BenSpark Family Adventures

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01317 Today Tara and Erik went home but left Lexi with my parents. Andy decided that he would sleep with Lexi tonight to keep her company. Andy certainly does love dogs and he loves getting to spend some time with Lexi alone. He was so happy to sleep there with Lexi and they slept really well all night long. This morning I took the boys across the street to the Bristol Beach parking lot. We took the two RC cars there so that I could work on the video for the BEZGAR truck. I also took my drone with me because I wanted to take some follow footage. Well, at one point the truck was backing up and I was trying to watch it in the drone controller screen and was backing up the drone at the same time and flew it right into my head. I got a couple good slices on my forehead. I was okay, though. We spent much of the day over at the beach and today was one of the nicest at the beach this Summer. Tonight we had a nice dinner with Mem and Grandfather in the back yard.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01116 Testing out my new phone’s camera and loving how nicely it captured our cat, Torunn. Apparently I use the phrase Torunn Sitting Pretty in my blog posts often enough that I have 3 posts with the exact same title. One from 2012 and one from last year. She is such a pretty cat.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #01099 The past couple of days Eva has been painting some bottle caps to make some pins. These are her finished pins. A couple of them are album covers, one is for Camp Half-blood from Percy Jackson books and I am not sure what the other is. She continues to impress us with her creativity.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00925 Hanging out on the porch at The Cape and my sister’s dog is chilling out. I took a few photos of her while she was relaxing. She looks tired but content to have everyone around to pay attention to her. She loves doggie scritches on her head and ears. Today I received a box from the Space Jam movie. Eva helped me make a quick video about them. Today and last night I went to my Krav Maga class. We’ve been doing knife defense and man my left wrist is hurting. I also received my paperwork for my upcoming black belt test. It is all too real.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00870 Whenever Allison comes into Eva’s room and gives her a hug James comes out from wherever he is and meows at her. Allison told me about this tonight and so I tried to see if he would do that if I hugged Eva. I hugged her and so he did look up and meow at me. I then tried to catch he giving me the stink eye as I hugged Eva. It is pretty funny.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00857 Eva loves having her boy James. She loves that he’s a big cuddly kitty. He’s a fat cat. He really is. He spends his time with her so she can cuddle with him and he loves it, too.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00837 I did buy a few new toys for my birthday. One of them is this new Soundwave figure that is part of the Transformers R.E.D. line. This is a poseable non transforming line of Transformers. They are great for posing into show accurate positions. For example this is Soundwave ejecting Laserbeak from his chest. The set even included hands that were set for specific positions so that Soundwave could perform the ejecting motion. Our cat, James, is having some issues. I talk about it in today’s vlog.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00793 We were up early this morning because of this guy. He decided to show what a good hunter he was by bringing Eva a dead mouse. The mouse, however, was not one that he caught. No, James brought the mouse up still in the trap that had caught it. So, Eva came into our room and told us, “James brought a dead mouse in a trap up to my room.” This was at 5:45am What a way to start the day. So I took a photo of James and added the caption to it.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00767 The other day when I was looking for the wolves for Andy I came across some of the Dragons that were part of our collection, too. I had packed a bunch of these figurines and toys away because Andy and Eva no longer played with them. I decided to keep the Dragons for myself and put them around my frog tank. The remaining frog is still swimming strong. We gave the rest of the large box to the school for the Pre-K class. The kids were quite thrilled to go through those toys and find fun things to play with. The box was decent sized too, so they got a ton of great new toys. I got another box out of the house.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00735 Torunn has found a new spot to sit. We moved a new couch and chair into the house recently and she claimed the chair. Well, she claimed the chair, I claimed the chair, and so did Eva. And yes, there have been times when we have all tried to claim it at once. Eva gats all feisty now that she has some self defense moves so she often gets the chair. Having the new chair instead of the loveseat in this spot really makes the room bigger. Speaking of the loveseat and old couch. Those were picked up by the city today. We’d worn those out. They didn’t owe us anything. Hopefully we will not tear through this new set of furniture as quickly. I’ve already put a ban on eating in the living room because of the kids and their “woodchipper” tendencies.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00634 We received an African Dwarf Frog Biosphere from Froggy’s Lair for free to review. Opinions are our own. With so much uncertainty and anxiety inducing upheaval in the world around us, especially for our children, it is nice to find something that is peaceful and calming. We are now proud owners of a couple of very chill African Dwarf Frogs from Froggy’s Lair and just having them hanging out in my office has had a soothing calming effect. When the frogs arrived they were packaged very carefully. I only had to pick up a gallon of distilled purified water ($1). Do not use tap water as that will cause a chemical reaction that will cause the Biosphere not to work properly. The frogs came in a secure bag of water. We first added the bioactive sand to the bottom of the octagonal tank. Then we added the colored rocks (blue) plus some decorative rocks (so the frogs can hide). Then we added the bamboo stalk and the water. I tried pouring the water slowly so as not to...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00625 The other day Allison took Eva to the Mall so that she could meet a friend and visit a couple of stores. She took Andy along as well and they looked for school things and clothes so they were at Macy’s. In one area they found knick knacks and totally impractical stuff. That is where Andy found the unicorn egg cup. As if his cravings for omelets wasn’t enough now he wants to have hard boiled eggs and eat them in the little unicorn egg cup. He’s a unique kid, that’s for sure. However, because of this he can now make a mean omelet and knows how to boil an egg properly. * With Supervision . We had a few things going on today. The kids were on their home day for school and while they were home I built two new bookshelves. These go on either side of the current bookshelf that is filled with my Skylanders toys. The new bookshelves were filled with Disney Infinity in one and LEGO Dimensions and Light Seekers in the other. The one franchise I could not add was StarL...

