Riverbend Journal

  The owner of the cabin I helped build earlier this year asked if I could make some cabinets as well. They are to be rustic and made out of pine. So I got some rustic looking plywood and spent a couple days making the carcasses for the lower cabinets. They will sit on a pedestal on the floor that I have yet to build which will form a toe kick like traditional cabinets. The one odd looking cabinet is the sink cabinet. The other three will have a drawer on top and cupboard space below. The countertop will be butcher block.  It is really hot around here right now so I try to get up and started early in the morning while it is still cool and just work for a half day and then move onto other things in the afternoon. This has been working out thus far. Tomorrow, I am going to get material to make the face frame, the pretty part that covers up the exposed edges of plywood and on which the doors will eventually get hung. I will also pick up material to make the pedestal on which everything wi

Another trip to the garden and another quarter inch of rain too, things were still looking great and growing like weeks. The tomato plants are starting to become loaded with lots of green tomatoes, especially the amish paste ones which I am looking forward to working with this year. Above is one of those generic hybrid ones that the local garden center stocks. They work okay for preservation but usually contain a lot of water which means a lot of hours reducing over a stove which is what I'm trying to reduce with the amish paste tomatoes this year. I only bought a couple plants of the one above for sticking in the ground early for fresh consumption. Our apple tree is looking to have another banner year. I still have tons of canned apples from last year so my hope is to just give these away other than what we eat fresh. The blown over peach tree isn't showing signs of stress and the peaches are starting to color but are rock hard and small. The ones above are about half the size

  Above is our brand new car, less than four weeks old, still smelling like that new car smell.  Sigh. Back from our vacation, a few days later we took my brother-in-law and his family to the airport for their trip home over seas. We got back home in good time and decided to go ahead and return the rental van a day early. So I set off in the rental van and my wife soon followed in the new car to pick me up at the rental place 80 miles away.  The drop off went smoothly and my wife being tired, asked me to drive her car home so she could take a nap. Feeling fine, I obliged and set off towards home. Less than 30 minutes later, at 1:30 on a hot sunny afternoon, a deer ran out in front of me from seemingly nowhere. I had a split second to swerve violently and attempt to brake. The swerve helped somewhat to make it a glancing blow on the hindquarters of the deer but my foot never had time to hit the brake before impact.  They say here in Iowa it isn't if you will hit a deer but when you

The day we left for our vacation, the area where our garden resides was labeled as being in extreme drought, the highest rating given out. Frankly, I wasn't sure much would be left of it after being gone for nearly 18 days at that point. But a couple of inches of blessed rain had fallen in our absence and it was looking quite good.  Above is a row of potatoes and another one of cabbage. The weedy spot to the left had been home to another row of potatoes and a row of onions. My brother-in-law had been wanting to harvest something so I told him to dig up a few potatoes and onions. While I was mowing the grass around all the fruit trees, he dug up an entire row of potatoes and all the onions. All were still lush and green on top and could have grown a lot more but weren't given the chance. My wife, still new to gardening, wasn't aware of this either and so didn't intervene. Thus out of an entire row of potatoes and an entire row of onions, we got one small basket of each.

During the planning stages of the trip, I realized that if we were going to be in Washington D.C., we were really close to a cousin of my wife and brother-in-law who lives in southeast Virginia. That cousin in the mother of the girl who committed suicide last year that I blogged about. Because my brother-in-law hadn't seen his cousin since they were children, we thought it would be nice to have a reunion and to pay our respects to her daughter, the very one whom I planted those apple trees in memory of recently. Above is the backyard of that girl's older brother where we spent three nights while he graciously stayed in his old room at his mom's house. The lake in the background is the results from excavations to build a raised entryway to a large bridge nearby. It was a beautiful place to rest and recuperate from many day son the road or in very crowded neighborhoods.  On one of our days there, we visited the grave of the daughter, buried next to her military father who die

