BenSpark Family Adventures

Photo-A-Day #83 06/30/05 The other day one of my co-workers asked if I had toys all over the house like I have them all over my desk at work. Not really. They are more organized and still in the boxes at home. These are my Binaltech Transformers from Japan.

I posted a new buzznet gallery. It is for the Whitewater Rafting Trip that Dad and I took last weekend. Tomorrow I should have photos up from my trip to Mobile, AL. I used all 250 photo uploads for Buzznet this month. Thanks to everyone who helped me get a premium membership for free. Penobscot Whitewater Rafting Trip – no pictures of actually being on the water. Still waiting for those.

I’m back. It was an early morning today. I pretty much slept and hour at the hotel and then headed to the airport. Out late. Up late. Couldn’t sleep because stayed up too late. In between falling asleep on the plane I finished Life of Pi. A very interesting book by Yann Martel. A story about love and god and a bengal tiger on a life raft. You’d really have to read it to understand it. I read it and don’t quite understand it myself although I do have theories. Get your own copy online or at the library.

Today I went with John and Kurt on board the U.S.S. Alabama. What a cool ship. I got lots of great pictures and will post a gallery once July hits and I have space at Buzznet. For now check out the Photo-A-Day. Well, gotta get up in 3 hours to fly home.

Photo-A-Day #82 06/29/05 Today I got to tour the U.S.S. Alabama here in Mobile, AL. What a great place. It was awesome to see the workings of the ship.

Yes, Allison is posting!! This is time #4 I do believe! I’m very excited, I just won two guest passes to see Ellis Paul at any show we’d like – all by answering a simple trivia question! I’m very excited. I’m not really sure what the guest passes mean, if we get to meet him after the show privately or what – but I won! I never win!!

Photo-A-Day #81 06/28/05 This is part of Ft. Conde. It is in downtown Mobile Alabama.

I am in Mobile, Alabama today. I have a demo tomorrow in Chatam, Alabama, which is about 2 hours away from Mobile. I got in around 12:00pm and got to the Mobile Bay Harley Davidson Shop here in Mobile. Then I made my way over to the hotel. The room was not ready for me to check in but no problem, there is free wireless internet in the lobby, so I checked out the e-mails I had as well as the days webcomics. Then I checked my BlogShares account, I already had $10,000,000.00 in it, if only it were real money. I’ve been getting more money as well as chips by trading links with other players. The game is pretty interesting and I don’t know even half of the ins and outs. Anyway around 2:00pm I went to the front desk, thinking it was 3:00pm (1 hour time difference here.) and they gave me a concierge room on the 19th floor. I checked in got settled and then headed downtown. When I got there I took the free electric bus called moba. It took me on a 10 minute loop around the downtown. I saw a br...

Photo-A-Day #80 06/27/05 So as I was driving into work this morning I noticed as I glanced in the rear view mirror that something was not right. I had taken a shower, shaved and put hair gel in; however, I never ran the comb through my hair. So I was pretty shocked to see all my hair standing up at all sorts of strange angles and see the parts that should have been standing up laying flat. Luckily I keep some gel and a comb in my desk for this sort of incident.

I have enrolled in BlogShares , a fantasy stock market game that uses blogs as companies. I am the owner of this blog on BlogShares and through that I can sell fantasy shares of the blog. As the blog grows in popularity the price of the shares will increase. To increase the shares I need more sites linking to this one and I will be linking to other blogs. I’ve created a section in the sidebar called BlogShares Sites. A randomly generated link and description will appear at the top of the section and then below that will appear some of the static links to blogs that I am linking too. Enjoy discovering these other blogs. And by clicking them you can increase the number of chips I have in my account. There are rules about appropriateness of blogs in BlogShares so if you come across something questionable, let me know.

This weekend I went to Maine to white water raft the Penobscot River . I went with my Dad, his friend Bob, Bob's two sons, Rob and Mark, their friends Justin, Sean, and Vic. We all met at Vinny T's on Friday afternoon, right after the free lunch from American Express Financial Advisors . I rode up with Dad, Bob and Rob. Rob drove the whole way, he had just gotten a new car and it only had 200 miles on it, so he wanted to break it in. Rob burned a bunch of comedy CD's for our ride up. We listened to Frank Caliendo – Make the Voices Stop , Ron White -Drunk in Public , Mitch Hedberg – Strategic Grill Locations , The Blue Collar Comedy Tour , Lewis Black - End of the Universe , and part of Bill Engvall - Dorkfish . We made pretty good time up to Millinocket Maine. When we got to Millinocket we followed the direction and that led us to a bridge being out. We turned around and got directions to Three Rivers Whitewater . When you give directions and use Strip Clubs as landmarks. ...

