Riverbend Journal

  I am fortunate to live in a town with a lot of diversity. There is a meat packing plant that hires people from all over the world to work there and with them they also bring their culture which shows up in restaurants that pop up around town. Most are short lived but we try to enjoy them while they are around.  The original immigrants were from Mexico and Latin America but later they came from French Guiana, Africa then from the Chuuk Islands in the Pacific and now it seems back to Africa again. Most of the original Mexicans that were hired have moved on to other plants out west but many remained behind. They were a mix of family that came with them and didn't leave with them to the new places, those that developed too deep of roots to move and some that are undocumented and have no real place to go. The Chuuks are still too new to have made inroads into the restaurant business yet but the Hispanics and the Africans both left a bunch of them.  Besides the traditional Me...

  Disregarding the debris and soil on the right side of the above photo, our sweet potato patch looks extremely healthy and has for a long while now. So when my eldest daughter home from college wanted a sweet potato to try out a new recipe, I told my wife we should dig one up just to see what they look like. We raised some once many years ago at our garden at the farm but the entire crop had amounted to just a handful of smallish sweet potatoes. I don't recall our plants above ground every looking this vigorous as the ones above do this year so I was optimistic that our luck had changed. What we found underneath the one plant we chose to sacrifice early astounded us. We found a dozen sweet potatoes under that single plant and every single one of them was bigger than our biggest sweet potato we have grown the previous time. They also weren't purple skinned as they should be. We bought the slips this spring and they had been labeled Japanese Murasaki sweet potatoes which accordi...

  Twenty-five years ago, I was walking home from the bank where I had just deposited my severance check and a guy came running out of an apartment raving about planes flying into buildings. I thought the man crazy until I got inside my own home, turned on the television and witnessed what appeared to be building two of the World Trade Center collapsing live on television. Although I was around for the Vietnam, Persian Gulf and Desert Storm wars, this was the first time I had seen war being brought to our soil and I was numb. I spent the rest of that day numb, sometimes in tears, watching things unfold on the television and wondering what the world would be like in my near future. Being recently unemployed as well, much of the coming weeks would be spent immersed in the tragedy.  The world did changed dramatically in the coming years. For a time we came together as a nation to mourn and to take action. The world even joined with us. The brief flame of a united population burned...

  Not long ago, I attempted to make some chaos coasters out of scrap wood and while cutting the 10th coaster, my bandsaw blade caught the wood and epoxy plug and threw it clear across the garage, damaging the blade irreparably in the process. At the time I decided I didn't need a 10th coaster when I had nine others but I never through away the plug. As the weeks went by, I decided that I could do better and perhaps get one more coaster out of the plug after cutting off the broken end if I made a jig to do the holding which can be much tighter than my own grip strength. So with a scrap piece of plywood and some scrap 2 x 4 material, I made the jig above. The block with the V-groove in it on the right is permanently glued to the scrap piece of plywood. There other block with the V-groove on the left isn't attached at all and the short square block above acts as a spacer. Unseen beneath the plywood is a scrap of wood that slides in the miter slot of the bandsaw allowing me to fee...

When we returned from Sagada, we had a couple days in which we mostly spent packing our luggage for the return trip. We had used cheap second hand luggage to bring many gifts (pasalubong) with us with the intention of leaving them there. However, I had forgotten that I had bought a large chunk of kamagong wood on my previous trip eight years ago that I hadn't been able to bring home due to weight restrictions. So between that and all the food gifts we were bring back to give to friends and family, we were having to shuffle things around so that all the bags made weight. Included in those bags were five new brooms (walis) that someone had hand woven while we were in Sagada. They cost about 250 pesos or $4.00 U.S.D. each. On the right is one of the ones we had bought many many years ago and as you can see, nearly worn completely out. They are superior for cleaning wood floors than typical domestic brooms and our main floor is all wood flooring. My only complaint is that the handles a...