Riverbend Journal

  Soon after we moved to this place some 14 years ago, I decided to hang our bicycles from the ceiling. My wife has always insisted that both our cars spend every night pampered inside the garage and so as we added children and bicycles to the mix, it became harder to do. In order to still leave room for all my woodworking equipment, I looked toward the ceiling and came up with a solution. I bought a half dozen of these rope hoists with hooks on the end and used five of them to hang up various bicycles and one to hang up a ladder. It got everything off the floor which allowed both cars to park at night but it had some issues. The biggest issue is that they were hard to work to lower a bicycle down. The mechanism requires a specific angle of the rope to allow the rope to slide past it and lower the bike down, something my kids and wife never seemed to be able to figure out. This meant that I was always on call to lower a bicycle down or pull it back up. This often resulted for the b...

  Moving day for our annual library fundraising book sale has come and gone. I thought I would share a few pictures of it for your enjoyment. Here is my dolly of books heading down the freight elevator to the main floor where the books will be offered up for sale soon. Although my dolly could hold more, I limited myself to 28 boxes at a time which weighed around 1000 pounds or about half a ton. If I stacked them any higher, it made it harder to see where I was going and increased the likelihood I would run into something or perhaps spill part of my load. In order to take this picture, I was backed into the corner next to the door with my phone held inches from my face and zoomed completely out as far as it would go. It is tight quarters with a half ton of books in a small elevator. Even though the dolly makes moving all that weight down to the sale floor easier, we still life each box onto the dolly and then lift it off the dolly and put it on one of the rows of display tables wher...

  Every fall, I help in a local fundraiser for our public library where we take donated used books in good condition and sell them cheaply back to the public with all the funds being given to the library to purchase more books. Last year, we came close to raising $30,000, our best year ever.  Although the sale lasts only three short days in the fall, work to prepare for it began a month earlier. Shopping carts are set up at the drop off location for people to put their donated books into. Myself and an army of volunteers wheel those carts upstairs to a cavernous storage room where we unpack them onto sorting tables and then one by one, classify them into one of about two dozen genres on more tables. Once they have been sorted, they are boxed up and put in stacks by genre until moving day. On moving day, myself and a couple other able bodied people, use large wheeled dollies to haul all those boxes of books, down to a large gymnasium sized room below where the actual sale is he...

  California Gold Rush family A blog post that I wrote about my 4th great grandfather Joseph Chicken Sr. whose gravesite I visited for the second time a few years back, elicited a response from a previously unknown cousin of mine. We have been corresponding via emails back and forth and sharing information. When I get these emails and requests, I typically start going back through my research to try and get facts straight and such and this time was no different. However, at the same time this was going on, I was also applying finish to six sets of chaos coasters so between coats while waiting for it to cure, I found myself with time on my hands. So I decided to focus on one of my nearby ancestors, in this case a fellow by the name of John Bolton who is the father of Joseph Chicken's first wife Frances Ann Bolton. John is sort of a blank canvas to me because he got caught up in the California Gold Rush of 1849, the only one of my direct ancestors to do so. However, I'm not sure ...

When I started out woodworking, like most people, I bought a lot of cheap tools that have since been replaced. A lot of it was because I simply couldn't afford better tools and often I learned by using the tools, what I liked and what I didn't like about them. The one exception is my planer (seen above) which I bought twelve or so years ago and have been tremendously happy with it ever since. It is probably no coincidence that you can find one of these in perhaps any long time woodworking hobbyist's woodshop. I know more people with one of these than I do those that have other makes and models.  I won't bore you with details but a planer has spinning knives in it that make rough boards smooth and the surface flat and parallel to the opposite side. It is an essential piece of equipment if you ever make something from rough sawn lumber which I do quite a bit since it is considerably cheaper to buy. The three large knives spin very fast and essentially scrape the wood smoo...

  My coasters were much liked among my family and friends that have seen them and so while waiting on better weather (cooler) to start a slightly larger project, I couldn't help myself and thought perhaps making some coasters to give out as Christmas gifts might be in order. After all, Christmas is just over three months away at this point. I sorted through my scrap wood destined for the fireplace this winter and salvaged enough odds and ends for two more coaster plugs. I dispensed with the cap altogether and this time just siliconed the PVC pipe forms directly to another scrap block of wood. Not only did that reduce the amount of epoxy needed, the most expensive part of this entire project, but it made it MUCH MUCH easier to unmold later. I also let the silicone sit up overnight before I poured any epoxy so I had zero leaks this time which was a nice perk. I ended up with two plugs of epoxy and scraps and they came out great. Not only were they much easier to unmold, but I didn...

  I am fortunate to live in a town with a lot of diversity. There is a meat packing plant that hires people from all over the world to work there and with them they also bring their culture which shows up in restaurants that pop up around town. Most are short lived but we try to enjoy them while they are around.  The original immigrants were from Mexico and Latin America but later they came from French Guiana, Africa then from the Chuuk Islands in the Pacific and now it seems back to Africa again. Most of the original Mexicans that were hired have moved on to other plants out west but many remained behind. They were a mix of family that came with them and didn't leave with them to the new places, those that developed too deep of roots to move and some that are undocumented and have no real place to go. The Chuuks are still too new to have made inroads into the restaurant business yet but the Hispanics and the Africans both left a bunch of them.  Besides the traditional Me...