I won a lunch for 15 people at Vinny T’s from American Express Financial Advisors. Here’s the gang having lunch. I had my Dad, his friend Bob and Bob’s son Rob and Allison and then some folks from work. Peter, John, Jeff, Joanne, Beth, Kahra and Jennifer. We all had a great meal.

Photo-A-Day #79 06/26/05 This is a snapping turtle that was laying eggs by the side of the road. Luckily the bridge is out on this road and the babies may have a chance when they hatch.

Okay I really want to recap the weekend’s events. However one doesn’t find out exactly how much a pinky is involved in typing until one breaks his. I will try and update from the past weekend very soon. I have many photos from before and after the trip because bringing my camera on the raft would be stupid. So many pictures and a full write up the rafting trip very soon.

Drew is currently in Maine white-water rafting. He has photos, but is unable to post them, because he has no access to the internet, but not to fear, there will be photos tomorrow. And I’m betting there will be lots of them! So check back tomorrow.

Photo-A-Day #78 06/25/05 Dad and I after our White Water Rafting Trip down the Penobscot River in Maine. It was a fantastic day. I have lots of photos from before and after and eventually I’ll be getting two photos from on the water but for now you have the after.

Photo-A-Day #77 06/24/05 Okay so this afternoon I will be heading up to Maine. I hope to find a way to post my Photo-A-Day tomorrow but I am skeptical. So today I post a picture of some of the gadgets that I have with me every day. A Lexar Memory Card Reader, so I can put up Photo-A-Day, a Generic Comp Usa 128MB Pen flash drive that keeps my Microsoft Money program so I can use it on two separate computers. I dropped the pen one day and the pen part broke, but the usb drive is working fine. And my Logitech QuickCam for Notebooks Pro. I bought this so that when I am travelling I can talk face to face with Allison. Maybe I should have bought her one too. Maybe on my next Compusa buyers binge. Well, not till after the wedding.

I’ve added a Tagboard to the right side of the Blog. This is for you to leave a message to me or to another reader. Please keep it clean. I can ban IP addresses and will do so it the need arises. I’m testing this out for the month and wanted to see if it was worth adding. So pop in and leave a Tag. If you get any errors or see anything wrong please let me know.

Ah yes, today I will be heading up to Maine to go White Water Rafting tomorrow. We leave from lunch. Oh yeah, I won lunch for 15 people at Vinny T’s in Dedham. So some of my co-workers are coming as well as Allison and my Dad, plus Bob and Rob whom Dad and I will be rafting with. I took a look at some of the rafting pictures from previous trips this month. Okay, I didn’t see many trips where the raft made it down the river without totally flipping over. So I think we may end up getting very very wet and may see some river time. I am very excited about our accommodations, The Yurts, they sound like just so much fun. Ton’s of pictures will be taken this weekend. There is also a nightly bonfire at the camp and a bunch of things to do. So I am very excited about the weekend. In other news around the homefront, Uncle Richard is now at New England Sinai Hospital & Rehab Center, in Stoughton MA. Last night my Dad stopped to visit him on the way back from the Cape. When he got there Uncle ...

Okay this made me laugh out loud. And I hope it will continue to make me laugh out loud each day. Daily Dancer is a website where a self-proclaimed Computer Geek (“I am Daily Dancer, a computer geek who loves to dance!“) dances each day in the morning. He has gotten tons and tons of hits on his site. And many people are commenting on his site every day. The site is very funny. Some videos have been taken down because of bandwidth issues but hopefully he will get them back up soon. I would really like to see a few of them. I mean these are laugh out loud funny. Is he a good dancer, not really. Is he having fun, heck yeah! Go check him out. He is very brave to put himself out there like that. I’m setting him up as a permanent link in my webtainment section. The Daily Dancer

Photo-A-Day #76 06/23/05 This is a photo of one of the buildings downtown. There are quite a few older buildings around that have some fancy designs on them. You don’t ever really see them because rarely does one look up higher than straight ahead while walking.

Photo-A-Day #75 06/22/05 This is one of the swans at work. Our company has two swans that make their home in a small pond at one of the facilities. One swan had been nesting up till about two weeks ago. No word on the cygnets though.

You may have noticed that I have added an imood icon under my name on the right hand side of the screen. I’m not going to get into how finding out about imood has caused some issues for me on the web. But that is neither here nor there. Anyway I thought it was an interesting item to add to the page so there it is. Why am I excited? Well, this weekend my Dad and I are going up to the Penobscot River in Maine to do some whitewater rafting. We are going with a friend of his and his sons. The rafting company is Three Rivers Whitewater, Inc. and we are staying for the weekend in a Yurt. What is a Yurt? Read all about Yurts. They sound like a unique experience. We’ll be rafting the Penobscot River. Class V all the way baby! I haven’t been whitewater rafting since college. During my first year of college I went whitewater rafting with the Alpine Club at school. For four weeks in a row I went with the Alpine club to various locations and adventures across New Hampshire. My first weekend I went...

