Author: benjancewicz

Just got back from the National Fatherhood Initiative annual retreat yesterday afternoon.
Tamika and I had a really nice time. It was held at the Hershey Lodge this year, a sprawling complex with hundreds of rooms. Some of you may recall Messiah College’s Christmas Tradition… it was often held at the Hershey Lodge. I had photos from then lying about in dusty places; if I find them I’ll put them up.

The retreat, as usual, consisted of a series of lectures and short ice-breaker games. I thought Roland’s lecture on the book Made to Stick was the best. I’ve been reading the book for the past month (no, I’m not that slow, I’ve also been reading 4 or 5 other books for the past month too), and I really recommend it for anyone involved in Marketing, Graphic Design, or just interested in telling better stories. It goes into depth of why stories like “flashing your headlights triggers a gang member killing” stick in people’s minds, and why dry business meetings don’t.

Monday night, I awoke at 3am and felt really really sick. I spent the next couple hours dashing to the suite’s bathroom and emptying my lunch and dinner into the toilet.
The next morning, I got up and was doubled over in pain. I’m not sure if it was something I ate, or a virus, or what, but the pain was excruciating. I felt dizzy and lightheaded too. I knew people would expect me to be down at the seminars, so despite Tamika’s protests, I took a quick shower and shuffled my way down to the Cocoa Room where the rest of the staff were gathered.

A couple hours into it, I began to feel really really sick, and finally Sherron (the new Resource Center Manager) got permission for me to go lay down outside. Right before that, though, they threw a surprise baby shower for Tamika and Elaine (who runs our Events department and is also expecting)! We were both very surprised as everyone got up and literally showered us with gifts.

God has really taken care of our every need. To be honest, I’ve been getting worried over the past couple months about how we were going to financially support having another mouth to feed. But now I (yet again) see that my worrying has been in vain.

This past weekend, Tamika and I drove up to her parent’s house in Perkasie under the guise of her mom taking her out for a pedicure and surprised her with a baby shower there as well! There were at least 30 or 40 people jammed into the house, and the family room was so full of gifts that they had to ferry them into the living room for Tamika to open them. I wanted to be a part, but they took a while to get to the gifts part (there was also a lot of food), and I had fallen asleep in the basement. I had helped move the stuff from where it was hidden in the neighbor’s garage, and after a long week at work I was pretty beat.
We got all kinds of very cool stuff, including a stroller, a crib, thousands of clothes, and even a beautiful gliding rocking chair for Tamika (my mom and her mom got together to get it).

Tamika and I rented a car and drove to Connecticut last weekend.

We rented a car, because the AC in our poor Saturn hasn’t been working. Fortunately, we get up crazy early in the morning and leave work late in the afternoon, so normally the temperature isn’t so bad… but for a trip to Connecticut in the middle of the day… we decided that no AC and Nya wouldn’t mix very well.

So, with the help of Tamika’s mom, we rented a little red Ford Focus, cranked up the AC, and headed north… and nearly froze. It was about 50ºF going through New York, and it rained cats and dogs.

Tamika felt really bad about getting the car, but it proved it’s worth on the way back when temperatures went back up.

We spent most of the weekend with my parents and my sister at the Mystic Arts Festival. My mom had a Pottery and Quilting booth on Cottrell St., (which was all crafts) and my sister Beth had a booth on West Main St. where she had her drawings, paintings, and prints for sale.
I’m not sure how much they sold (they weren’t doing very well when we left on Sunday), but it was fun to just sit and relax and talk with them.

Tamika and I also went to visit Babchi & Jaju (my grandparents). Jaju was in a pretty good mood. I accidentally startled him when we came in; he had been dozing in his office among the canisters of beads that littered the his desk. He makes rosary necklaces for people at his church, stringing them one by one, bead by bead. Babchi was as lively as ever. She was disappointed that she wasn’t able to go to the Arts Festival though, because it was too hot for Jaju. She gave us some blueberries from her garden to take home with us (though not many survived our hungry stomachs on the way home!)

