BenSpark Family Adventures

Photo-A-Day #540 09/30/06 Today Allison and I went out to the Wrentham Arts show and then to Adam’s farm. Adam’s farm was a nice little place and we got some farmstand apples and walked around and got a few pictures. Here is the gallery.

Photo-A-Day #539 Tonight Allison and I went to dinner at Andy and Rondi’s place. They are back from their honeymoon and have broken out many of the great wedding gifts that they received (you got a jump on us by about a year on that one). The photo above is Andy’s new toy. A Butane torch for Crème Brûlée. But I am getting ahead of myself. On my way home from work I stopped by the Big Apple (because I was avoiding the giant cluster that is 495 between exits 17 and 14) and picked up some fresh baked donuts for Andy. He was excited to get some of the tasty treats. I was excited because Andy not only made Burritos for dinner but scallops wrapped in bacon for an appetizer. My favorite appetizer ever. Dinner was delicious. We had a “Burritotastic!!” meal. Yep, Andy made a fine spread of Burrito fixings and we made our own Burritos while at the table. It was a fun and relaxed meal. After dinner and before Crème Brûlée we played some trivia games on DVD that I got from Target for $2.48 each on...

I am proud to announce that I have set up a Kodak Marketplace and it has a few images that I am selling via that site. If it does any business at all I’m going to upgrade to another type of Marketplace account through Kodak. In the coming weeks I will be uploading many more of my best photos. Buy a print or two they make for great wall hangings. BenSpark Marketplace Why so much talk recently about Kodak and the Kodak website. Well, my company does a Staff Art Show each year and on my first year I entered 5 pieces. They were five of my favorite pictures, and they now hang in our room at the Cape. It is now my fifth year at work and I have been doing the Photo-a-Day thing for over a year. I came up with the idea of entering something to do with Photo-A-Day as my exhibit piece this year. What I decided was to take the first 500 photos and make five collages of 100 photos each. I am calling it “500 days…500 photos” and I am pretty excited about how the collages have come out. Here is what ...

Photo-A-Day #538 09/28/06 Today I got a little distracted with this cup. I also learned how to do some cool stuff with Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0. I’m working on a video for work, should be fun to see how it turns out. Tonight Neil and Andrea came over for dinner and to watch My Name is Earl and The Office. It was a lot of fun to watch with those guys. And nevermind that the shows are so funny too. They also got sucked into watching CSI with us. This season the original CSI is the show to watch, last season it was CSI Miami and well, CSI New York, not so much.

Photo-A-Day #537 09/27/06 The Phantom Gourmet was in my town today. That is a good thing. There was a murder up the road from our place. That is a very scary thing. The murderer was caught. So that is a good thing. So I’ve been able to catch up on local and national news lately because I have been going to a gym since Monday. I’ve only been doing the bike and the treadmill so far but will be getting into a program on the nautilus machines. I was in the supermarket today. I love coupons and try to use them as often as possible. I thought I did pretty good today because I got two packages of rice for free because I had a coupon. However, the guy in front of me had an entire basket full of stuff and then he pulled out the coupons and his bill came to $3.47 and I think he got some other coupons worth $5.00 so he actually got money back from shopping. I was standing there and I said to the guy, “That is amazing” It is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen at the supermarket.

Photo-A-Day #536 09/26/06 Things just keep popping up around the house. The compost from the dump pumpkins also had squash seeds. So the pumpkins began to grow one way and the squash went the opposite. There were two squash however one got a bit nasty so it was off to Tara’s composter. Maybe more will grow when we use that compost. As far as the pumpkins, we now have 4, they should be nice and orange but the time Halloween rolls around. And speaking of Halloween, my friend Derek sent me this Halloween Game. Halloween bowling. I created a Kodak Marketplace. I may try this out and sell some prints of some of my pictures. Who knows. http://marketplace.kodakgallery.com/benspark

Photo-A-Day #535 09/25/06 Today was the first time I used a Kodak Digital Photo Kiosk. It was pretty neat, very easy to do. I was using for an upcoming project that I participating in. More about that at a later date as the event approaches. I joined a gym today, trying to get back into shape. The place is called Answer is Fitness. It is a new gym in our town and it has all new equipment. One really cool thing they have is a device that you can plug your headphones into and watch any of the dozens of TV’s that are hanging from the ceiling. I look forward to getting back into a routine. Watched the new show Heroes tonight. It was decent, looks like one you gotta follow, lots of twists and turns. Hiro is my favorite character at this time. You can view the whole premiere episode online at the NBC site. Check it out.

