Andrew Parks Life Blog Experiences & Interests

In the early 80′s I was lucky enough to make the acquaintance of a guy by the name of Jeff Walls, at the time we worked together at an electronics manufacturer in Marietta Ga. Jeff introduced me to his friends who had formed a band called Guadalcanal Diary. It was great to see Jeff and the band find the success that they did in the 80′s. It was great to see them get off the rat race wheel and make it big with several albums. Music seems to take people on a great ride in life.

Jeff is a great guitarist, the last time I checked he was playing guitar with an Atlanta based band called
The Woggles, he definately has a crisp unique guitar playing style.

I was lucky enough to see Guadalcanal Diary play many times in the early days, and to I to see them play at the Strand Cabaret, a club in Marietta Ga. that was in the basement of the now revived Strand Theater.

I found this video on YouTube of an MTV music video with Nina Blackwood as the host.
Now that is the way I remember MTV when it was just Music Videos, man they have strayed so far from who they use to be.

Enjoy this 1983 MTV video on YouTube Video of Guadalcanal Diary doing Watusi Rodeo.

Walking in the Shadow of the Big Man/Jamboree

Flip-Flop

Posted under My Life

A few months back I was watching TV and ran across this special on 60 minutes. This peaked my interest because I have seen friends and family suffer health related problems, and for the past several years I have been making slight changes in my diet, testing and adding supplements to my diet, and trying to get the right amount of sleep (7 to 8 hours), and exercise so that I might avert some of the common health related problems like heart disease, diabetes, etc..

Take a look at this short video, then I will ramble on some more about how my recent testing with resveratrol is going.

Ok so you get the picture, basically you would have to drink massive quantities of red wine and or grape juice to even come close to the amount of resveratrol that you can get in some resveratrol supplements that are commercially available.

I first tried a few different supplements of it, and since I have been taking it for over 3 months now, I have seen some improvements in the following areas.

1. Energy level ( I may be imagining this but I don’t think so)
2. I have dropped a few (5) pounds over the past three months and have not changed my diet. If this is a direct result of the resveratrol, and say I lost the same five pounds every 3 months, in a year that could be a significant weight loss. It is a known fact that caloric restriction will lengthen your lifespan.
3. Regularity ( I won’t elaborate much here)

It is still too early but the initial effects seem to be very positive. I have not experienced any side affects from taking the supplement. The only think I sometimes notice is that if you don’t take it with food you will burp what tastes like condensed grape juice? I guess that is what this is. It is kind of like when I take fish oil on an empty stomach, now that is sick, burping fish oil. So far I have been following the recommended dosage, because like anything, too much of a good thing can be bad.

Tonight I created this little picture with photo-shop from a graphics pack I purchased a few years ago, for those who like to drink wine don’t give it up, just take resveratrol too.

Resveratrol youth

Posted under My Life, anti-aging

Surfin around on youtube today checking out what’s up with Keane these days, and low and behold I ran across Tim Rice Oxley doing a cover of “Jackson Browne’s” / Gregg Allman’s “These Days“, off of the Laid Back Album. Jackon Browne wrote the song and it was his orginal, although I have to say Allman’s version is the one I will always remember. These days was one of my favorite songs that seemed to capture of lot of feelings for me and when I was growing up listening to this Album daily. You know how some songs just give you certain feeling, this one did, and still does, it is timeless.

What I like about Tim’s version here is I can pick out all the words of the song without having to go look up the lyrics. Of course not taking away Gregg’s mastered version that is the best of all time.

It is strange how some music / artists you just feel a connection with through their music, well Gregg Allman was alway one for me, and Keane certainly.

If you get a chance go check out both on YouTube, lots of good stuff there.

Enjoy

Laid Back

Posted under General interests, Hobbies, Music, My Life, teenage memories

I grew up in Smyrna Ga. I have had every intention to try to capture my memories of my childhood and teenage years somewhere, I guess my blog would be the best place for that.

I have been wanting to drive around Smyrna and take pictures of the few places that are still left that hold memories for me, more on that in a later post.

In the meantime I have decided to try a brainstorming exercise to try to think of every person, place and or thing about Smyrna and my experiences there.

Here goes the random list as they enter my mind, I will add more as I think of them.

Family,Sandies, Dantes Pizza,  Smyrna Elementary,  Aunt Fannies Cabin, Brinkley Park, Dunn St., Campbell High School, 1970 Chevelle Malibu, summertime, friends, GB’s Place, Hoot Gibsons BarBQ, Storyland, the covered bridge, bennet woods, old fire truck, the 4th of July, how to make a buck, belmont hills shopping center, Howards, Cobb Center, Griffin Middle School, Sisters, sparkles skating rink, Campbells Restaurant, The American Legion, Tenneco, Lee St., Jonquil Plaza, Smyrna Cable, The Sunnyside Inn, Nanny, Holly Tree, Colquitts, Ponderosa, Pizza Inn, Shakeys Pizza, First Baptist Church, Calvary Baptist Church, Church St., Ridge Rd., Pecans, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Silver Corvair, magic tricks, baseball, Johnny Rebs, A&P, Captain D’s, JC Penny’s, Woolworths, Dunaway Drugs, Dairy Queen, cutting grass, Whitfield St., Cousins, The Music Mart, Gibson’s Department Store, Richway’s, Jonquil sporting goods,Garage, Floor Heaters, Big Apple, Love, sno-cones, the concession stand, pool,green grass, blue sky, Jonquil pool, the teen canteen on Church St., Jane Lyle Rd., the woods, tennis, go cart, old Smyrna Library,

I am sure I have a bunch more in my brain but it is not 11:40 and I have to wake up at 4:30 AM

To be continued

P.S. If anyone from Smyrna reads this please post your memories here.