My brother Nick had to work at a public pool all weekend, so he wasn’t able to come to the Arts Festival much, but we did go with him to see Bourne Ultimatum. It was a great movie. Much better than I expected. There are trilogies out there, but very few of them I would consider successful. Most sequels tend to loose steam and storyline. The 3rd Bourne movie stayed true to the first, and once again wowed not only with storyline, but with technical ability and (rare among action films) very good acting.
I also got to hang out Nick with him in the evenings playing video games. He just bought himself a brand new computer with money he had saved up, and bought a bunch of games. One of the games, Supreme Commander, was a spin off of an older game called Total Annihilation, which is the only computer game I play (I limit myself ’cause otherwise I’d waste too much time!) He showed me the ropes and let me play for a while. Another reason to get a better computer…

Speaking of which, one of my computers died last night. We’ve got several computers in the house, but arguably one of the most important ones (the one which I do most of my graphic design work on) was the one that died, unfortunately. Luckily, I had set up another computer a couple months ago that I had pulled out a trash pile as a server, so it keeps most of the files backed up on there. Still frustrating though. Soon enough, I’ll be able to purchase a Mac Pro and hopefully my technical problems will be solved for a while.

Been hanging out with Paul and his family a bit more, we went over and watch Wedding Crashers with them the other night. It’s hilarious, but pretty vulgar. I’d give it 2.5 stars out of 5 on the Benjamovie Scale. We might join them to watch a Black Belt exam at Kim Studio this weekend.

Had a meeting with a talented designer today; Diana Flores contacted me after seeing my link welcoming people to join Zerflin. Tamika and I met her at Chipotle and she showed me her work. She’s very talented, and I hope to be posting soon with some projects we’ll have collaborated on.

Thank goodness for RSS! Both MySpace and Facebook have finally gotten on the bandwagon and published their user’s blogs to RSS.
If you’re new to RSS, it’s basically a system that pulls all of the text and images out of a page and plugs it into a Reader. So, for example, if you subscribe to The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Onion‘s RSS feeds in Google Reader, every time they post a new article, it shows up in your reader.
This is helpful, because it means you only have to go to one site (Google Reader’s) to read your news, instead of 3.
This is great for me, because now I can keep up with all my friends who post blogs in all the different social networking sites, no matter what site they’re on.
And besides, I miss you all. 🙂

Incidentally, this journal ALSO has RSS, which you can see by the little orange icon up in the address bar.

I’ve got a couple projects that are wrapping up, and so I’ll be posting them soon.

Peace!

…and use your brain. You CAN use more than 10%, you know.

Inspired enough?
Visit Stephen Wiltshire while you’re at it. He’s cool.

I lift up my eyes to the hills—
where does my help come from?
My help comes from the LORD,
the Maker of heaven and earth.
He will not let your foot slip—
he who watches over you will not slumber…

Tamika and I are going through difficult times right now. There are those around us who seem to take the greatest pleasure in causing us to fail, and we see only obstacles at every turn.
We’re patiently waiting for Him to create an opening for us, but at times it’s hard.
I’m doing my best to work hard with Zerflin, but my meager cut doesn’t seem like much right now… It seems to make me more weary than it makes me money.

We need prayer. Prayer against discouragement, mostly. We know God has our backs, and He’s never let us down before.
But somehow, with our failing and faulty nerves, and the knowledge that we really don’t deserve any of this… we feel the enemy’s wrath blow and cringe before it in pain.

Through all these trials (few of which I can speak about here), God has brought the two of us together. Amidst my incessant working and Tamika cleaning and cooking for the two of us, God set aside some time for just the two of us. That alone made the entire month’s worth of grief worth all the frustration and heartache.

Thank you all for your constant support and love, we cherish you and keep you in our prayers.

I had a really nice weekend.

Tamika went out on a date on Friday, and went to The Charles Theater in North Baltimore. We went to the Juong Kak Restaurant a couple blocks north of the theater. And the food was AMAZING. I am officially jealous of my Korean friends Mipa Lee and Sujy Yoon for having been able to eat this wonderful food their whole lives.

The restaurant, despite it’s unassuming outside appearance, is beautiful inside… all rough hewn wood furniture. Every table had a grill built into the middle of it. Tamika and I ordered variations of the same dish, and in 10 minutes our waitress brought us a platter with about 25 tiny bowls of vegetables, fish, and things I had never seen before, and two heaping slabs of meat, and scattered them all over the table. Then she slid open a section in the middle of the table and proceeded to barbecue our food in front of us! She was extremely open and friendly, and patiently talked us through the various ways we could eat our food.
And everything was delicious. I ate everything, and I loved everything. The meat was the best I’d ever tasted, sweet and slightly salty, with spices and herbs that made you feel like you were in heaven. If you ever have the remotest chance to ear Korean food, GO.