  Disregarding the debris and soil on the right side of the above photo, our sweet potato patch looks extremely healthy and has for a long while now. So when my eldest daughter home from college wanted a sweet potato to try out a new recipe, I told my wife we should dig one up just to see what they look like. We raised some once many years ago at our garden at the farm but the entire crop had amounted to just a handful of smallish sweet potatoes. I don't recall our plants above ground every looking this vigorous as the ones above do this year so I was optimistic that our luck had changed. What we found underneath the one plant we chose to sacrifice early astounded us. We found a dozen sweet potatoes under that single plant and every single one of them was bigger than our biggest sweet potato we have grown the previous time. They also weren't purple skinned as they should be. We bought the slips this spring and they had been labeled Japanese Murasaki sweet potatoes which accordi...

  Twenty-five years ago, I was walking home from the bank where I had just deposited my severance check and a guy came running out of an apartment raving about planes flying into buildings. I thought the man crazy until I got inside my own home, turned on the television and witnessed what appeared to be building two of the World Trade Center collapsing live on television. Although I was around for the Vietnam, Persian Gulf and Desert Storm wars, this was the first time I had seen war being brought to our soil and I was numb. I spent the rest of that day numb, sometimes in tears, watching things unfold on the television and wondering what the world would be like in my near future. Being recently unemployed as well, much of the coming weeks would be spent immersed in the tragedy.  The world did changed dramatically in the coming years. For a time we came together as a nation to mourn and to take action. The world even joined with us. The brief flame of a united population burned...

  Not long ago, I attempted to make some chaos coasters out of scrap wood and while cutting the 10th coaster, my bandsaw blade caught the wood and epoxy plug and threw it clear across the garage, damaging the blade irreparably in the process. At the time I decided I didn't need a 10th coaster when I had nine others but I never through away the plug. As the weeks went by, I decided that I could do better and perhaps get one more coaster out of the plug after cutting off the broken end if I made a jig to do the holding which can be much tighter than my own grip strength. So with a scrap piece of plywood and some scrap 2 x 4 material, I made the jig above. The block with the V-groove in it on the right is permanently glued to the scrap piece of plywood. There other block with the V-groove on the left isn't attached at all and the short square block above acts as a spacer. Unseen beneath the plywood is a scrap of wood that slides in the miter slot of the bandsaw allowing me to fee...

When we returned from Sagada, we had a couple days in which we mostly spent packing our luggage for the return trip. We had used cheap second hand luggage to bring many gifts (pasalubong) with us with the intention of leaving them there. However, I had forgotten that I had bought a large chunk of kamagong wood on my previous trip eight years ago that I hadn't been able to bring home due to weight restrictions. So between that and all the food gifts we were bring back to give to friends and family, we were having to shuffle things around so that all the bags made weight. Included in those bags were five new brooms (walis) that someone had hand woven while we were in Sagada. They cost about 250 pesos or $4.00 U.S.D. each. On the right is one of the ones we had bought many many years ago and as you can see, nearly worn completely out. They are superior for cleaning wood floors than typical domestic brooms and our main floor is all wood flooring. My only complaint is that the handles a...

After completing our rice terrace hike and picking up others in our group who hadn't gone with us, we headed into town for a late supper. We ate at a place that specialized in chicken inasal so I ordered chicken inasal. Inasal is grilled chicken with lemongrass and calamansi which is a native citrus fruit similar to a lime. You can find it just about anywhere in the Philippines though it is known by different regional names.  The next morning we had some local red rice that we had bought the day before and cooked some to try for breakfast. It looks like Spanish rice but doesn't have tomatoes in it. It is a bit fluffier with less chew than say Jasmine white rice. A traditional Filipino breakfast is rice, over easy egg and some sort of pork product. In this case we had tocino which is a sweet cured pork. I already posted another version of this photo but after breakfast as we were getting ready for the day my wife shouted at me to get outside quickly and so I did. In case you mis...

  Above is a picture I took 23 years ago on my first trip to the Philippines. There were a lot of memorable events that happened on that trip, namely that I received an official blessing to marry my fiancée. However in terms of sheer beauty, walking among the rice terraces near Sagada is the event that I only have to close my eyes to remember. Back then, we just stumbled upon a path descending the mountain behind the motel we were staying and came across a native village full of nipa huts and a little girl who guided us further down into the rice terraces themselves. It was a beautiful place full of golden rice and purple mountains. For the next 23 years, I have been wanting to get back to this region before it changed to something unrecognizable and this trip worked out. After breakfast, we drove up the road aways to pullout where guided hikes were offered through the rice terraces to see a large waterfall. Foreshadowing a bit, I think the reason this place remains largely undistu...