Riverbend Journal

  Part of good land stewardship means doing the sorts of things that mother nature used to do until mankind put up barriers to prevent it from happening, in this case, setting fire to the land. In plots of prairie, native prairie grasses send roots down upwards of ten feet deep providing the black nutrient rich soil this part of the world is known for. But in the spring, cool season weeds can come up earlier and crowd out the native grasses with shade and if left that way, will eventually take over any given plot of prairie. Mother nature solved this problem by sending fires to sweep across the prairies but mankind put a stop to this by building homes and towns out there and getting upset when mother nature burnt them up. So every year on the farm, we try to burn approximately half of our patches of prairie by artificially setting them on fire in a controlled manner that we can control them. In the picture above you can see on the far right the first line of defense, a plowed strip...

  Back before we left for Colorado, the weather was just getting nice to where I could work in the garage whenever I had time and there were even a couple days where it got warm enough to glue which required a full 8 hours or so of above 50 F degree weather. So I got to cracking on the bookcase project by cutting out the various parts, all of which you can see on my workbench above. You can even see some of the beginnings of the joinery work started with the slots cut into the boards on the left.  There are different levels of woodworking like most hobbies I suppose. One can use joinery techniques that will definitely get the job done but may not hold up for hundreds of years or one can go all out and build something that might last hundreds of years but at the expense of more time. I chose the first route on this project with my choice of mostly using dominos to join things together.  By using dominos, which are wooden domino shaped pieces of wood, inserted into the slot...

  No deep dive with this post into what I am seeing in these post card pictures though I have no doubt I could spend hours doing so. I just selected these as being interesting street scenes with incredible detail and a delight for my eyes to look out when enlarged. Hopefully you might enjoy them too.

  I won't bore you with all the details but thought I would show you a few pictures from our recent Spring Break trip. On the drive out to Colorado Springs, we stopped in Victoria, Kansas to stretch our legs and to walk through the "Cathedral of the Plains" known formally as the Basilica of St. Fidelis. I always enjoy the opportunity to look at fantastic architecture while getting blood circulation in my lower extremities flowing again. Before stopping for the night, we visited perhaps the biggest Van Gogh painting and easel in the world in a small part in Goodland, Kansas. You can see my car parked behind it to the left.  Due to the heavy winds I wrote about previously and the poor driving conditions, we didn't do much on Sunday after we checked into our AirBnB other than do so shopping for breakfast making supplies. The following day we of course drove down to Florence to visit the salvage shop and pick up the Clara Kuck related items. Little did we know Florence is...

  While driving out to Colorado Springs was a lot of driving, 12 hours each way, it wasn't dull and boring. I had my phone packed full of podcasts so I could listen to them but mother nature also provided some entertainment as you will see in the above clips I took from the factory dashcam that came on my newest vehicle.  We purposely left late and drove only about 9 hours the first day and I wish now we had driven more. The second day we only had 3 hours left to drive on paper but it probably took closer to 5 when all was said and done due to mother nature. In the middle of the night I woke up and could feel my motel bed shaking up on the fourth floor of the motel. I thought it might be my wife until I got up to use the bathroom and saw the water in the toilet bowl sloshing back and forth. Then I knew it was the wind and it must be howling. Several hours later when we exited the motel, I knew for certain it was the wind because I had to use most of my strength to open up the ...