BenSpark Family Adventures

Photo-A-Day #479 07/31/06 Our church is going through some renovations. We’re adding on an elevator, some meeting rooms and handicap access. The project is coming along and I think it is at the midway point. We stopped and checked out the progress during our walk tonight.

Photo-A-Day #478 07/30/06 So today I wanted to give my review of Alton Brown’s new show Feasting on Asphalt. Why no review? The power went out at our house on Friday evening. What this meant to the VCR was a total wipe of all programmed tapings. So no Psych on Friday night, no Feasting on Asphalt on Saturday night. No problem, we got back last night at 10:15 to find the VCR fiasco. I jumped online to see when the show was being rebroadcast, come to find out it was coming up at midnight. And there was another great show called Behind the Eats which was a reveal of all the cool things that they do on Good Eats. That was going to be on at 3:00am. I reprogrammed the TV to the cable stations and reset the VCR to tape the two shows. (Those of you who are paying attention might see where I am going with this.) I failed to program the VCR to the channels. I had the VCR on and I saw channels and was able to change channels so I thought I was all set. But I was not. I planned to watch the shows ...

Photo-A-Day #477 07/29/06 Today Allison and I went to Tina and Ryan’s wedding reception. Tina and Ryan got married back in April and today they had their wedding reception. We had a very nice time and it was entertaining watching the little ones run around and enjoy the two kiddy pools. There was one little kid who played with the hose all day long, he watered the lawn, he watered the asphalt and he nearly soaked a whole table of party guests. I was waiting for that. On our ride over to the reception we saw this car. Notice the license plate. Um… no, actually I don’t. Nope, no ego on this kid at all. I mean come on the car is an Acura. It is basically a Honda with the H squished into an A.

Photo-A-Day #476 07/28/06 Tons of rain today on our trip up to New Hampshire. Allison did a great job driving through the pouring rain. After dinner there was a full rainbow. And I was fast enough with the camera to actually get some pictures of it. Also Dan sealed the porch and wanted me to take a picture of the water beading up.

Okay, Okay. I know I said I don’t watch reality shows, except for Last Comic Standing but I was home last night after Superman Returns and caught the second half of Who Wants To Be A Superhero? I admit it I got sucked into what was happening. The first challenge was a morality challenge and I missed it, The three cast members picked for possible elimination were picked for these reasons.  One wanted to use this experience to get rich by making toys of his character One wanted to meet men in tights One would rather kill people than save people Guess which one was booted? The one who wanted to make a profit from his experience. HUH! Seeing as this show is about Superheroes and, Superheroes don’t kill people as Stan Lee says, wouldn’t it have made more sense to kick of the guy with the blood lust. No… fine, moving on. The second challenge was for the Superheroes to change into their Super costumes as quickly as possible in a public park without anyone seeing them and then race to a fi...

Photo-A-Day #475 07/27/06 Tonight there was a block party downtown. There was volleyball in front of the post office. There were some classic cars and the end of the street had been turned into a tiny lagoon. A great time for the downtown association. Here are some pictures from the block party. Volleyball! More Volleyball This girl could jump. Main Street Volleyball The mini train goes up an down our street. The lagoon. This kid is having a great time. A sweet ride. Another sweet ride. Great Camaro Great truck. Another Great Truck. Tonight I also went and saw Superman Returns. Yeah I’m up on all the new movies, I know it. I really liked the movie. Some great stuff that I wanted to see happen with Superman. Some really tough parts to watch and yes there was an underlying Christian tie in. Some iconic moments that paralleled Superman and Christ. Overall I liked the movie a lot. They sure tried to squeeze a lot into the 2 1/2 hours. I think it worked very well.

Photo-A-Day #474 07/26/06 Went back to work today. Eye is still a little funny and will be for a while. Gotta put drops in every 4 hours. The drops are keeping the pupil very small. This is making things funky. If I close my right eye (good eye) and look out of just the left I can see the screen right now without a big blob over the middle of it. My vision in my left eye was always like looking at an eclipse because I only saw the things at the edges and that was very blurry. Now I see everything but it is all still blurry. It is going to take a few weeks for my vision to adjust.  My eyes have always been two separate entities that worked independently of each other. My right eye did all the work and the left was a slacker. Now the slacker has a little bit of vision and it is messing with the hard working eye. I noticed it today while I was reading. My good eye was reading the right hand page but the left eye kept popping in with what was on the left page. I was on a section of the...

Photo-A-Day #473 07/25/06 Today Allison and I put together the shelves that we bought at IKEA with Neil and Andrea. We also got to open some of our wedding stuff. We are very excited about that. Now we have more space and the use of some new stuff. Here is the progress of the activities from today. Everything laid out and moved to the living room. Duncan claimed Allison’s desk. Everything off the desk. Moving more stuff around. Desk is gone, floor has been cleaned. One section complete. End and middle section complete. The shelves are completed. Kitchen counter is complete with new wedding gifts. Can’t get far back enough to take a full shot of the shelves. Left side, got all the cookbooks organized, now gotta start using them. Middle Section We moved the microwave, Right side of shelves.