Photo-A-Day #534 09/24/06

This has to have been one of the most funny shows on TV. I miss it. I loved Frank and Marie, they are some of the funniest TV people online. Peter Boyle has some of the best lines in the whole show. The series is in re-runs and you can probably catch it 4 or 5 times a day but if you wanted it you can get the series on DVD. I remember seeing Ray Romano back in college when he was touring he college circuit and he used to have a video of his actual twin boys and it was hilarious. I am so glad that he made it big with Everybody Loves Ray. That whole show was so much fun.

Photo-A-Day #533 09/23/06 For some reason there was no actual post for this image.

Photo-A-Day #532 09/22/06 Duncan is not like other cats. Instead of chasing toys he chases the shadows of the toy until I put it right on top of Duncan. He’s really funny when he chases shadows on the walls. Okay, I am so frustrated with Gold Rush. Oh, I will still be playing it but it is frustrating. I got to the Gold Challenge and figured it out quickly but as I translated the riddle to Scrabble I was signed out and so when I put in the answer (the correct answer I was told it was incorrect. so I re-did the math and then even did it on an excel file. When I finally realized that I was signed out I was livid. After I tried all numbers between 200 and 250 I checked one of the answer centers and saw that there was a scrabble translator. I’m getting one of those gold bars man. It is gonna happen. If you are not playing Gold Rush you should be.

Photo-A-Day #531 09/21/06 The flowers are all starting to die off. There are a few stragglers.

Photo-A-Day #530 09/20/06 It was as good as it looked. From the Chowder Pot III on exit 56 on 95 in CT. I recommend getting there for the early bird specials and getting the stuffed lobster. It was fantastic. The hot sauce was good on the frys.

Photo-A-Day #529 09/19/06 Arr, today me mornin' started with a jaunty cruise to de' tech. Today be me 5th year of swabbing the decks and keelhauling lubbers. Me captain give me no black mark ‘twas not in me cards for today. Today ‘twas bestowed upon me the north star of service. A mark to be proud of, me gait has a bit of an extra swagger on this day. Arr methinks that the trek to the tech was in vain this morn. Twas not no reason for me ta be in the wild iffin me bunk was fair and true. Arr, so me scuttled me heathen arse out the door and sailed for home port. From me bunk I launched me attack across thar intee'net. Twas a good shot too, right on the target. After the scuttlebutt I made haste to me ship and set sail for the Island that is long. Twas a grueling trip with nary a stop for nary sustenance nor privy. Avast, at thirty leagues from the island me wind died, twas right bad luck. I carried on and made landfall at 10 past the hour of 7 in the dark and stormy of n...

Photo-A-Day #528 09/18/06 Something a little different today. I used some of the fun features of photoshop with a picture of our screensaver. Also sad news, one of Allison’s fish died. Maybe that was my inspiration today. Poor guy. tonight is the begining of the TV season. The first up was The Class. It wasn’t half bad. Next was How I Met Your Mother. Good, I like the direction. Barney is still the best. He cracks me up. Two and 1/2 Men. Poor Alanm hopefully things will turn around for him. The show is getting a bit tired however. I don’t get the belly laughs that I used to when it was fresh and new. It may fall out of my rotation. I’ll probably say more about The New Adventures of the Old Christine and CSI Miami when I watch them. Now It is time to get off the computer.

Photo-A-Day #527 09/17/06 A bit of a lazy day today. Allison went to the Outlets with Amy over in Wrentham. We also went to a craft fair at the middle school. Later in the afternoon we visited my Uncle Richard’s house for a BBQ and second birthday party for Grandma and Grandpa and Richard’s girlfriend Sally. Nice place. On the way back we saw this guy riding around with his monkey.

Mike Birbiglia is probably one of the funniest comedians I enjoy listening to. Mike keeps a Secret Public Journal online that anyone can read and the journal entries are hilarious. Mike is doing a stand up tour across the country and he has a few CD’s for sale too. You can check him out on MySpace as well as on his videos from YouTube. Mike has a great skit about being afraid of bears. He recently came very close to a grizzly in Alaska, I guess that he may finally get over that fear of bears. Here are a couple of Mike’s CD’s that you can get from Amazon.com.