Photo-A-Day #74 06/21/05 Duncan by the window. I was sick of the flash making the cats eyes look really freaky so instead of turning it off I held my finger partway over it. Now it looks like Duncan is in some red tinted room. Weird Pic. But what the heck, I’m tired from Buffett last night.

Yesterday Allison and I, along with her father Dan, went to Great Woods to see Jimmy Buffett. I know it is now called the Tweeter center but once a year when Jimmy comes back it is Great Woods again. This year was a lot more sedate for us than past years. We packed light, super light. Had two chairs, a cooler, 24 Coronas, three subs from D’Angelo and a bag of pretzels from the Road Trip on Sunday. We packed light. We had so much extra space that we gave some of it to our neighbors so they could cook on it. We must have watched about 50 people almost burn themselves on those two grills. They were low to the ground and no one is looking down in the parking lot. There is just too much to see. One of the things that people were coming to see was the Bachelorette party that was right next to us. There was the Bride-to-be all decked out in a wedding dress and sash that said, “Bride-To-Be” They had an inflate a date guy, a giant inflatable penis that they had people take pictures next to and ...

Photo-A-Day #73 06/20/05 Fins Up! Tonight we went to see Jimmy Buffett at Great Woods. More photos to follow.

So, we are finally back from PA. We drove about 850 miles through the course of the weekend. Getting down to PA at 3:30pm on Friday and returning home to MA at 5:30pm on Sunday. The trip down was pretty uneventful, and while driving long distances that is a good thing. Allison and I made a couple of stops, first we stopped for Dunkin Donuts and some munchkins. Then we didn’t stop again till Danbury CT, to stop and get a pin at the Danbury Harley Davidson. I’ll be posting that pin with my pin collection photos next month because I only have a few more pictures I can post this month on Buzznet. (Thanks guys for signing up as friends so I could get a year enhanced membership, from Buzznet.) Our next stop was in PA, where we had lunch at Marvelous Muggs Restaurant. It was a pretty nice place and they had fried pickles. In spear form not chip form, and speaking of chips they had homemade old bay potato chips. That was a special treat. As we were leaving Marvelous Muggs, Allison got a call f...

Photo-A-Day #72 06/19/05 Jake liked biting my feet today. Jake is Elise and Charles’ puppy. He is a very cute little guy, tons of energy and very lovable. I tried to get him biting my shoe as I held up my foot and aimed the camera. Not to shabby.

Photo-A-Day #71 06/18/05 Allison and Elise at Vicky and Justin’s wedding. Wedding recap tomorrow.

Photo-A-Day #70 06/17/05 Photo-A-Day is up early today. Allison and I are heading to PA for a weekend wedding. So here is a photo of Oliver.

Allison and I are heading to PA today. 8 hours in the car baby! Yep we are driving on down to PA for a wedding. We should be leaving in about 10 minutes. Just enough tie to read all my webcomics, take and post the Photo-A-Day and write this little note. I’ll update when I can, maybe even an audio blog. Audio blog is now officially a part of Blogger. Sweet.

Photo-A-Day #69 06/16/05 My Binaltech Wheeljack figure came in the mail today. When Transformers first were released in the U.S.A. in 1984 Wheeljack was the first figure I ever had. He was originally a Lancia. Now he has been reformatted into a 2005 Ford Mustang. And this car looks sweet. I’ve been looking for the Alternator version of this character (Alternators are the Hasbro versions, and Binaltech are the Takara versions.) but have had no luck. Oh well, soon enough I will find one.

Today is my Mom and Dad’s Anniversary. Tonight Tara and Erik and Allison and I made dinner for Mom and Dad. We had steak tips and Tara and Dad shared som Salmon. Tara made a salad and potatoes, and sweet potatoes and we had some bread with oil and spices to dip the bread. It was a nice night.

I  recently picked up a 2 CD and 1 DVD set for my Dad for his birthday of Frank Caliendo’s comedy routines. One is called Frank on the Radio which are recordings from Franks Many various appearances on radio morning shows. Nothing from the Bob and Tom shows though, hmm. If you haven’t heard of Frank Caliendo you will. He is on Mad TV and he has also been on many sports shows because he has a great John Madden impression. He also does many other voices.  One of the skits on the radio CD is Frank being challenged into incorporating 10 different voices into one topic. The DJ shouts out the names of the people to impersonate and Frank just cranks em out. This has to be one of the best parts of the CD. The other CD is called Make the Voices Stop this is a CD of his standup routine which is hilarious. The DVD is called Giggles Shakey Cam DVD. It is called that because the cameraman is laughing at different times and he moves the camera. If you want to see some great stuff that Frank...

