Riverbend Journal

While I am away in the Philippines for the month, I will continue to have my blog publish some old posts from previous trips. Here is one from from a trip back in 2003.   Joe Philippines: Part II Dawn was slowly starting to arrive as we neared the mountains of the northern Philippines. I had been riding in this mini van for almost six hours at this point and thought I was going to grow roots into the seat. We started up the mountain and the van immediately slowed down to a crawl. I had thoughts of getting out and walking beside the van to stretch my legs but thought it might be insulting to the owner of the van to have me walking beside it while he was pressing the gas pedal to the floor. Off to the left was a shear drop off into the river below and to the right was the blunt face of a cliff with not much room in between where we were. I decided to lighten the mood by sarcastically asking if this was the type of vehicle that we always read about in the American newspapers that were...

While I am away in the Philippines for the month, I will continue to have my blog publish some old posts from previous trips. Here is one from from a trip back in 2003.   Joe Philippines: Part I The air went from a controlled stale cold to heavy dampness that instantly clung to my entire body like a dirty fir coat two sizes too small as I stepped outside the airport doors. A smell not entirely different from that of a roomful of wet dogs assaulted my nose. A crowd of people speaking in a different language all jostled to get near me first and sell me a service or trinket that I did not understand or want. "Hey Joe," they would say before they rambled into a broken thickly accented English sales pitch of some sort. In my tired jet lagged state, it might as well have been Arabic for all that I could understand. Welcome to the Philippines I said to myself as I worked my way out of the crowd and started looking for my fiancé. My first trip down the sidewalk was unsuccessful in fi...

  I'm not a rally kind of person which is good because I really don't live in a part of this world where people feel the need to demonstrate a particular belief to those who thing differently. For the most part, we just live in peace with each other even if we don't see eye to eye on things. But I made an exception, my first in over five decades and attended a peace vigil in our park on Friday. Five different pastors/priests/ministers from five different parishes here in town all got together and put on a vigil for peace in this world. One at a time, each person gave a speech on a particular aspect of peace to a crowd of around 250 people, mostly scattered around on the various park benches and picnic tables all throughout the park. In between each speech was a song about peace. At the end, bells were tolled from a nearby church. Although not strictly a passivist, I do think there is little use to wars. I also agree with the minister who gave a speech on negative peace that...

  Because I intend for this dresser to be more than just an average one, it sort of forced my hand in the drawer construction. I just had to do dovetailed drawers and you can see all the pieces in the picture above. Fortunately I have a dovetail jig that works with my router and because I've used it before it was already set up and fined tuned so I cranked out all the pieces in short order. Above you can see how the dovetails fit together and why the contrast is sort of beautiful and an indicator of craftmanship. I'm not saying that I'm a good craftsman but that most people who build drawers using dovetails likely are. Once the pieces were done, it took me the better part of two days to glue them up because I only had enough clamps to do one at a time. I could have probably stretched it to two at a time using other bigger clamps but I find when I'm racing the clock (glue starts setting in a little over five minutes) and using heavy clamps that are hard to get in the rig...

  There used to be a number of ponds across the farm mainly because nearly every farm had one or more for watering livestock or as a water source. But like many industries, farming has changed and thus the need for farm ponds has been reduced. When you combine that with the need to maintain a pond to keep it in working order, we have simply let the ponds live out their useful life and removed them. The one pond where we mostly fished since I was a little kid still exists but the overflow tube on it has rusted out and it would have cost more to repair it than to just build another pond. I wrote about one of my last fishing trips to that pond here , and my attempt to salvage what fish remained.  Since that time, we have built a new pond in a different location. We don't have a particular need to water livestock or have an alternative water supply anymore but having a place to meet as a family and perhaps catch a few fish seemed appealing enough to justify the cost.  Last sp...