Photo-A-Day #472 07/24/06 The surgery is over and now I’m waiting for my other senses to decrease about 38%. I still have some goopy stuff in my eye and have to put drops in every hour or so and tomorrow have another Eye doctor appointment but I am feeling okay. I had a slight headache after the procedure and it feels like something is in my eye, like an eyelash or something. There actually is something in my eye and that is a new lens, which apparently didn’t fit right at first, or so I read from Allison’s post. I was still a little loopy when I was told that. I do remember saltines, saltines and ginger ale are my friends. Very tasty. They even gave me seconds. The procedure was very interesting, I had lots of eye drops put into my eyes, (a regimen of 4 drops every 5 minutes three times and then the eye doctor put in 2 more.) And now I have to put in two drops every hour. During the procedure I was awake and saw many colors, actually just 7 colors, the standard rainbow ones, no chartr...

We are back from Sturdy. The surgery went well and the patient is doing well. There was a minor difficulty getting the lens to sit correctly in the eye, but the surgery was quick and Drew is sleeping off the anesthesia. He’ll post pictures later of his cool looking eye patch. I convinced him that his adoring public could wait a few hours for today’s photo of him looking stoned. Thanks to everyone for their thoughts and prayers. We appreciate it.

Photo-A-Day #471 07/23/06 Today Allison and I went to IKEA with Neil and Andrea. We went to get a set of shelves to put into our kitchen. The desk that we are using now as a place to store items is going to be moved to Allison’s art room/ future nursery (no kids or signs of kids yet). We also have a file cabinet that we are using for kitchen stuff too and that is being moved. We picked up the GORM system, including two (approx. W30″ X D20″ X H68″) sections with 4 shelves. We also picked up 4 additional shelves that are 19″ wide. So all together we will make use of storage space of about 7 feet of width and almost 6 feet of height. So look for some pictures when we get this built. After the IKEA trip (about 4 hours, that place is huge) we went back to Neil and Andrea’s and had a very nice dinner and caught up with them. Tomorrow is my eye surgery, so we will see how things go tomorrow (no pun intended). I found this both funny and sad that a sign needed to be added to a non-functioning ...

Photo-A-Day #470 07/22/06 Today Allison and I did some cleaning around the house and we got a quote on some carpet for redoing one of the rooms. We also picked up a few items at Comp USA like the two pack of Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 and Adobe Premiere 2.0. Some great features to Photoshop Elements 4.0. I can’t wait to learn them all. Premiere is going to take some getting used to but I look forward to learning that one as well.

Another Jason Statham movie, he runs, he jumps, he drives cars fast and oh yeah he shoots tons of guns. Crank The premise is that he is a hit man who as been injected with a poison that will kill him in an hour. However if he keeps moving and keeps his adrenaline up he won’t die. I don’t know about you but I always heard that poison will move quickly through the body when you get excited and keep moving around. Must be movie logic.

Photo-A-Day #469 07/21/06 Unmarried men take heed, you will never get the first bite of anything once that ring goes on her finger. Apparently whatever you desire to eat will be yours once a bite is taken out of it. I wanted to take a picture of my ice cream cone for today’s PAD but as I turned to get it from Allison she was in post stolen bite. She recreated that for the picture.

I was contacted by my friend Andy on behalf of his friend Jay to see if I could help punch up his company website. It is only a one pager for now, but this is what I came up with. Outer Banks Kiting It was nice to dust off the html cobwebs and work on something besides the blog. More to come for this site after the major kiteboarding season is over.

The heros in a half shell are back, or will be back on 3/30/07. I loved the Ninja Turtles and especially the first movie. It was a very good movie. It even had Corey Feldman voice my favorite turtle, Donatello. Everything after that was not good, this movie is going back to the roots of the characters. The trailer is awesome! Apple – Trailers – TMNT Update: I watched this again and I have to say that this is how a trailer should be shot. It shows the characters that we know and love, it shows that they have their signature looks and personalities. It has almost no dialogue and it reveals nothing of the movie. The trailer is brilliant.

Amethyst Allison created her own superheroine with the Heromachine, she had no name for her character or a backstory. I came up with a name, Amethyst. But I have no backstory for her. I did look up the jewel Amethyst and the meaning behind it. One particularly interesting thing about the jewel was what Leonardo Da Vinci was supposed to have said about it, “Leonardo Da Vinci wrote that amethyst was able to dissipate evil thoughts and quicken the intelligence.” So I would say that this character has something to do with being very intelligent. Update: There seems to be a lively discussion about my superheroes in the comments section. Apparently when someone can fly and sprout wings from their back the most unbelievable thing about them is that they fight crime and miss important TV shows. Yep, that is the most unbelievable thing in my character’s backstory.

