Riverbend Journal

  After my BIL returned home from his week of work in Manila, we spent one weekend day going to visit "The Mansion" which is a cross between the White House and Camp David or creating an analogy for the current occupant, a cross between the White House and Mar-a Lago. In all my previous trips to the Philippines, it has been a summer home for the President of the Philippines and technically still is though the guards won't say that specifically. However, recently the main structure you see in the photo above is now a museum and open to the public with approved reservations which my SIL had obtained. The Mansion was actually built by Americans for American leaders after the Spanish American war and was completed in 1908. During World War II, it suffered greatly from bombing but was eventually repaired before being turned over the Philippines who then converted it into the summer home of their President. Not quite two years ago, it was renovated again and opened up to the pu...

  Upon returning from El Nido, a stay at the farm near Tarlac and our aborted trip to see the Hundred Isles, we spent a week close to our home in Baguio. My BIL, who was also our driver, returned to Manila for a week of work and my wife spent her time going out and meeting various groups of her friends and former classmates. As a husband, I sometimes went and sometimes didn't, depending on venue and what my wife was requesting. None of it was terribly exciting though so I won't bore you with the details.  At some point though during that week, I took my kids and their cousins out to eat at a local eatery called "Good Taste". It was quite the experience and I could come up with nothing quite like it that I've ever been too. First and foremost, the restaurant is massive and consists of five floors! At least the one floor we ate on, level five, could seat probably 300 to 400 people. I would say it was only half full when we got there so maybe around 200 people. I hav...

I'm not good at repetition which is why I always decline when someone sees something I have made and tells me I should make more to sell. The only time I have listened was when I built a second batch of inbox drawers for desks but I needed one anyway for personal use and I thought, why not build a couple more while I'm at it. I don't mind the work of cutting and assembling but when it comes to sanding, I always regret my decision. So when it came down to making the drawer front for my 12 drawer dresser, I wasn't terrible thrilled because I knew it would be a lot of repetition. Above is the beginning of the drawer fronts. Since they are just going to be plain flat oak without adornment, they shouldn't be too bad. It is fairly easy to sand flat things fairly quickly. The only real concession I made was that I kept things ordered so I can grain match the drawer fronts. Essentially every row of drawer is cut from the same board and in order so when assembled, the grain ...

  Judging solely by the number of pictures taken during any of my trips to the Philippines, transportation is easily at the top of my fascination list. A lot of that has to do with me spending a lot of time using it in one form or the other and some of it has to do with it being very different from where I have spent the bulk of my life.  If I had to boil down transportation to something more specific, the Jeepney (seen above) is perhaps my favorite of all. In the mountains of Baguio City, they used to rule the mass transportation market and still to this day play a significant part. They started off as discarded Jeeps left behind by America after World War II but are built specific to the Philippines now. I would call the above Jeepney the second generation of the vehicle and on my last trip, I saw my first glimpses of the third and even fourth generations.  The third generation is a more aerodynamic version of the second generation Jeepney's and lack all the colorful cu...

  I subscribe to a couple dozen woodworking YouTube channels mainly to get inspiration for projects that I would like to build. But one particular channel The Family Woodworker , I subscribe for a slightly different reason. The channel owner is a very artistic woodworker and has lots of projects simply creating art out of wood which is something I have always struggled how to do. I can design and build a 12=drawer dresser from looking at pictures and knowing how to build furniture but I struggle when it comes to making things that are just artistically beautiful. The Family Woodworker has inspired me over the years with his artistic skills and when this project came up recently, I knew I just had to do it. As a woodworker, I generate a fair amount of scrap. I generally save the bigger pieces on racks and in piles to use elsewhere, many times as jigs to help me do various wood working tasks or sometimes as smaller projects. But I still end up with a lot of small scraps of beautiful ...