Riverbend Journal

  For some reason, I have never liked drinking coffee so perhaps that is the reason why I never understood while short tables in rooms are referred to as coffee tables. For me, they have always been a place to rest my weary feet while reading a good book, perhaps sit a bowl of salsa and a bag of chips on or perhaps keep my journal handy so I can update it when I tire of reading. Miscellaneous task table seems like a more apt description though I do admit it doesn't roll off the tongue as easily. Above is a project I did four years ago and was my inspiration. I bought plans for these tables from an online YouTube content creator who does wood working. They now reside in our living room on either side of our easy chairs with their nested companions underneath and pulled out and spread out around the room when having a party. The circles line up and the bars appear to be three when nested together. So I took that for inspiration when I designed the coffee table by adding three vertica...

 In the days leading up to our vacation, I was able to sneak a little time and get back to work on the coffee table project and make the circular decorative element that will grace each end. I started out by ripping off an edge of one of my extra walnut boards that had a bunch of sap wood on it that made it undesirable for use on the top. Sap wood is the lighter colored wood and really stands out against the dark walnut interior wood. Sometimes it is desirable to see but in this case I didn't want it. Once I had the strip cut out, I cut it into pieces putting a 22.5 degree angle on each end and making them to an exact length. Geometry tells me that if I have eight pieces with that angle and put them together as above, I will form a circle and indeed it did. I could have made it out of a solid very wide board but with vertical grain going across the thinnest part later on in the process, it would have weakened the circle making it more prone to breaking and it would cost me a lot of...

  My mother-in-law is a fairly religious person and at one time considered giving up her two children after her husband died and becoming a nun. A nun talked her out of it and told her to care for her children and later I would marry one of those children so it worked out. Thus whenever we are near a grotto on one of our travels, we tend to stop for a look see. After the family reunion trip to Pigeon Forge, we had four days to kill before another event that happened to fall at the tail end of our planned vacation days and so we drove south to see my brother who lives in Northeast Alabama. That trip south wasn't uneventful as I would like as we had a tire come loose and nearly fall off after nearly 10,000 miles of driving it since I had new tires installed last fall. Fortunately it was caught before it fell off and after a three hour delay, we were able to complete our trip. The following day we drove to see this grotto which is called the Ava Maria Grotto. A brother of the nearby m...

  My wife had schedules two separate weeks off this summer for vacation and we didn't have any definite plans for either week since they have to be scheduled a week in advance. So when some of my wife's relatives from the east coast said they had books a rental house in east Tennessee and asked if we would like to join them, and we saw if fell at the start of one of those weeks my wife had filed for, we said heck yeah! So that is how we found ourselves in a mountain top rental a mile outside of the tourist mecca of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee last week.  Most of our time was spent doing family centered things so I don't have a lot of pictures that aren't personal in nature. We did go for a hike in Smokey Mountain National Park one morning taking some of the family who had never hiked before with us. We did a short trail up Porter's Creek to see the waterfall you see above.  The younger folks went into Dollywood one day but I stayed back and spent a relaxing day reading,...

  As it worked out, we had just enough straw stored underneath our deck from what I had hauled up a couple years ago to just mulch this year's garden. But I still had quite a number of bales still down on the farm that I had to bring up for future years. A couple people from down there were headed my way so I asked if they could bring up what they could fit in the back of their trucks and they obliged. I helped them unload it during the hot part of the day so just stacked it in our driveway. The following morning while it was still cool and the sun was behind the trees, I lugged it all down and stacked it up underneath our deck and tarped it. There it will overwinter and allow us to mulch our garden next year and possible they year after.  I love using mulch as it makes the garden much easier to keep clean of weeds and with our poor depleted soil, helps us to build up organic matter quickly in the soil. More organic matter will add more nutrients for our plants and will also m...

   I am away on a road trip and will be back in a week or so. I love the part of a wood build project when I start the finishing process. For many years, at least up until the recent altar I built for someone else, I have eschewed the use of stains and instead prefer to retain the natural colors of wood. Thus I have forgone the use of stains and film finishes and instead just apply oil to my wood projects. In this case, I am using a hard wax oil finish which penetrates into the wood to provide protection from moisture and allows the richness of the wood to be visible. Above is the lower shelf of the coffee table which I made out of read oak boards planed down to an inch thick. Next up, I applied the same finish to the base minus the three vertical walnut pieces on each end. Since I still have a decorate element to make (and haven't yet started on it) that will adhere to those three pieces, I don't want to apply oil to them just yet so that the glue will stick well. When I get ...

