Riverbend Journal

  The last two weeks have been all day misting rains which isn't very motivating to work and the next ten days looks to be more of the same. Instead of working in the garage, I've been keeping busy with my volunteer activities and doing some genealogy work. One of my long term goals has been to try to find pictures of all 32 of my great great great grandparents. It is an unachievable goals as some of them were too poor or died too young to have been able to have photographs taken of themselves, but I would like to get as many as possible. A few of my pictures however come from a family book that I inherited that consists of pages run through a copy machine, three hole punched and bound in a cover. As one might expect with a picture of an ancestor that has been through a copy machine a number of times, they aren't very detailed.  Above is one of those copied pictures. So in an attempt to try to get a better photograph, I did some sleuthing to find descendants of the authors ...

I haven't had a lot of luck with obtaining peace with neighbors. Let me explain a bit. At the first house I owned, I was surrounded on three sides by neighbors with small yapping dogs that were constantly neglected in the backyard and spent their days yapping at my every move. If I went outside on the back deck to grill supper, I would grill to the constant sound of dogs yapping constantly at me. I'm not sure how others can find this acceptable but it wore me down not being able to enjoy my own yard in relative silence, at least as silent as one can get in a small town environment. So when we moved, one of my criteria was to find a house with more space between myself and my neighbors. After almost a year of looking, we found it. Our current house is surrounded by trees on two sides and the only neighbor which we have that actually shares one of our borders yard to yard didn't have dogs, only cats. That neighbor died and her replacements have two dogs but they are old and s...

  Soon after we moved to this place some 14 years ago, I decided to hang our bicycles from the ceiling. My wife has always insisted that both our cars spend every night pampered inside the garage and so as we added children and bicycles to the mix, it became harder to do. In order to still leave room for all my woodworking equipment, I looked toward the ceiling and came up with a solution. I bought a half dozen of these rope hoists with hooks on the end and used five of them to hang up various bicycles and one to hang up a ladder. It got everything off the floor which allowed both cars to park at night but it had some issues. The biggest issue is that they were hard to work to lower a bicycle down. The mechanism requires a specific angle of the rope to allow the rope to slide past it and lower the bike down, something my kids and wife never seemed to be able to figure out. This meant that I was always on call to lower a bicycle down or pull it back up. This often resulted for the b...

  Moving day for our annual library fundraising book sale has come and gone. I thought I would share a few pictures of it for your enjoyment. Here is my dolly of books heading down the freight elevator to the main floor where the books will be offered up for sale soon. Although my dolly could hold more, I limited myself to 28 boxes at a time which weighed around 1000 pounds or about half a ton. If I stacked them any higher, it made it harder to see where I was going and increased the likelihood I would run into something or perhaps spill part of my load. In order to take this picture, I was backed into the corner next to the door with my phone held inches from my face and zoomed completely out as far as it would go. It is tight quarters with a half ton of books in a small elevator. Even though the dolly makes moving all that weight down to the sale floor easier, we still life each box onto the dolly and then lift it off the dolly and put it on one of the rows of display tables wher...

  Every fall, I help in a local fundraiser for our public library where we take donated used books in good condition and sell them cheaply back to the public with all the funds being given to the library to purchase more books. Last year, we came close to raising $30,000, our best year ever.  Although the sale lasts only three short days in the fall, work to prepare for it began a month earlier. Shopping carts are set up at the drop off location for people to put their donated books into. Myself and an army of volunteers wheel those carts upstairs to a cavernous storage room where we unpack them onto sorting tables and then one by one, classify them into one of about two dozen genres on more tables. Once they have been sorted, they are boxed up and put in stacks by genre until moving day. On moving day, myself and a couple other able bodied people, use large wheeled dollies to haul all those boxes of books, down to a large gymnasium sized room below where the actual sale is he...