All posts by Drew

BenSpark.com is about my life through photography. Each image is a gateway to a story about my daily life. Occasionally funny, inspiring, interesting or creative BenSpark.com is real life in photos. With over 4200 consecutive days and many different cameras BenSpark.com has documented images from the mundane to the amazing.

Photo-A-Day #441 06/23/06

Jake

This is Jake. Jake is Elise and Charles’ dog. He is such a cutie. Jake is so full of energy and fun. Elise and Jake play with bubbles (animal friendly ones) Jake has a great time catching them in the air or stomping them out on the rug. I got a bunch of photos while he played.

get it Jakey
Get it Jakey!

Take the Picture Quick, this is the most still I've been all day.
Take the Picture Quick, this is the most still I’ve been all day.

So Many Bubbles. What to Do? What to Do?
So Many Bubbles. What to Do? What to Do?

More Please!
More Please!

You Looking at Me!
You Looking at Me!

Jake loves them bubbles.
Jake loves them bubbles.

So today Allison and I drove to PA. The Pike to 84 to 81 and here we are. We made a couple of stops but we made it by 3:00pm. We listed to three CD’s from Eragon and it was good to go back and re-listen to the start of this series. Some things I picked up on more the second time around. We played, stop after every chapter to sort out the myriad of details. We played this game less and less as the day went on as Allison was picking up the story very quickly.

We had lunch at Marvelous Mugs and the meal was a very good one. Now we are at Elise and Charles’ house and are getting ready for dinner. Tomorrow we get up early for a trip to York to go to the Harley Davidson Factory for a tour. No camera’s are allowed inside so I’ll only get to take pictures in the tour center, bummer.

If you do not want to read about a terrible story of animal cruelty and my thoughts on it, stop reading now.

If you are an animal lover and live in Massachusetts you may have seen the very disturbing story that aired this morning on the news. I heard it this morning as we said goodbye to my parents. It was a story about a small dog that was viciously murdered by some sick individual who impaled the dog on an iron fence. I felt sick and the feeling stuck with me most of the ride to PA. (I guess that is why I wanted Jake to be today’s Photo-A-Day, he’s such a loving pet and so full of life.) How could anyone do that to a dog? Apparently the dog was taken on April 17th from the backyard of the owner and this past Tuesday some sick bastard picked up the 13lb miniature Pinscher above their head and slammed it down on the spikes of a wrought iron fence in Roxbury. How can someone do this sort of thing? I understand that people do much worse things to other people and that in perspective that this was a dog. I’m not going to argue the importance or value of one over the other, although some pets I like way more than some people. This sort of story will haunt me for a long time.

It is like the story where in a fit of ‘Road Rage’ some bastard got out of his car after a fender bender with a woman, reached into her car and pulled out her Bichon Frise and hurled it into oncoming traffic, got in his car and drove away. That story still sticks with me as an horrific, sick and evil act. I did a search on the story about the Bichon Frise – Leo. The guy who killed Leo got the maximum sentence for his crime, Three Years! Not near long enough in my opinion. That was in 2001, he’s out now.

Massachusetts is a state where animal cruelty can get you a five year jail sentence. I certainly hope that they capture the scumbag in Roxbury who killed the miniature Pinscher and toss his craven ass in jail. There’s more I want to say about what I want to happen to this loser this but it is not fit to print.

Sick, depraved, weak and despicable, there are no words evil enough to describe these actions. To take an innocent, helpless, dependent life and snuff it out without so much as a thought is detestable.

Photo-A-Day #440 06/22/06

Here is Oliver; he has found refuge from the heat by lying among Allison’s bags and stuffed animals. His latest perch has been on the plastic bin tower that we have in the bedroom because of the lack of space. Hopefully we will get that taken care of in the next few months.

So today I found out that this blog is a favorite blog of MisterNashville.com. Eddie Christy runs MisterNashville.com and he is also a featured blogger for Metro Blogging Nashville. Eddie faithfully reads daily and comments almost daily on this blog. He leaves Kudos on almost every post. Sometimes he’s so quick I haven’t even gotten a chance to make any last minute edits before he’s posted a message. That is so great! Check out Eddie’s music and blogging skills on MySpace as well as at MisterNashville.com and http://nashville.metblogs.com/. Eddie you should grab the Photo-A-Day display box code to add to MisterNashville.com, it can be found here.

Tomorrow Allison and I head down to PA for a fun weekend to stay with Elise and Charles and visit with a few more of Allison’s friends. I found out today that I’m going to need to take an extra vacation day for this trip. You see the fates decreed that the planets would align and I would be in PA around Harrisburg at the same time when I had a demo there. So we would drive down to PA, spend the weekend and part of Monday with Elise and Charles then Allison would drop me at the airport to pick up a car so I could go to my hotel room for Monday night. Then on Tuesday Allison would drive home, I would do my demo and catch a flight to Kalamazoo MI (Yep I’m actually going to Kalamazoo… jealous?) do a demo in Kalamazoo on Wednesday and fly home. But the Harrisburg demo cancelled so we’ll be imposing on Elise and Charles’ hospitality one more night and get another day down in PA. But now I have to get to the Harrisburg airport early to try and get on standby for some earlier flights. Changing my flights this close to the demo date would have been too much money. So I may get to know the Harrisburg Airport really well or I may have more time in Kalamazoo. That is my life on the road.

Speaking of life on the road or rather what takes us places along the road… our cars. A double whammy is hitting us in the next few weeks. First whammy is Allison’s car, we dropped it off for service so it would be ready for our trip this weekend and we got the added bonus of having to by some rear brakes, they were worn down to 10%, not 10% worn but 10% left. Yeah, lets take care of that. Why are we not taking my car to PA, it gets at least 2 miles more a gallon? That would be whammy #2, Air conditioner in my car is busted and I need to get it repaired. Found out that it’s going to cost money to find out what needs to be repaired before I pay additional money to actually have it repaired. They have to determine if it is leaking. I told them, yes it is leaking, can I have the $225.00 it is going to cost to determine that applied to the cost it will be to repair it? Let’s just put it this way. Service departments have no sense of humor.

Okay I’ve told you that I’ve been working with Blue Cross Blue shield with their program called Fit Blue. Well I’ve added an online tool to my (going very slowly) slim down. That would be the USDA’s site called My Pyramid.gov with it the new food pyramid can be personalized to my weight as well as my weight loss. I set it up today, it is a pretty fun site.