Christopher Moore write some pretty funny messed up stories. One of my favorite books by him is called LAMB: The Gospel According to Jesus’ Pal Biff. The untold story of those years between birth and Jesus’ public ministry, very imaginative and hilarious. For people who know me and see me on a regular basis. I’ll sell you my copy of Practical Demonkeeping for $3.00

I added an adsense by google bar on the right side near the bottom of the screen. It is supposed to take words from the blog and put links up for targeted ads. I am supposed to be able to filter out certain types of ads. If anyone notices anything that shouldn’t be on this site please let me know. Thanks.

Photo-A-Day #68 06/15/05 This is the new grill. I’ve used it every night since we got it on Saturday. I love grilling!

In rerun form at least. In July the Sci-Fi Channel is picking up Firefly! So watch it from the beginning. From the Sci Fi Channel: “SCI FI Channel announced that it will air reruns of Fox’s canceled SF series Firefly, including three episodes that never aired on Fox. SCI FI will air all 14 hours of the show, from creator Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), starting July 22, in the 7 p.m. ET/PT Friday timeslot. It will be followed by new episodes of Stargate SG-1 at 8, Stargate Atlantis at 9 and Battlestar Galactica at 10.” Shiny! I they had only picked this up sooner and actually continued the series. That would have been much better overall.

The backyard clean-up photo montage is now complete. All photos from now on will be on my Buzznet Photoblog. Now that I’ve learned how to syndicate. Sometimes I will post them on the Buzznet PhotoBlog and sometimes I will choose the blog this option so that the picture appears here. Either way you’ll still be getting all the fun photos I can take. So here are the Backyard Clean-up Photos in order. And here are two more videos. (Quicktime required.) Dad on the excavator. Me on the excavator, at night, it is too dark to see, should have turned on the scoop light.

Tonight, Tara, Dad and I worked on adding more pieces of fence to the backyard. Dad rented another machine, a small compact excavator. The excavator had a small plow on the front and a big scoop on the front. There are two rubber treads and the machine moved a complete 360. It moved a lot smoother than the backhoe but it was much smaller and there were no stabilizers so it shook a lot more. Dad drove the excavator most of the time because he used it this morning at a job and had lots of practice on it. Tara and I got the posts and fence panels and we all worked on getting the fence up and level and nice and straight. We still have to spread the rest of the loam over the backyard and their is the part of the fence that is around a very large tree that my Dad needs to piece in but we are coming along with the backyard clean-up. I should be getting up the photos soon.

Photo-A-Day #67 06/14/05 Photo-A-Day has changed. Oh, I am still taking a photo a day except there is a now a blog feed from Buzznet over on the right hand side of the screen. There you will see a small thumbnail of the most recent Photo-A-Day. You can click on that photo to see a full size image and my write-up about that photo. I’m trying to streamline the Benspark Blog to offer many new features in the coming weeks. This is just one of the new improvements.

I have explored the world of Blog syndication, and I like it. I started exploring this because I wanted a way to put the Photo-A-Day images on the sidebar. Then I got into learning about Feedburner for the Benspark Blog. Now I have a few things set up so that you can subscribe to the Benspark Blog. That’s right you can get the Benspark Blog on your My Yahoo, My MSN or any other type of RSS syndication reader. It is very, very simple. At the bottom of each post there are some buttons that will help you subscribe to the benspark blog. More changes are in store as I learn and explore more about the options for syndication.

Photo-A-Day #66 06/13/05 This is our wall of engagement cards. Thanks to everyone who sent us a nice congratulations. No work in the yard today. Too hot.

The other day I discovered a couple new webcomics, Crap I Drew on my Lunch Break and Asylum on 5th Street . I sent the links to Allison and she came across this one, and then asked me if I was selling webcomic artists our life story. The artist of Crap and Asylum is named Jin wicked, just about the coolest name ever, besides Wes Molebash of You’ll Have That . You put Bash in a name and it just gives it some zing. Insert Oliver or Duncan here And speaking of web comics. I have been updating the list with different comics that I have found in my adventures online. Please check out their websites. Some use course language from time to time so be warned. I’ll have to put up some sort of legend about which ones are family friendly, PG-13 and truck driver mouth. For the most part the daily cartoon is pretty accessible to all audiences. Some of these comics have huge archives and major backstory about the characters. PVP – Player Vs. Player. I love this comic because the characters are so m...