We then walked back to the Charles and decided to watch Nuovomondo (the Golden Door). It’s an Italian film that follows a rural family’s journey to the United States in the 1950’s. It’s a very strange movie, that flips between reality and fantasy… but it’s very well done. And it’s very relevant, given the struggles this country with immigration. If anything, it helped me to better understand what it must have been like for my Polish and Irish ancestors to come over to the “New World”.

On Saturday I had a big wedding with my good friend and photographer extraordinaire Jocelyn Mathewes; I assisted her in shooting the wedding of Jason and Kuren Morgan in Baltimore. I’ll post up pictures from it once I get them back from Jocelyn.

Sunday Tamika and I went to church with our old college friend Twi. Twi was in gospel choir with the both of us, and since he hails from Baltimore, we joined him at his church and then went out for lunch together.
I hope we get to hang out together more.

So, Tamika and I have come to an agreement on a name for our little baby. 🙂
If you’re just tuning in, a month ago we discovered that she will be a girl, and began narrowing down what we would like to name her.
Finally, on June 21st, we decided that we would name her Nya (pronounced Nah-yah).
We were at an India Arie concert. Tamika and I had bought tickets months ago, and invited as many friends as possible to join us. Only Aebony and Derek joined us, and we packed ourselves into the Rams Head Live, a music venue in downtown Baltimore.

The show was spectacular. We got decent “seats” (it was standing room only) up on a 2nd level balcony above the stage. And it was just amazing. She sang, played piano, guitar, and even played the flute. Changing or modifying her outfit for every song, after a short while she fell silent, and just looked out into the crowd.
“You know, I’ve got this setlist here…” she said, “And I don’t feel like singing it. There are other songs that I think you need to hear.”
And from that point on, she would go around and chat with her band to decide which songs to play. And play they did. Her musicians and singers were incredible. And Arie let them perform. She had them do solos, and invited them to dance around on the stage with her, and called on everyone in the place to sing along. At one point, she even stopped in the middle of the song, and pointed out into stage right. “Someone can sing over here.” she exclaimed, “No, seriously. I heard someone who can really sing. Who was it?” With that, she put the microphone down into the audience, and had girls pass it around singing the chorus of the song.

She sang songs from all three of her albums, and even gave us previews of “songs that may or may not make it on the next album”. She gave testimonies about her life and relationships, preached a sermon, and even brought her mother out on stage to sing with her.

Tamika had suggested the name Nya some time back, as a hybrid from what had been our favourite names up until that point. She had really like Neyla, and I like Nyrobi. Nya means “purpose” in Swahili, and as we listened to India Arie’s music wafting up from the stage, I told Tamika we should definitely name her that.

In my family, my father, my sister and me all share the initials BJ, while my mother and brother share NJ. We thought this might be a cool tie back to them as well.

The rest of that weekend was nice and relaxing. We traveled up to Philadelphia to visit her grandparents. I got to swim in the pool (one of my favourite things to do) and just rest. It was very nice.
On Sunday we got to go to downtown Philadelphia to see the musical “Hair” at the Prince Music Theater. I’m designing brochures for their upcoming cabaret and season, and so I was offered free tickets to come see their final show. It was very well done. Tamika and I got front row seats, and the performance literally happened all around us.
When I was at Messiah College, we performed Shakespeare’s “As You Like It“, but in a 1960’s setting. After seeing “Hair”, I now see how much our director, Valerie Rae Smith, pulled from the musical. We even opened with “Age of Aquarius” and sang “Let the Sunshine In”. My role was to be “William”, a minor character.

I’ve got the clutch on my motorcycle fixed, finally! Troy, a neighbor from down the street who is a highly-skilled handyman, helped me re-thread the cable and taught me how to adjust it with a screw on the side of the engine.
All I have to do now is buy some oil, a filter, and a new set of gaskets and it’ll be ready to run! Of course, I’ll have to take it to inspection (which it may not pass), but at least I’m headed in the right direction. I miss riding it…

Don’t worry about the wicked, or envy those who do wrong. For like grass, they soon fade away. Like spring flowers, they soon wither.

Trust in the Lord and do good. Then you will live safely in the land and prosper. Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you your heart’s desires.

Commit everything you do to the Lord. Trust him, and he will help you. He will make your innocence radiate like the dawn, and the justice of your cause will shine like the noonday sun…

part of Psalm 37, the Bible.

Tamika asked me what to read last night (we’ve been trying to get into the habit of reading to each other every night (usually it’s her reading to me), and without knowing why, I said “Psalm 37”. It turned out to be just what I needed.

