACA. It fixed some serious issues in our healthcare system. But whenever we change something quickly and without much discussion from those in the know, i.e. doctors, there are likely to be side effects that happen that no one saw coming. This was one of those things. It is what it is. Fortunately, though this clinic was by far the largest in our town and likely a 20 mile radius in every direction, there are still some left. When news broke, my wife and I talked it over and after refusing to retire, we decided we didn't want to move with one kid s...

  During my initial conversation with the Salvage store owner, she mentioned a hand drawn family tree which excited me greatly. I have poured a lot of time and effort into tracking down Kuck descendants over the years in hopes of finding pictures to replace the ones likely lost by my great grandparents in the missing semi incident. After maybe 25 years of searching, I found what I was after in a salvage shop of all places but I am not complaining. Another reason for my excitement is that despite all this research, one branch on this side of my family tree remains the shortest one on my entire tree. I have mentioned it many times on here but my third great grandmother, Mary Meyer Kuck, John Kuck's first wife, died young along with five of her children of diphtheria and left very few records behind, so few, I have never been able to identify who her parents were. My hope was that perhaps this hand drawn family tree might identify her parents.  Above is the very hand drawn family...

  Hopefully you can enlarge the above photo enough to see the morel mushrooms hidden like easter eggs everywhere. It is what I call a mushroom machine and I probably picked over 30 large yellow mushrooms within the frame of this picture. It is not something I find every year but when I do, I am thankful. This one tree alone filled up both the bags we had brought with us so I had to carry those two bags back to the car about a half mile away and bring to more bags which we filled maybe half way. It was my best year in a LONG time for morel mushroom hunting. It is hard to show scale of our haul but this is the largest mixing bowl we own and it is full to the top of morel mushrooms, mostly yellow ones this time around. They are soaking for a bit right now and later tonight I'll cut them in half to check for bugs but seeing that it is still a week or before I normally find them, we saw very few bugs and absolutely no ticks which in a typical year can coincide with the latter parts of m...