Riverbend Journal

  Note: I am halfway across the country from my home and may not have internet access on a regular basis for a few days so if your comments aren't published right away, that is why and I apologize in advance. I will try to get them published and answered as soon as time allows. I have been dreading this step ever since the Good Samaritan got in his vehicle to go back home after helping me lower the base to floor level. I needed to create attachment points to allow for the top to be bolted onto the base after it was moved inside the church since the doors of the church aren't wide enough to allow the entire thing to be carried in as one piece. I was able to attach brackets to the base but I needed to get the top centered onto the base and mark the holes for the brackets onto the bottom side of the top. To do that, I either needed to lift everything high enough in the air to crawl underneath OR I needed to turn everything upside down. I thought with some planning, I might, just m...

  Not long ago, I mentioned our gardening woes this spring and my discovery that rabbits aren't immune to electrical shocks, but that my solar powered fencer wasn't up for the job. I discovered that by running an very unrecommended extension cord all the way from the house to the solar charger and used their battery charger connection to essentially continuously charge the battery, also not recommended. I thus ordered a proper weatherproof fence charger that will plug into my outside outlet on the house. Above is the business end which you can see is coming out of the PVC pipe I used to insulate the metal fence posts from the electrified fencing. Using a sidewalk scraping tool that I mainly use to chip ice off the sidewalk on rare occasions, I repurposed it to dig a six inch deep trench in our lawn and buried the cable from where it exits out of the bottom of the PVC insulating pipe above to our patio underneath the deck. I then fastened it up a post and on the bottom side of t...

  After getting the plywood top laminated together, I got one last stick of oak lumber from my big box store and milled it down to make my own shop veneer, much thicker than what you can buy, to cover up the exposed plywood edges. It is 1/4 of an inch thick and when I apply a 1/4 inch radius later to soften up the edges, it should all but disappear making the entire top look like it was cut from a giant slab of wood.  Unfortunately though, I discovered that despite maybe a couple hundred clamps, I did not have a single clamp that would work to hold the veneer in place while the glue dries. Not wanting to but a bunch of expensive clamps that I'll likely never use again, I had to get creative. Above you can see what I ended up doing after digging through my storage box of ropes, bungees and ratchet straps. Perhaps 15 years ago, while living in another town, the local Ace Hardware store was going out of business and I stopped in while all inventory was 75% off to see if there was...

  With the best piece of plywood turned with the good face pointing down onto a moving blanket to protect it from damage, I applied epoxy to the back side. Like the side panel assemblies, the size prevents me from clamping it adequately and in a short enough period of time before the adhesive starts setting up. Epoxy gives me enough time to use alternative clamping in the form of lots of screws placed every six inches or so. The epoxy comes in tubes that I squirt on and it thick enough it doesn't run which meant I needed to spread it out in an even layer.  Previously I used small glue rollers but they cost around $10 and the epoxy pretty much renders them junk afterward. I had two old ones that I used and both had to be thrown away. This time, I wanted to try something different so bought some plastic putty knives for 99 cents each. They turned out to work quite well and I didn't feel bad about tossing them after I was done. It is hard to see but above is what it looked like a...

  After kicking around various ideas on how to entice people to lend me their backs, I came to an obvious solution. I would call up the parishioner who designed the altar and ask them to find some people to help lower it. He responded back saying that although he knows of one person who could possibly help, he thought that just the two of us would be able to do it. I was a bit skeptical but acquiesced.  While waiting for him to arrive, I decided to up the odds a bit and built a sort of midway platform between the height of my workbench and floor level. I overturned four 5-gallon buckets and placed a short 2x4 piece of lumber between them. This would give us a place to set the altar on about 18 inches or so above floor level and prevent us from having to lower it all the way down in one go and possibly injure our backs.  After checking things out, my good Samaritan and I just went for it and honestly, it wasn't bad at all. Both of us got it set down onto my makeshift platf...

  This was how our garden looked like a couple weeks ago. Although hard to tell with this lighting and from this far away, everything is up and growing though a bit behind normal due to the cold mornings that still plague us. But as I write this today, hot weather is here for the next week or so, and I expect progress to be more visible.  It certainly has been a challenging year for us for some reason. We have been able to start very little in our greenhouse this year. Part of that was due to using some fairly old seed and probably the largest problem was just due to the cold mornings. We planted things in there fairly early and the cold mornings just kept them from germinating. Next year, I think I will try starting things inside where the temperatures are more consistently warm, and then transferring them out to the greenhouse for hardening off and better sunlight after they are up.  Another challenging issue has been the rabbits. They ate our pea crop, onions and a few...

Long time readers of this blog will know that towards the latter parts of April and the first week or so of May, I descend into madness. Morel madness that is. I find myself wandering the woods of southeast Iowa, picking off ticks before they can attach themselves to me, all to find a lot of what you see above. However, I find myself quickly approaching the time where I will have to find something else to consume me and will go mushroom hunting no more, at least purposely. I've been hunting for morels in the same wooded draws for more than 40 years. In the large majority of those 40 plus years, I have found enough to sate my appetite even though these delicacies only grow for a couple weeks a year. But the last handful of years, I've found fewer and fewer mushrooms. Probably a large part of it is just me. My eyes aren't any better than they were when I was younger and living 40 miles away from the areas I hunt, I certainly don't get down to look as often as I did when I...