For the next two days, we pretty much spent our time walking around the mall surround the Capital, memorials and Smithsonian buildings. All of them I had seen on the prior mentioned band trip in junior high but it was a first for almost everyone else. I discovered a new to me memorial to F.D.R. that I had never heard existed and it turned out to be my favorite. It was not only uncrowded, but it was a vast complex of water features and shade covered benches to enjoy them on a hot day which I certainly did. We saw all the fan favorites like the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials but they couldn't hold a candle to the F.D.R. one in my opinion.  I have lots of pictures of the Washington Memorial from our two days but this more obscure one is my favorite with the gnarled tree and reflection in the tidal basin. Our guests had their sights set on seeing the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum though privately, I wasn't looking forward to it. I pretty much knew it would be horribly crowded a

 Where ever we go, especially on weekends, we still like to attend Catholic mass. Since we were planning on arriving in Washington D.C. on Sunday but turned out to be Saturday, I had looked around online for a church and found that the largest Catholic church in the United States was in Washington D.C. So it seemed like a no brainer to attend the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception after our tour of the Whitehouse for Saturday anticipated mass. As one might expect from a church so large, it was quite ornate and after mass, we stuck around for a special choir presentation from some private school from Indiana and then walked around looking at the various alcoves and taking pictures of the spectacular sights. I won't bore you with all those photos but if you are ever in the area, even as a non-Catholic, they were worthy of a stop to see.  After our stop at the church, we returned to our VRBO rental for the evening where we cooked a home made meal for a change

The next day, the one planned for spending with relatives who couldn't make it at a VRBO that cancelled our reservation hours before without telling us, we instead drove to Washington D.C. I had called our next VRBO rental, while the rest of my group were boating at Niagara Falls, and asked if we could extend our rental by a day earlier. It was available and after wiring some additional money, we had it a day early. So we pretty much drove all day from Niagara Falls to the VRBO rental in North Bethesda, Maryland. Six months earlier, we had written our Congressman, asking for tickets to tour the inside of the Whitehouse, home of all the U.S. presidents in office since John Adams. Two weeks before we left, they let us know that we had been approved though on a day before we had planned to be in Washington D.C. Thanks to the blessing of the cancelled VRBO, we could now make it happen. So the next day, we drove to an outdoor park and ride that could hold a 15 passenger van, and rode th

  Back in the planning stages of this road trip when I was looking for stops to break up the driving, Niagara Falls crossed my mind, We had stopped the four years earlier for the first time and though enjoyed it, really didn't think I would ever return. But I thought my brother-in-law and his family would and so I worked it into our schedule. As you can see from the picture above, we did make it and my brother-in-law and family, mother-in-law and sister, and my two kids all got to ride the boat from the U.S side this time (prior time had been from the Canadian side) into the horseshoe of the falls. I probably would have ridden again but my wife had no interest in repeating the boat ride and as it turned out, I had business to attend too. Initially we had planned to see some relatives from my wife's side of the family and so had gotten a VRBO rental for two nights in nearby Buffalo. It was fully paid for a booked but I hadn't heard anything from the owner and while in Toledo

  The next morning we headed for Chicago, rolling into town at the tail end of rush hour exactly as we hoped. Our first stop was a late addition to the trip. An artist that I have known for nearly 20 years through blogging and later Facebook, had shared an exhibition of her work and several other Filipino/American artists at a community center that has started to be renovated after years of neglect. Since it was going to be going on during our time in Chicago, we stopped by for a gander and weren't disappointed. The Cliffnote version of a long story is that the previous owners had run the organization into the ground and members had to sue them to retake control. They won that suit last fall and have been trying to rebuild the community center from the figurative ashes it had been reduced too. I name dropped the artist I know to the volunteer manning the front desk and as a result, we got a full tour of the entire building, much of it in only the beginning stages of remodeling. I w

When planning was in its infancy, we asked my brother-in-law where in the United States he would like to see during his visit and he immediately told us Washington D.C. So with that as our rough framework, I started to plan how to make it a reality. Since there would be ten of us (turned out to be eleven), I first rented a 15 passenger van and had the rear seat removed so we could fit all the luggage necessary for a two week trip with 10 (11) people. Less than a month before we were to leave on the trip, my mother-in-laws sister announced she would be visiting us during the same time and of course would be joining us. That is how we ended up at ll people.  With that many people, I decided to carve the journey up into small chunks with lots of stops, especially on the way out and so the first stop was the filming location for the movie Field of Dreams which is only a few hours away from where I live. I have been there many times over the years and each time it gets more and more commerc