  I am away on a road trip and will be back in a week or so.  At long last, we finally have some bluebirds that have hatched out. It has been a tough start for them. Despite being bigger than sparrows/wrens, the bluebirds kept being fought off every time they showed interest in nesting in our bluebird house between the house and the garden. The sparrows would attack the poor male bluebird until he gave up and flew off and then throw one of their quick built nests up inside the bird house. Every day, I would go remove the nest and toss it in our compost bin. This went on for TWO MONTHS! Evidently the sparrows got the hint at that point and either built a nest somewhere else or moved on to someplace with less picky humans. After a week or two of inactivity, suddenly I saw the bluebird pair had come back, built a nest and laid four eggs. Typically they lay five but this was during a heat wave and late in the season which may have limited them. It was so hot, I was worried that th...

  I am away on a road trip and will be back in a week or so. Although I'm still on a road trip vacation, I thought I would burn up some posts I have written in advance so there won't be such a backlog when I get back. Above is the first assembly of the new coffee table proceeding. It was done during a heat wave which does limit the working time of glue and the working time of me physically but as long as I am physically able to get things together and get them together fast enough, the heat shouldn't affect the strength of the glue like it might a finish.  Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of pictures of this project showing all the various steps and that is probably a good thing being so soon after the altar project. I don't intend for this blog to be a how to manual for woodworking anyway. So below is a mockup of the coffee table though is still incomplete. I have to round over some edges to make it not so sharp and pointy and I am also missing some decorative ele...

  This post title serves two purposes. It is to designate the last day of our trip to New York City and my final post about that trip. It is also to let you know that as you read this, we are on the road again for a longer vacation and I most likely will be hard to find online for the next couple weeks.  Our final day being a Sunday, we decided to go to mass at a place I visited numerous times during the early months of Covid before our local church started taping it's mass for anyone to see. So we walked the 10 blocks of so to St. Patrick's Cathedral, where we had briefly toured earlier in our vacation for an 8 am mass. It was quite refreshing to be walking the streets with few people out and about. One couldn't pay me enough to live my life in a place like New York City but if forced to at the threat of my life, I would and you would probably find me mostly in the early morning hours while most everyone else was asleep. It is quite an ornate church and I'm sure I coul...

  Around everything else going on in our lives, vacations, garden harvests, other obligations, etc., I have started on my next build project. Above you can see some of the pieces as I work on the joinery that will hold it all together eventually. Many many years ago, my wife decided she wanted to get into American medicine versus the socialized medicine world she left when she married me. She was burnt out with not being able to adequately care for her patients in a world in which the government paid for everything (I won't go into the details here because it is a long story) so she had gone into medical research but then seeing the (then) American system and how well it worked, decided to return to patient care. That required redoing her residency here in America and that meant that we had to rent an apartment in the urban jungle for her to stay in during the week while I held down a job and took care of our eldest child at our house in a rural part of the state. Since this living...

  This trip to New York was my third time but up until this point, I had never attended a Broadway play. I love our local plays that do so much on incredibly limited budgets but wanted to see a full scale production, much like the off Broadway version of Hamilton I saw a number of years ago, in their native setting. We tossed around several names but in the interest of family, settled on seeing The Lion King. We made our way to Times Square and shuffled along with the hordes of people until we go near the theater and saw a large line of people waiting to get in. Unsure of where the line began, we simply merged into the line and received no complaints. I must say, the journey from the sidewalk to our seats was a very efficient process compared to our local productions. The ushers were well seasoned on dealing with us tourists and the show only started a few minutes late. Photography and recording of any kind is strictly prohibited and yet the lady sitting two rows in front of us had...

  Two pictures from our local 4th of July celebration. Happy 249th Birthday America!

  After seeing Liberty and Ellis Islands, we headed up to the site of the former World Trade Center site of the twin towers. The first memorial was being cleaned and wasn't operating but the second site was. Like everyone in my generation and older, I can still remember the events of that day vividly and I found the rest of my afternoon to be a fairly emotional one as I relived the events again. The museum now in the basements of those memorial pools seen above was tastefully done and one of the rare museums where it wasn't geared towards entertaining kids and was instead, focused on preserving the history of a day that will live in infamy. Above is one of the "milk" walls meant to stop river ground water from infiltrating the basement of the twin towers when they were standing. The lighting was dramatic and appropriate for memorial. The outskirts of the memorial are used to display large relics preserved from the tragedy like a portion of the large antenna that used ...

Perhaps my favorite part of the summer growing season is when there are a variety of things becoming ripe in the garden. It is such a joy to step outside my back door and pick a couple handfuls of this or that to incorporate in our meals for the day. Above is the result from one morning trip about a week ago. We are finally starting to get some peas after we succeeded in preventing the rabbits from eating them. It won't be a bumper crop due to the lateness of the year and the intense heat wave we are getting as I type up this post, but it will be enough for a taste which is what I mostly want. The potatoes are fantastic! They are large and they appear to be plentiful with the new method I used for planting them. I wanted to dig out a few "new" potatoes but I'm not sure at this point they qualify for that. We will be using them heavily in our diet from now until we harvest the remainder for storage. We haven't yet mastered the storage part so really only get a few ...