  I have reached what feels like a pretty significant milestone. I have the base of the altar completed for the most part. All the trim and bead work has been added and I spent an entire day of nothing but sanding it down through two different grit levels. I still have one more finer grit to go so another half day. It takes a lot of time to get into all the nooks and crannies and to do the sanding I have two different sanders plus a few wood blocks and good old fashioned elbow grease. At points during the assembly process, I felt discouraged about a few defects but I was able to get them all repaired and they are no longer noticeable at all. In fact, as I was wrapping up my second grit of sandpaper, I was quite pleased with how everything had turned out. As I have told several people, building this thing was above my paygrade but somehow, I think I may be able to pull it off. After taking these pictures, I put a padded blanket underneath it to protect all my sanding efforts and was...

  After the delays of looking at flowers and trying to stop radon from entering my life, I decided to get back to my altar project. When I left this thread last, the beading had been clamped to the scraps cut out to form the double ogee arches above to assimilate the rough shape so that it would be easier to fasten in place. After a few days of hanging out around my forms, my beading that will be used to cover up the plywood edges and provide some detail interest had warped enough to allow me to fasten it on easier though it would still require a lot of clamping to hold it until the glue dried. So I spent a day applying the beading, waiting for the glue to cure and then continuing with another vertical strip. The bottom beading will be applied maybe tomorrow and then the real fun of lots of sanding can begin in earnest. 

  As everyone already knows, we Catholics have a new pope as of Thursday afternoon. I was shocked as most were that an American born pope was elected but happy to see that he seems (on paper anyway) a lot like Pope Francis in many regards. However, I see a lot of people, especially non Catholics on the far political left, celebrating him, as they did Francis, as someone who is changing the church. To be clear, Pope Francis and most likely Pope Leo XIV, did and will not change any of the church's core beliefs. All Pope Francis did and from what I have read about Pope Leo has said, is teach us to follow the gospels. That includes a lot of loving our fellow people around us. They did not suddenly say homosexuality is not a sin. We can still love and care about homosexuals while not condoning the act. They did not say we encourage people to break laws to enter our country illegally and cause strain upon our system of care. We are to love immigrants and welcome those that do come throug...

  After the radon man left, he told me that the levels of gas that our detector was detecting should drop after a few days due to radon having a half-life of around three days. He also said he would be back in a couple of weeks to place a state certified radon detector/recording device in the basement for a few days to put in our file for auditing purposes. Well only one of those things really happened. While the radon did come  back with his detector/recorder and set it up, our levels displayed by our reader never really changed all that much. They might have gone down just a little but not nearly enough as promised. Thinking it might be just a calibration issue since mine was cheap and purchased (probably from China) over the internet and the radon man's recorder probably cost as much as a cheap new vehicle, I hoped it would display different results.  Three days later he came back to print out the results and pick up his device and while they were slightly less than wh...

A week and a half ago, while our youngest was away on an overnight school trip and we were experiencing our first true empty nester experience, we decided to occupy our minds by going to a nearby town that is known for their tulips. They have a very well attended festival celebrating their tulips the following weekend, but we wished to avoid the crowd and as an added bonus, the majority of the tulips were already at their peak or just past their peak. There were still a lot of people out and about photographing all the blooming tulips of various kinds. There was even a young lady in a fairy tale looking dress being photographed in front of various tulip beds and seemed to follow us around as we saw them multiple times. Since we have a fairly vibrant hispanic culture around and she looked of hispanic descent, I suspect it was a quinceanera photo shoot. I just had my phone camera and wasn't really taking a lot of pictures though I did take a few. Others were there with full blown lar...

  Recently, I discovered a video on our security camera of a fox crossing our driveway. Since there is no sound, I was unable to answer the question of, "What did the fox say?" I haven't seen that fox whom lives somewhere down in our ditch, for many years so it was nice to see it is still there. I just wish it would step up and kill more rabbits plaguing our garden. I also noticed that one of my cameras was offline, the same camera that I had to unplug to reroute it around a pipe on another project I was working on and then plug it back in. I knew immediately what had happened. Whenever the power blinks or I have to unplug and replug in a wire, my router randomly assigns a computer address (known as an IP address) to the camera. Unfortunately, the software that deals with the cameras to allow me to view and record what they see requires that the address be constant. As a result, every time the power blinks or I temporarily unplug the camera cable, I have to remember how t...

Above is the nearly completed base. I have added another layer of trim around the bottom perimeter of the base and have all the cove molding cut and laying in place on top of that. I am too worn out today to glue it in place so will do so tomorrow. I also have to install the beading that will go around the perimeter of the double ogee arches to cover up the plywood edges and give it a bit of panache. Then there is a lot of sanding followed by figuring out how I am going to install the top to the base and get those attachment points mounted. Then somehow, I need to get said base, some several hundred pounds worth of wood, off my workbench and down on the ground so that I can start on the top. I still haven't figured out how to do that. Perhaps there may be pizza and beer bribes to get some manual labor involved. Above is a close up of the beading that I spent a fair chunk of time this morning making. I made it out of scraps, cutting in the bead detail and then ripping them from that...