Photo-A-Day #526 09/16/06 Buttons. Allison loves buttons, she has a button purse and a bunch of vintage buttons that she got from her grandmother. I always feel lie I have too many buttons. Shirts for work come with some extra buttons, pants too. By the time I wear out a shirt enough for a button to be lost it is past the point of no return. Apparently saving buttons was a huge thing long ago. And so we have tons of buttons. I’m not saying it is a bad thing, I collect transformers and don’t open the boxes. They take up alot of space and do nothing. I understand that. I have always been a collector of things. When is it time to give something up, however? When is it time to thin things out? How much is too much? Do you always need the newest thing? Stuff to ponder. Today I helped my Dad at the Attleboro house. He’s been doing tons of work there. New floors, new paint, new bathrooms. He’s put in a lot of time and hard work. And it looks really nice over there. But there is still so much ...

Photo-A-Day #525 09/15/06 Today I got home from Michigan and then headed up to Natick to a Buffettless Buffett party. The second of its kind. I was to bring and retire the Tiki of Death. That was retired early on in the night with a 750ml of Jose Cuervo margarita. The Tiki is still at Betsy’s. I had a heck of a time getting up to Framingham to catch a ride over to the party. Allison came from work and we decided to leave my car at my office and I would get it tomorrow when Allison was on her way to book club. I was coming up from the PVD airport and figured I would shoot up 146 to the pike and save myself some time. Nope that did not happen. No time was saved in fact time as wasted. I ended up going about 25 miles out of my way to end up one exit past the one I got off. I was coming up on 146 and noticed that there was a huge back up so I veered off onto 122 and ended up making a wide u-turn essentially. The party was as always a very fun time. Betsy and Peter are fantastic hosts and w...

Photo-A-Day #524 09/14/06 Okay so iGo is having a contest. It is called “Where Have You Taken Your iGo?”. They are looking for the most unique location that the iGo has gone. You are supposed to take a picture of you and your iGo. The contest runs between September 12, 2006 to December 31, 2006. What I don’t understand is who is taking their iGo and taking pictures of themselves with it. (Granted I just did for this contest and my photo is lame, even for a last minute photo-a-day picture.) What sort of place am I going to go with my iGo and get a picture before December 31, 2006? The reason I should really win this contest is that I’ve been using my iGo JUICE for four years and I have taken it across the country and into Canada. It accompanies me on every trip (except for the one where I forgot it and all hell broke loose, well at least in my world.) I’ve used it with three laptops, three cell phones and a PDA. This thing has been my lifeline on the road. I remember overlooking the cit...

Photo-A-Day #523 09/13/06 This fountain is in the Detroit airport. It is fun to watch, the jets of water go at different intervals and jump from one place to another. Then they eventually all begin to stream in a constant arc. I watched for a little bit, it sucks you in to watch. While at the PVD airport this morning I ran into our friends Autumn and Kenny. Autumn just recently won the Ms. Wheelchair America Pagent in Little Rock Arkansas. They are heading to Florida for a personal appearance, not sure where exactly because my flight was boarding and they were off to their flight. We’ll have to catch up with them soon. I had my sneakers get some extra special screening and then at the gate had my bag get extra special screening. I’m feeling extra special today. I began reading Bare Bones by Kathy Reichs, this is the 6th book in the series. I pretty much flew through the last two books and didn’t even mention them. Fatal Voyage and Grave Secrets were very good books in the series, good ...

Andy & Rondi’s wedding reception Andy & Rondi at the West Dennis Yacht Club at Sunset is my very first photo post! I did this all by myself!

My favorite web comic is Wes Molebash. Wes is a fantastic comic artist and he is a friend of ours. Wes’ comic is called You’ll Have That and it is about Andy and Katie, a young married couple in their mid twenties but it is much more than that. He came to our house this past summer so that he could go to a comic book shop to sign copies of his first book. Wes has a second book coming out this December and you can get in on the action and order it from Amazon.com right now. We bought a bunch of his first book and gave signed copies of them as gifts to our friends and family and everyone loved them. This comic strip is accessible to everyone and so funny and smart. You should check it out.

