Riverbend Journal

  Although our mini vacation just had us away for four days, our garden apparently didn't get the memo. Above is some of the picking we did in the late evening of the day we returned home and our garden was fully shaded for a few minutes before dusk fell. Clockwise from the top are a pile of cucumbers, a pile of shishito peppers, three mostly ripe and bug eaten tomatoes, the first of the year, a pile of okra, one watermelon and a bowl of strawberries. Unshown is our onion crop which is currently curing in our garage under the light breeze of a fan. Does anyone else have a garage that smells of onion and garlic like mine?  We gave a bag full of the cucumbers away to friends and the rest I got busy preserving the following day. I dill pickled the Japanese peppers which I love as a tangy and a bit spicy side dish with just about any heavy savory meal. I only discovered how much I love them last year when I pickled a handful of pints of last years crop late in the season. This yea...

  A couple weeks ago, during that oppressing hot stretch of July, we had an unexpected four day weekend come up and decided to take advantage of it. So we packed up the car and drove down to northwest Arkansas to spend some time on the Buffalo River.  Being spring fed, the river was pretty low this time of the year so we had to drive down a ways to find a place where it was still barely deep enough to paddle but we were able to manage, along with hundreds of other like thinking individuals. Fortunately for us, we got an early start while most were still getting their acts together so our day wasn't terribly crowded though we saw signs of the masses behind us at the takeout point. The early start to our day also had the advantage of avoiding the hottest part of the day. We only stopped our paddle once in late morning for a bite of our lunch that we had brought along across from the above bluff. There may have been a brief swim session as well until the masses started floating d...

  Ever since I have been going to the Philippines, my wife has wanted to go to Palawan, which is a long skinny island among a chain of islands stretching southwest from the Philippines off into the China Sea West Philippine Sea as the locals like to call it. Unlike here though, they don't have any qualms about renaming bodies of water. Palawan is known for their pristine white sand beaches and certain areas like El Nido, a city on the NE end of Palawan, are tourist attractions. Always before though, our trips were just too short to justify spending half of our time in the Philippines on Palawan and away from family. This time around however, we had a shade under four weeks in the country so had time on our hands. Our original plan was just for my wife, two kids and I to go as the plane fair is quite expensive. (We nearly paid the same price for a round trip ticket from Clark to El Nido as we did our tickets from the U.S. to Manila!) In fact, we booked our tickets about a month in ...

After visiting my wife's first home, we continued on to the home that used to belong to the parents of my brother-in-law's wife. They both died in the years leading up to Covid and since then, my SIL and her sister take care of the house with periodic visits. The land includes the store front you see in the picture above and the house barely visible among the trees behind the store and above the rock retaining wall. There is a small garden between the base of the retaining wall and the back of the store that they harvest some vegetables from but mostly they stop here to feed the dogs, more on that later. Just to he left of the store in the first picture, you can see an incredibly steep road heading up to the driveway of the house. Above is a picture trying to convey just how steep the road really is. I am always amazed at how the vehicles we ride in are able to climb up such steep roadways when I feel like my feet are just about to slide out from under me when I walk the very s...

  On another day, we continued touring around the Baguio area, first dropping down Kennon Road a bit which is a very winding road that winds up from the lowlands to the mountain tops of Baguio along a steep gorge. It is very prone to landslides and indeed, just descending down it part way we had to pass several areas which were down to one lane due to the other lane no longer existing due to a landslide. Our destination was the locally famous Lion's Lion.  On past trips, when we have passed by the lion head, I have known that I was near the end of my trip and we would soon be in Baguio. Back then, there was just a pull off for it and one could hop out and take a picture. These days however, it has become a tourist draw so you have to pay to park in the much larger pullouts and then up and down the road from the lion head are lots of vendors peddling cheap Chinese trinkets to the masses. There is even a sort of line that forms for people wanting to climb up near the lion's mout...

  After catching up on the garden and a mountain of paperwork that it takes to run the life of a family and someone who volunteers perhaps more often than he should, I set my sights back on the dresser project. For the last month and some change, it has been residing in our front hallway. I put it there so that it could live in a temperature and humidity controlled environment while I was away, especially after all the effort I put into flattening the dresser slab top. With the flattening done, the hard work was done but the time consuming part began, repairing all the defects and sanding. Repairing the defects is relatively straight forward. I used picks and such to remove dirt, debris and bark from the internal cracks at areas where limbs had been at some point in the walnut tree's life. Once they were cleaned out, I applied tape to one side of the board and then after flipping, poured black epoxy into the defects on the other side of the board. The tapes purpose is to prevent th...

  One sign of increasing wealth in the Philippines was the sheer number of restaurants everywhere. When I say they were everywhere, I do mean they were everywhere. Once could zoom in on a google map anywhere, including in residential districts, and find restaurants on every street and corner. I suspect licensing for restaurants in the Philippines is much less onerous than it is here in the States, which helps to explain the sheer number of them. Many look like they are just run off the porch of the home where a family lives and for the most part, I avoided those. I'm sure there are many with excellent cooking but I tend to think an actual restaurant with a name to uphold might care more about serving food that won't make me sick.  So one afternoon while out driving about, we went to eat at a newer restaurant which was making a name for itself on social media. From what I gathered, the cook of that particular restaurant had made his name on some cooking television show for cook...

  One of the things I always enjoy experiencing in the Philippines is going to the market. It is totally unlike the sterile process of going to the local grocery store here. Here, everything is in logical order and there may only be one or two options for each particular item you wish to purchase, especially when it comes to fresh vegetables and proteins. The Philippines is the exact opposite in nearly every regard. To start with, all of the food markets of Baguio are open air. You either walk down relatively wide alleyways like the one above or you enter the labyrinth of aisles on the ground floor of many of the surrounding buildings which are still open to the outside. There may be some added lighting but there is certainly no doors to open into a conditioned space. Trucks crawl up the mountains in low gear to arrive to the outskirts of Baguio every morning with fresh produce. Grains and warm season veggies like peppers, squash and tomatoes come up from the lowlands of the south ...

At the end of our day touring around Baguio, someone suggested we stop at a new art place called Pugad Ni Art Studio. We had to stop a few times to ask directions as it turned out to be hard to find and I can see why after we finally got there. It was essentially in a building that essentially blended in with the neighboring houses and other than a sign on the door, was otherwise unlabeled.  Even when we knocked on the door we had to wait for a lady to answer it amid a bunch of barking dogs who assured us we could come inside and look around. Immediately inside the front door I saw the above sight, an unworking Volkswagen van sitting in the living room on some dirt scattered over the floor. To one side of the van were the living quarters of the live in artists and on the other side was an art studio where the art was made followed by five small floors or art hung on the walls. I enjoy looking at modern art and at first, the visit seemed to be like a visit to just about every modern...

  I have always found the best way to cure jet lag is to find plenty of things to do that first day to force brain to be active until normal sleeping hours in my new time zone. So after a partial night's sleep and some morning hours reading until my Filipino family were awake, we ate some breakfast and headed out to explore some new sights around town. Our first stop was the Diplomat Hotel which after years of being empty, is slowly starting to be fixed up and marketed as a haunted place. Although I don't believe in ghosts, I can see how people might think there are ghosts here due to a somewhat sordid history. It was built by Americans after the Spanish War and became a seminary. During World War II, it was a place of refuge for Filipinos until the Japanese invaded it and turned it into a head quarters. Within it's walls, many a Filipino native along with the priests and nuns were tortured, raped and executed. During the later days of the Japanese occupation it became a ...