If you can pray for us, we can use it right now. God is blessing in many ways, and I’ll talk about my fabulous weekend later… but right now we need some prayer.

..Girl!

So, I am a little (ok… very) late in delivering this, but we found out our baby (still affectionately known as “Munchkin”) is a girl!
We do have a couple names we’re considering, including Nayla & Nyrobi, and whole bunch of other ones.
But those are our favourites right now. You can see pictures of her here!

We drove out to Ohio this past weekend, to join Tamika’s old roommate Vinny and her fiance Paul for their wedding. Vinny was Tamika’s roommate in college, and she also lived with her after she graduated.
Cleveland is beautiful. Very very flat, but pretty. Rolling countryside, with lots and lots of trees, and Amish carriages every 500 feet. We were introduced and welcomed in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Miller, a couple that Vinny had gotten to know.
They reminded me a lot of my parents; just really nice welcoming people. Both in their 50’s, (though you’d never guess), she loves baking wedding cakes and cooking, and he loves archery, woodworking, pool, and makes his own wine. Yeah, you heard me. His own wine. He grows fruit trees in his yard (which is huge) and mixes it in with a “grape base” as he called it, and makes specialty wine which he stores down on enormous wine racks he also made himself. Very cool people.
We were miles from anything too, and it was the first time in a long time I really felt peaceful. I slept like a baby while we were there. It was just… quiet. It reminded me of home.

I miss home.

The storm was beautiful yesterday afternoon. It shook the whole building and beat against the large windows of my office.

I turned the music down low, and just listened to it.

I went outside and took some pictures of puddles. Here’s one of the ones that turned out nice:

It DID knock out my internet connection last night, though. So I wasn’t very productive last night.
I’m running 2 PCs in our tiny little office. One is serving as a Library (the slower one, with bigger hard drives) and the other is the one I work off of. So I spent the evening editing photos and sorting through files.

Tonight Tamika and I are going to her next doctor’s appointment. Just a routine checkup.
Tommorow evening, I’m going to be picking up some pictures I had framed.
I have an art show up in Harrisburg this weekend. You can check out the gallery of the art dealer who is running the show, or see them in my own gallery.

The Gallery opens on Saturday, May 19th, from 4PM – Midnight
The Cathedral Room (Above The Harrisburg Maennerchor)
221 North Street Harrisburg Pa. 17101
You can read more details about it here.

After dropping off the artwork, Tamika and I will be traveling to Philadelphia to photograph a wedding reception.

Aloha!
So, I’m writing this in between projects, ’cause it’s crazy & insane.
Want to work for me? Now’s the time. If you think you’d like to do some stuff for me, email me immediately and let me know what your skills are. If you can, I’ll work you in.

So my wonderful wife Tamika threw me a surprise birthday party on Saturday. I had NO idea at all. And I was surprised at all the people that came! Thank you all so much, all who came, sent me cards, wrote me emails and sent messages on Facebook. I feel very loved. 🙂 You have no idea how much I miss all of you (though Tamika knows, she hears about it all the time). 🙂
She got her parents to come, and her mom cooked the most amazing ribs & chicken wings… I brought some for lunch today. We watched our wedding DVD (I’ll be putting up clips on here sometime soon), ate food, laughed, talked… it was just really really nice. I was really floored. Thank you all sooo much. 🙂

I’m definitely planning more stuff this summer. Trips to the beach, barbeques & such.
We’re going to an India Arie concert on June 21st. Come with us! The tickets are only $35 (which is a steal).
I’ll post more events here, and also on Facebook as I think of them and plan them out.

We’re going to the doctor’s on May 24th for our second sonogram (you can read about the first one). I’m excited, because we might be able to find out whether it’s a boy or a girl. Some people advised me to bring a videotape, because they might let us record it. If they do, I’ll put it up.

Speaking of pictures n’ such, with the help of my Mom & Dad, I’ve been organizing the photos in my photo gallery. All of them except for a few on pg. 5 are organized by date & place.

I’ve got a couple projects I’m working on right now.
I just finished a brochure for a breakdancing company called Chosen Dance Company (I also did their website). You can find more like it in the Booklets section of my services.

I also just finished a business card for Funkai Dakii, a clothing designer. You can find more like it in the Stationary section. I’m going to be doing her website and doing a couple t-shirt designs for her as well, but nothing I can post until they’re being sold.

I’ll write more later. 🙂