Carissa’s and Chris’s Cross Country Movie. My cousin Carissa and her boyfriend Chris just moved to San Diego. They took a cross country road trip to get there. Then they sent us a link to their video of the trip. It was really well done. So if you want to check out a great road trip movie with a good soundtrack click the link.

Photo-A-Day #522 09/12/06 Ollie playing with the cat toys. Amazing. I hardly ever see him do this.

Photo-A-Day #521 09/11/06 This is the September 11, 2001 memorial that was erected last year in my town. The project came about from an eagle scout for his arrow of light project. It is a very simple memorial with four sides, the front is pictured above. On one side it is in remembrance of those who died in New York, the next side is for those who died at the Pentagon, and the last side is for those who died in Pennsylvania. All around the base embedded in the rocks are the shields and logos for the branches of the armed forces along with the fire department and police department. The kid who set this up and coordinated the donations for this memorial was 14 years old at the time. Gives me a little hope for kids out there. We will remember… One of the Web Comic Artists reflected on what he was doing 5 years ago. Here is my reflection. I was working with my father that day. We were digging posts for a rather large deck on a friend of the family’s home. The ground in Massachusetts is mos...

Allison and I are back from our long weekend. I have tons of pictures from the wedding and it will take a long time to go through, crop and edit out random passersby but I will get some galleries of images up as soon as possible. Let me put it this way, I took 1 GB worth of images on the day of the wedding alone. Read the recaps below.

Photo-A-Day #520 09/10/06 Today Allison and I went to a Sunday Brunch at Rondi's parent's house in West Dennis. They had a wonderful spread of food and a beautiful home. Their home has such nice landscaping. We got there as one of the first people to arrive, surprise. The party started and many of their family and friends arrived. We spent some time talking about websites, photography and listened to Andy talk about kiteboarding. We had a great time at the Sunday Brunch and then we went to my grandparent's house (Mom's parent's, we stayed with Dad's parents this past weekend) for my grandparents' 80th birthday. Mom made some finger sandwiches and we had 4 cakes, one for grandma and grandpa, one for Shelby, one for Erik and Tara made a gluten free one for grandma. We were joined by Tara, Erik, Mom, Dad, Shelby and then later my Aunt Luann and her daughter Lindsey came over, then Luann ran out to pick up her son Nick. So we had a full house. It was very nice t...

Photo-A-Day #519 09/09/06 Today Allison and I went to Andy and Rondi's wedding. That was at 5:00pm. Before the wedding we spent the morning and the afternoon with Grandma and Grandpa. We had a very nice breakfast and lunch with them. Breakfast with Grandma on the sun porch that my Dad built. Lunch was out on the patio outside. We had a very nice weekend with Grandma and Grandpa. It was very nice of them to put us up for the weekend. It was nice to spend a good amount of time with them talking and enjoying each other's company. We also had a lazy afternoon and got in a few naps after our recent late nights. At 3:30 we headed over to West Dennis beach to give Heidi a hand with the beach set up. We brought down the chairs, the bottles of cider, the Frisbees, the shells and the sand. There was quite a bit to set up but the three of us worked very well as a little team. We set up the aisle first. It was lined with seashells that Rondi had spent many days collecting. Then we set up t...

Photo-A-Day #518 09/08/06 Today I went with Andy and his three brothers and his father out on a ski boat on Bass River in Dennis, MA. Andy brought along his two wakeboards and a towrope. We motored out through the channel and into the speed zone. We were basically the only boat out on the water today. There were a few kayaks and a couple other powerboats but essentially the whole speed zone was ours to do with what we wanted. Once we figured out the proper trim settings and went down to four people in the boat (Andy's dad and brother Zach stayed on shore.) we got some speed out of the boat. I had Tara's camera and was perfectly fine trying to take pictures. Andy went first and he got right up on the wake board and was switching lead feet and everything. Then his brother Nate tried and I think he might have gotten up, then his brother Ethan tried and he got up too. We went back to the beach and Ethan and Zach switched. Zach got right up on his first try and got the hang of it ve...

