Riverbend Journal

  The late summer doldrums are here apparently because this is the first post I've written in a couple weeks now. The last couple weeks of posts were all written maybe a month ago and set to publish when they appeared. There are another couple weeks of posts wrapping up my vacation that will publish in the coming weeks. I do this specifically for times like this when I have a large swath of time with not much interesting really happening. It takes the pressure off of posting something so people don't begin to wonder if I'm still alive. Above is a picture of an origami boat made from a dollar bill. One of my many volunteer activities to give back to my community is to count the Sunday collections for our church about once a month. The sight above is not my favorite sight to see because it slows me down, especially when there are dozens of origami or just tightly wadded up bills that I have to individually unfold and/or flatten so that we can more easily count them and later ...

  Since I still have a number of posts yet to publish on my trip to the Philippines, I thought I would do an extra post this week of my garden as it was a couple days back. Above is our "new" trellis that I erected at one end of our garden. It had been at the old garden but had languished in the weeds elsewhere on the farm until I rented a U-Haul trailer and made the trip down to bring them back up to our urban garden. In the foreground is bitter melon, a Filipino ingredient that is like a bitter tasting squash that they use in several of their dishes. It grows quite well and fast in our climate and has nearly taken over the trellis. Lower down in the middle are cucumbers that my wife planted. They are nearly done producing but this was one of the best years I've ever had growing them. I have enough pickles to last me the next five years. Further down is a failed attempt at watermelon. My wife wanted to plant them on the trellis and I tried to discourage her because I did...

  Twenty-three years ago, my first trip to the Philippines ended with a visit to the Sagada region which is known for their rice terraces sometimes referred to as an eight wonder of the world. It was such a beautiful place and so far away from all tourism because it was difficult to get to. Back then, we spent a long day bouncing over dirt roads scratched into the sides of mountains and through small creeks and waterfalls. Twenty-three years later, the road is now paved though as you can see from the screenshot above from my phone about midway through the six hour drive, it isn't a straight shot. In fact, it is so twisty and curvy and up and down, that our average speed the entire distance was likely only about 35 miles per hour, about the same speed we traveled twenty-three yeas ago, and this time on a paved road with not a lot of traffic! We rented another van from John Wayne, loaded it with some luggage and food and headed off north up the central mountain range of the Luzon pro...

Twenty-three years ago, we decided to drive up a particular mountain near Baguio that offered an excellent view of the surrounding mountains and overlooked an area known as "The Mines" where locals indeed mined. There were large scars upon the land. Twenty-three years later, the mines aren't visible anymore and instead houses dot the landscape.  Twenty-three years ago, you walked down a rough trail from a pull off to a rock outcropping where you could take in the view of "the mines". Twenty-three years later, the trail was a sidewalk that led you down the hill in a zig zag pattern so that you had to pass by a maximum number of vendors trying to sell cheaply produced souvenirs. Even if you were in the market for a cheap souvenir, you had to watch your step as there were people everywhere and random steps everywhere. And for all of this, you had to pay a toll just to visit the area. Twenty-three years ago, there was a lone Igorot native in the area who kindly pose...

After getting all the drawer pulls and drawer faces sanded and finished, it was time to attach them to the drawer boxes. To do that, I used a trick to allow you to space everything all nice and neat. Starting at the bottom and using shims that I cut from scraps, I set the bottom row of faces in place. Prior to that, I had drilled holes in them that match the holes also drilled into the back of the drawer pulls. So with the drawer faces in place, I sent some screws through them into the drawer body using those predrilled holes for the drawer pulls. This holds the drawer face firmly in place until I can pull out the drawer and fasten the drawer face to the drawer from the inside of every drawer. I can then repeat this process for each row working my way up to the top of the dresser making sure to use the shims so the spacing looking nice. One detail you may or may not have noticed is that the drawers are grain matched from side to side. I used a single board for each row and kept the pie...

  After my BIL returned home from his week of work in Manila, we spent one weekend day going to visit "The Mansion" which is a cross between the White House and Camp David or creating an analogy for the current occupant, a cross between the White House and Mar-a Lago. In all my previous trips to the Philippines, it has been a summer home for the President of the Philippines and technically still is though the guards won't say that specifically. However, recently the main structure you see in the photo above is now a museum and open to the public with approved reservations which my SIL had obtained. The Mansion was actually built by Americans for American leaders after the Spanish American war and was completed in 1908. During World War II, it suffered greatly from bombing but was eventually repaired before being turned over the Philippines who then converted it into the summer home of their President. Not quite two years ago, it was renovated again and opened up to the pu...

  Upon returning from El Nido, a stay at the farm near Tarlac and our aborted trip to see the Hundred Isles, we spent a week close to our home in Baguio. My BIL, who was also our driver, returned to Manila for a week of work and my wife spent her time going out and meeting various groups of her friends and former classmates. As a husband, I sometimes went and sometimes didn't, depending on venue and what my wife was requesting. None of it was terribly exciting though so I won't bore you with the details.  At some point though during that week, I took my kids and their cousins out to eat at a local eatery called "Good Taste". It was quite the experience and I could come up with nothing quite like it that I've ever been too. First and foremost, the restaurant is massive and consists of five floors! At least the one floor we ate on, level five, could seat probably 300 to 400 people. I would say it was only half full when we got there so maybe around 200 people. I hav...

I'm not good at repetition which is why I always decline when someone sees something I have made and tells me I should make more to sell. The only time I have listened was when I built a second batch of inbox drawers for desks but I needed one anyway for personal use and I thought, why not build a couple more while I'm at it. I don't mind the work of cutting and assembling but when it comes to sanding, I always regret my decision. So when it came down to making the drawer front for my 12 drawer dresser, I wasn't terrible thrilled because I knew it would be a lot of repetition. Above is the beginning of the drawer fronts. Since they are just going to be plain flat oak without adornment, they shouldn't be too bad. It is fairly easy to sand flat things fairly quickly. The only real concession I made was that I kept things ordered so I can grain match the drawer fronts. Essentially every row of drawer is cut from the same board and in order so when assembled, the grain ...

  Judging solely by the number of pictures taken during any of my trips to the Philippines, transportation is easily at the top of my fascination list. A lot of that has to do with me spending a lot of time using it in one form or the other and some of it has to do with it being very different from where I have spent the bulk of my life.  If I had to boil down transportation to something more specific, the Jeepney (seen above) is perhaps my favorite of all. In the mountains of Baguio City, they used to rule the mass transportation market and still to this day play a significant part. They started off as discarded Jeeps left behind by America after World War II but are built specific to the Philippines now. I would call the above Jeepney the second generation of the vehicle and on my last trip, I saw my first glimpses of the third and even fourth generations.  The third generation is a more aerodynamic version of the second generation Jeepney's and lack all the colorful cu...