Riverbend Journal

  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...