Randy, the proprietor of my local comic book shop has a band and they have a myspace page. I think seeing these guys may be a rockin time. I’ll have to catch a show. www.myspace.com/wildtimeband Allison and I are gone for the weekend to Andy and Rondi’s wedding. Mucho pictures when we return. Also today is my Grandfather’s birthday. Happy Birthday Karaoke Rick!

Photo-A-Day #517 09/07/06 Allison and I went up to the Cape a day early. We got in very late. I got new glasses. These are the glasses.

Photo-A-Day #516 09/06/06 That squash plant in the front yard seems to have a new addition. Allison saw this little squash on her way into the house today. The new season of television shows has begun. Last night Allison and I watched the new Fox show called Standoff. This show stars Ron Livingston from Office Space and I thought it was a pretty decent premiere. Tom Wopat was a guest star. I will probably watch this again. Bones is back, we watched last week’s premiere episode last night and tonight we watched the second episode. For some reason this season they are emphasizing the way that Bones is so different than everyone else in that she has terrible social skills. This frustrates me because last season she was coming along and becoming more social. Nevermind the fact that Tempe (Bones) is some much more social in the books. I need to get to some of the later books to see what happens but the character backstories are so different and that has made this season harder to watch. The...

Photo-A-Day #515 09/05/06 Back home. Back to the routine of daily life. These guys have been missing us an awful lot lately. And I haven’t taken a shot of them in a while either.

Photo-A-Day #514 09/04/06 Today Allison and I had a very spontaneous day. We started with breakfast on the back porch with Mom and Dad and then took a drive over to the Nobska Lighthouse to do some photo shooting. We ran from there to Grandma and Grandpa’s to share our pictures with Grandma. We also took Grandma for a walk around the block and we went out to the backyard for a little while. We had intended to go home or to catch up with Neil and Andrea on the boat. While we were in the backyard the weather was beautiful and it had been a crappy weather weekend. So we changed plans and picked up some sandwiches to have on the beach. We went back to the house changed and headed over to the beach. That was just in time for a giant cloud to cover the sun. It was windy too, but we stuck it out until the cloud moved and the blue skies came back. As we were on the beach we got a call from Neil. They were at Bassett’s island and were going to head back to the house for burgers and dogs and str...

Goodbye Crocodile Hunter. Stingray kills ‘Crocodile Hunter’ Irwin – Yahoo! News Watching this guy you wondered how he kept alive this long but today Steve Irwin was killed by a Stingray off the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Love him or hate him he did a lot for conservation and education. He was entertaining to watch and he left a lovely wife and two small kids. He will be missed.

Photo-A-Day #513 09/03/06 Today Allison and I rode up to Harwich with Mom and Dad to celebrate Grandpa’s 76th birthday. Aunt Cathy and Roger were there, so were Corrine, Jeff, Maddie and Haley. Aunt Connie and Aunt Candy and Jen, Chris and Autumn were there too. Grandma and Grandpa made us lunch (a family recipe meatball and spaghetti) We also had a cake for Grandpa. Grandma had some old items from Grandpa’s life including a couple of issues of a Taxicab magazine. One had an article about Grandpa and his taxi business and the other had an editorial written by my grandpa. Hmmm, wonder where I get my desire to write about things. The issue that had an article about grandpa has an artist’s drawing of grandpa on the cover. I caught a picture of that. Actually my writing everything down comes probably from my grandmother because she had a three ring binder with stories and items and life moments of my grandparent’s life together. I didn’t get to read all of it today but maybe next weekend w...

Photo-A-Day #512 09/02/06 Allison and I were on the Cape today. I got to sleep in and when I woke up I worked with Dad on a project for the garage. We have talked about putting up some shelves on the side of the garage for his ladders. For a long time the ladders were on these old pieces of staging that Dad used to use for cutting the hedges, until one of the rungs broke and he nearly sliced off his nose. So those were retired and given the job of holding the aluminum ladders. Today they were retired for good. Some of the pieces went to the dump and some are going to be burned this winter. I their place Dad and I constructed three posts with 4 16 inch platforms spaced at 22 inches apart so there are essentially four “shelves” for the ladders. The posts can hold 8 ladders easily. The side of the garage looks nice and neat now. The next project is construction of a kayak rack on the back of the garage for easy access in the summer. Although from the looks of the weather this weekend I do...