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00619 Don’t call our James “Fat” it makes Eva mad. I’m not saying that he is heavy but when he jumps off of Eva’s bed Allison and I have a game called “Cat or Kid” and try to determine who is coming down the stairs. That is how heavy this cat is. Tonight we were watching The Dragon Prince during dinner and Eva came in carrying James. She sat down on the bean bag chair and rolled backwards with the cat on her. She had a hard time getting back up, but don’t call that cat fat.

  Photo-A-Day 2.0 #00588 Eva’s spending a few days extra on The Cape with her Aunt. While she is there her cat, James, is wandering the house meowing. He misses his girl. We were chatting with Eva on Facetime tonight and the cat came into the room. We showed him the phone with Eva on the other side. He was not amused.

This is a line my wife likes to give me each and every time the cats end up getting on her nerves. Well I get to tell her that tonight when she gets home from knitting class. Our little fuzzy angels got into our bedroom (the are not allowed int he new bedroom and usually we remember to lock them out) and knocked over the vase of flowers that I gave Allison for Valentine’s day. I was working on a post and I heard a big, loud THUMP! and I ran to the front of the house to discover the door to our bed room was open. Our cats are very adept at opening these doors in a tag team cooperative attack on the doorknob and the bottom of the door. Oliver will climb up onto the couch and start pulling at the door with both paws. Duncan will reach one paw under the door and start yanking it toward him. They can usually get the door popped in about 15 seconds. That is unless we lock the door with a sliding bolt. Then they cannot get through, but it doesn’t stop them from trying. But they are cute.

Photo-A-Day #682 Bonnie likes her water running. Allison and I started our day in New Hampshire. We had breakfast and lunch with Marcia and Dan and headed home around 12:30. On the way home we stopped off to hang out with Andy and Rondi and Stephen the Dog. We played a bunch of Wii games together. The first game we played was Monster 4X4 World Circuit. I totally dominated the races, but I think that given more time everyone else would move up and be on par with me in that game. Then Andy and Rondi played Wii Play and then Allison and I played Wii Play. We were going to play another round of that but switched to the Wii Sports and did bowling. Rondi is at the Pro level in that game and Andy hit strike after strike. I did not fare so well in that game. We ended up staying till dinnertime and decided to go to Acapulco’s to pick up dinner. Andy and I drove out there to get our dinner and Allison and Rondi talked Disney plans because Andy and Rondi are headed to Disney later next month. Our...

Photo-A-Day #681 Today Allison and I were still up in New Hampshire. We got to sleep a little late and then we played some Nintendo Wii and had breakfast. We are really enjoying playing the Wii. Allison is fiercely competitive and gets mad at me because I pick up on these games very quickly. That is because I spent years in front of my Nintendo playing game after game. Now we can download many of those old games and play them on the Wii’s virtual console. Pretty sweet, except those games are now worth the equivalent of $5.00 and I remember paying $40 or $50 for them back when they came out. And a quick search of eBay tells me that they are now worth practically nothing. But I am saving them for some reason, a reason I do not know. I will probably use them to punish my kids when they complain and want something expensive or something or if they have been naughty. Me: “Here see how tough Dad had it!” Son: “But it doesn’t work” Me: “You have to blow in it first and then jiggle the cartrid...

Photo-A-Day #678 Today I worked from home and I was using my laptop on the old desk for part of the day. It was very cold yesterday and our front room gets plenty of sun so it is very warm. I moved there for the afternoon. Oliver decided that he wanted to be some place near me so he hung out in one of the cubbies and watched me as I worked. I sometimes wonder what these cats think about the things that Allison and I do each day. Anyway, I know I have had a lot of Cat pictures lately but with cats as cute as ours it is hard to resist. Yesterday I also completed capturing the video from our wedding. I used Microsoft Movie maker to take the video off the camera and then save it into 10, 15 minute files. I will then take the files, and work my magic with Adobe Premiere, adding sound, removing sound, adding images, removing some of the images and then burning it all to DVD. We are hoping I finish this sometime before the second anniversary. My grandmother taped the wedding from the altar an...

Photo-A-Day #675 Little Oliver, he’s been so needy lately. The boys now have plenty of room to run around because they have the run of the entire upstairs. Well, not the entire upstairs, they are not allowed in our bedroom (at any time) or the living room (at night because they rattle the door trying to get in). Our boys are smart, they have learned that 100 year old doors do not have the best latches and if they rattle them enough then they will be rewarded with an open door. It just leads to another room so they really don’t win anything. However they are cats and they are curious and they try to get out often. Had a long day at work catching up on many things after being on the road for a while. Still haven’t seen my desk in about three weeks. I’ll be going there tomorrow. I got almost everything I needed to get done completed. I still need to do a couple of things and I will be able to breathe easier. I hit the gym today. Still working on the cardio and the fat burn. 1/2 hour on th...

Photo-A-Day #666 This past Tuesday Allison began her new hobby, knitting. She is taking a knitting class at a store downtown called Yarn It All. This past Tuesday was her first class and she has been working away at her first project, a scarf, ever since. The scarf is now about 2 feet long and is coming along nicely. Allison got some knitting supplies from Tara and they are both going to take the class. Tara is going to start up this Tuesday and I think Allison’s friend Jenn is as well. She is very excited about the project and the class. She has already said that she wants to knit me a Jayne Cobb hat eventually. I will be very excited to get it too. Duncan and Oliver have been sitting on Allison’s lap too and she enjoys that they don’t disturb her as she knits and she can knit and not disturb them. Although it looks like Duncan has his eyes on the yarn. Other than that today we went shopping, I burned a couple of DVD’s for work and Allison cleaned more out of the old bedroom. Things a...