Photo-A-Day #468 07/20/06 Tonight Allison and I went out with our friends Autumn and Kenny. Autumn, you may remember is Ms Wheelchair Massachusetts and she will be competing in the Ms Wheelchair America competition during the first week of August. And Autumn and Kenny recently got engaged. We are so happy for them. Autumn told Allison via e-mail that tonight at dinner she had something shiny to show her. So Congratulations Autumn and Kenny! Today was filled with hospitals and doctor’s offices for me. I had my pre-op appointment to talk about my surgery on Monday. Tomorrow I start a regiment of antibiotic eye drops and apparently after hours of prep time the surgery itself is less than 10 minutes. So after that I am hoping to be able to see much better. That will be cool. The other appointment was for my feet. They have been doing much better so I don’t have to go back unless they start hurting too much. Today after work I checked out different washer and dryers at Bernies, Best Buy and...

Perusing Pop Candy today brought me to the Sci-fi Channel’s site for the new reality show Who Wants To Be A Superhero? An interesting concept for a show. Get a bunch of people to make up their own superhero and then compete to get your superhero immortalized in a comic book. On the site there is a cool little program that allows you to make your own Super Hero, it is called the Heromachine. I took a stab at creating my own super heroes. The backstory on these two is that they are a married couple (amber and Daniel Peters) who inadvertently release the power of a gargoyle when they accidentally break a gargoyle statue at Notre Dame Cathedral on their honeymoon. Little did they know that this statue was truly a guardian of the people. When the statue broke lightening struck the pieces and released the essence of the guardian. Amber and Daniel Peters were infused with the guardian’s essence and given special powers. Amber and Daniel do not realize that anything happened to them when the s...

Photo-A-Day #467 07/19/06 Do you know how hard it is to take a picture of your own eye. Well since my camera has a 180 swivel on the LCD screen it really wasn’t. Why am I taking pictures of my eye. Well, Next Monday I am having surgery on my left eye. I have had a cataract in my left eye since I was about 10 years old. At that time the technology wasn’t up to speed on cataract removals. Now it is. I am a bit freaked out about the whole thing but I know it is going to be a vast improvement in the long run. Today I had my eye measured by like 15 instruments including an infrared light and a cup of water apparatus, it was weird but interesting. I also had some numbing drops put into my eyes. That was a little weird.

and I am melting. It is really hot and humid here. Which has meant multiple showers because of all the formal clothes we’ve been wearing. This week has been a tough one. Thanks for coming by and reading the tributes to Fran and Great-Uncle Richard, we are going to miss them very much. Today I took all the photos from Great-Uncle Richard’s wake and scanned them into the computer and added keywords for easy searching later. Then I made an online gallery of those images for anyone who may have missed the ceremonies. So when you see Great-Uncle Richard in the past posts you can click and go to the gallery.

Honestly is there anything better than Roadhouse? This movie was awesome. And the deluxe edition looks to be fantastic, you know why? Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier of View Askew have a commentary track on the movie. Pop Culture Gold! So get your butt down to the Double Deuce and order a cold one. Kick Ass action is on the menu. Road House (Deluxe Edition) In all honesty I liked the movie when it came out but it has become such a punchline/punching bag for comedy that you have to watch the movie for yourself.

Photo-A-Day #466 07/18/06 Today’s photo is of my sister Tara’s new composter the Envir-o-cycle. So now we’ll take care of our vegetable and fruit waste by dumping it in this thing, and after some time it will produce some great compost. You know what that means, more flower pictures. I feel like today I got a Kharmic Ice Cream Sundae. My car has been in the shop for two days to get the air conditioner fixed. I held off as long as I could stand it and then got it fixed. I was expecting a huge, huge bill. Luckily I bought an extended warranty on the car. It covers till 100,000 miles or six years. Since I have 84,304 miles on it in 4 years. I’d say that I’ll hit the mile cutoff before the year cutoff. But the repair was a small one and the extended warranty picked up $321.00, so nice. That is a car payment. So I’m hoping that if anything else warranty related is to occur that it will occur in the next 15,000 miles. So hence the Kharmic Sundae as opposed to the usual Kharmic crapwiches tha...

Just want to remind you that Feasting on Asphalt will be starting on July 29th. The food network has a couple quickie videos up. Check em out. I am so excited for this to start. Feasting on Asphalt : Alton Brown : Saturdays at 9pm/8c : TV : Food Network

Photo-A-Day #465 07/17/06 It is hot. Thank you fan. Car was not fixed today, wasn’t even looked at today. Fun, fun.

Photo-A-Day #464 07/16/06 This past weekend Allison and I went to the Cape. We spent a goodly amount of time at the beach, got lots of sun, sand and salt water. We both read a good deal from our respective books. I started on Deja Dead by Kathy Reichs and Allison read Firestorm by Nevada Barr. Getting into a brand new author and new series is sometimes a slow start for me. It was in the case of this book. I was used to the character I knew from the TV show Bones and I find out that Dr. Temperance Brennan in the books is much different than the one from TV. So it took a little while to get into. But once I made it over the hump the book was much better to read. I will probably enjoy this series very much. While at the Cape this weekend we had a couple of nights out on the back patio taking advantage of beautiful weather and the opportunity to cook outside. I certainly did not want to return home to the oppressive heat and no sea breeze. So we ended up staying at the house till 9:00 on F...

Photo-A-Day #463 07/15/06 Write up tomorrow.