Author Archives: Cam
The New BHQ and Minivan too!
We redesigned our website- I just get that bug once in awhile…
Greg did the template work and I sat next to him and shouted “More colors! More space! Less space! There is more than before! Now make less! Over, over! More green blue blue!” The old site was just kind of clunky, angular and outdated (you can compare the old version and the new version. We even overhauled the logo (very dangerous- but who cares!?). Once we get a few of the bugs out the new site should be better than the old one in every way. Want to drop me a line to tell me what you think? Stifle that urge. Hold it… hold it… there you go.
And in other news, we’ve done it. Successfully rotated our entire vehicle selection in less than six months. How extravagantly delicious! We traded the Acura toward…
… a 2003 Honda Odyssey. I honestly didn’t want to be the guy who drove a sports car and made his wife drive a minivan. And I’m not! She chose this. We had looked at the Honda Pilot first (you know, trying to maintain our hip image with an SUV), but the Odyssey really won us over. When you can automatically open your car doors from the Keyfob you have a winner. Fran wanted the red color because it reminds her of a berry on Reunion Island called the Goyavier. We have now achieved Utahsimilation.
Grass and Halloween
This is a post that should have gone up last week, but I just haven’t had the time. Usually I rob myself of sleep and sacrifice exercise and time with my family to do this stuff, but I did all that and there still wasn’t a free moment. Talk about a rough week.
Anyhoo… each October the Sabins throw a wicked Halloween party. This year was particularly exciting because it was in their house and they did an incredible job of decorating. Fran was a Kangaroo with a miniroo (Gabe) tucked into a pocket. Claire was a lady bug and Michael was Raphael (not the painter- the turtle). If you want pictures of them you need to visit the other blog. I was feeling lazy so I just dressed my thumb up. The scar from my cut made a great mouth. It’s really too bad that I already had the stitches out.
Before the party I had been at Andrew’s house helping out with sod. I put a picture of some grass above to fill in space. It’s not Andrew’s. It’s not mine. I have no idea who’s it is. You can see Andrew’s real lawn here.
Need for Speed
This is a post about my obsession with vehicle power. I’m not trying to be tacky, I just love modified cars (plus I have a lot of blog catching up to do…). It started out innocently enough back in 2003 with an Acura Integra. It was a forest green 1995 model with 142 horsepower. I loved it. Compared to our 2000 Honda CRV it was a rocket. It was this car which got me hooked on the idea of upgrades. I looked at cold air intakes, exhaust systems, toyed with the idea of an engine swap and then one day, quite by accident, I found my new car.
It was a modified silver 2002 Acura RSX-S and I had to have it. The base engine would have put out 200 horsepower but this RSX was equipped with a Greddy Turbo, Intercooler system and an upgraded exhaust which shot the output to a little over 300 horsepower. Perfect for a speed freak. The acceleration was satisfying. Time moved on and my appetite for power increased (as did my understanding of engine capacities and limits). I wanted something more powerful but upgrading the Acura wasn’t going to give me what I wanted. It was time for a change. I looked for something that would reflect my personality a bit better. I moved away from Japanese innovation to…
…American muscle. I purchased a black 2006 C6 Corvette a few months ago and I couldn’t be more pleased. With 680 horsepower (more on this in a sec), unrivaled handling and heart-pounding acceleration I have found true automotive love. While it appears to be a Z06 model, my vette is really a clever impostor. It’s the standard C6 coupe with every Z06 accessory such as body panels, brakes, emblems, etc. While the base coupe has 400 horsepower stock, this Vette attains its massive power via a twin turbo setup (you can read all about the APS twin turbo upgrade here). There are numerous advantages to the stock coupe with the upgrades. The Z06’s lightweight engine materials (i.e. titanium, magnesium, etc) make it dangerous to add more pressure to the cylinders via forced induction. The LS2 engine of the ’06 coupe, while smaller and heavier, is actually much better suited to a turbo upgrade. It’s my opinion that you can safely get more torque and horsepower out of it than the Z06 block. In addition, with the coupe you get a removable top, better gas mileage (I’m averaging 25mpg!), the option for an automatic transmission (I’m loving it), it’s way cheaper to insure (it’s only $7 more a month than my Acura!) and it costs less then a comparable Z06 model. Spiffy.
Maybe one day I’ll trade out the Vette for something a little faster… or maybe not.
Internet TV
I used to feel a small amount of regret about not having television piped into our home. The only up to date information I had came from reading the news on Yahoo. I’d be forced to buy DVD collections of TV episodes I enjoyed, but I was always a year behind. “Oh my gosh! Did you see what happened to Clark? I can’t believe they were able to… oh… sorry Cam.” I often resorted to reading episode transcriptions (how sad is that?). Well no more! Rachel recently turned me on to the fact that all these episodes are available on the Internet. Somehow I managed to miss the moment when every major television studio decided to make content available online. You only have to endure are are a few ads and you can watch The Office, Prison Break, Smallville and more. Hooray… maybe.
The Blogging Begins…
So here it is- my first blog post. We have Andrew and Greg to thank for making this happen. Andrew came by my place to instruct me in the ways of WordPress. Greg designed the very odd graphic that adorns the website (if someone could rip something out of my mind, it would look very similar). Andrew may wonder why the first post has taken me so long. To answer this question I will post two pictures of a work-related mishap (after the pictures I will expound).
While tweaking a knife something went terribly wrong. One minute I was holding the knife and the next it was on the ground and I was spraying blood everywhere (yes, you can spray blood from your thumb). Luckily one of my guys was there to drive me to the hospital. They stitched me up (as seen above). I probably won’t have any feeling in my thumb for a long time, but somehow I managed to miss my tendon. There’s always a silver lining. Needless to say this impairment makes typing difficult.
More to come later!
-Cam
PS- Both Greg and I are having a terrible time trying to format things with the WP software. Even the “Code” option is proving quite useless as WP inserts its own “magic tags” into every nook and cranny. It may be a template problem though… not cool.