Thanks

Posted under Family, Genealogy, General interests, Music, My Life, Spiritual, childhood memories, favorite restaurants, home, homelife, relationships

I seem to be a bit late to getting around to watching the latest movies, and I practically have to be drug to the movies. The last movie theater that I visited was when my Wife and I went to see Mama Mia, I was reluctant to go see a movie with a name like that, I knew nothing about the movie, then after the first few minutes my Wife informed me, “Oh by the way this is a Musical” as she laughed at the look on my face.
Well needless to say Mama Mia seems to be one of those movies that you start out hating, then all of the sudden it grows on you. We now have the DVD and did a family movie night, my daughters ended up hating it too, then ended up saying it was a good move. It is one of those movies that gives you a good feeling once it is finished with it.

So again with Twilight the movie, I am sort of late here as well. My daughters have been reading all the Stephenie Meyer Twilight series books way before the movie was made, of course while watching the move they informed me several times that the book was way better than the movie. And they kept saying something about “is robert pattison’s married? They googled it, the answer is no.

I have to say the movie was pretty entertaining, I doubt if I will ever get around to reading even a chapter of one of the books. I am more of a technical reader that a pleasure non-fiction reader, I need to change that I’m told.

Now I am looking  forward to the release of the next movie, New Moon.

Posted under Family, General interests, Music, My Life, books, favorite books, home, movies

We live in Georgia so we are lucky there is the Georgia lottery with the hope Scholarship program to help pay college tuition costs. I am fairly sure that your child has to maintain a B average in order to keep Hope, pardon the pun.

I have been researching other avenues of ways to save for college expenses. I read about 529 plans, which grow tax free, and can be spent tax free, also something called a Coverdell plan although it sounds like you have to manage your own investment with a Coverdell.

There is some good information on 529′s at Clark Howard’s website here.

Also in my research I also found a really neat site site called UPromise.com where you can get back a percentage of your everyday purchases, at restaurants, department stores, online stores, and grocery items. Once you build up your rewards you can take the rewards and open a 529 plan, or pay off student loans, or get it back in the form of a check.

I will be opting for the check option, then I can place the savings directly into a 529 plan of my choice.
They have an example on their website, where you can open a 529 direct with their own investment company, although I am not sure this is the best option from what I have read about 529′s and how they are sponsored by individual States. I created a mind map of how I plan to use this site. A little different than the diagrahm on UPromise.com
.

Take a look below, I created this little mind map as an example of how I plan to use UPromise.com
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You can move the mindmap around by clicking your mouse and dragging it to look, or increasing or decreasing the size of it.

Upromise – Turn your everyday spending into college savings

Posted under Education, Family, Favorite Websites, Finance, General interests, My Life

I read these articles I come across that state you would have to ingest huge quantities of resveratrol to realize the health benefits.

Well I found that I could not drink red wine, it seemed to react in a negative way with a medicine that I take, I’ll spare you the details, so I rolled over to my local walgreens and purchased a bottle of resveratrol supplement. I have to say I was wondering if the walgreens brand I found was really the real thing? It took forever for me to find it hidden among the wall of vitamins, minerals and herbals. It cost me just around 10 bucks, I took it for a month and then ran out, I need to refill it, but just have not found the time.

How much resveratrol do you have to take, or red wine drink for it to benefit your health ?

Take a look at this article I found that suggests allot of resveratrol.

Diet Blog

Resveratrol: Fountain of Youth or Waste of Money Diet Blog, California by Mike Howard Red wine drinkers have been toasting to better health and longer life with all of the news pieces on the miracle that is resveratrol – a component of red grape skin and some other fruits. Let’s sift through the claims and hype and see …

So in a nutshell I think what they are saying here is, if you are going to seek the health benefits of resveratrol, you are going to have find a concentrated source of it in order for you to see the real health affects. I did quite a bit of research on the web and found that Biotivia seems to back the claims of their product with some fairly hefty R&D on the subject. The deal I found on Amazon may be better than on Biotivia’s site, Amazon offers free shipping sometimes.

Amazon Resveratrol Simple Search

Biotivia Resveratrol Bioforte 500 Dietary Supplement, Capsules, 60-Count Bottle

I always like to check wikipedia as well, very interesting information here that supports possible longevity and and anti-aging properties of resveratrol.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resveratrol

Posted under General interests, My Life, News, anti-aging, health

Well it has been a while since my last post to my blog, the reasons for the blogging hiatus? too many to note, but I am going to quit making excuses here and start blogging my life again.

Recently these are the things that have happened in my life. We have been working on trying to prepare our home in Powder Springs to sell it. We have rented a house in Marietta and have moved in there, so we can start staging our home to sell. I must admit this is terrible time to sell your home, but we are hopeful the market will shift soon.

Well, we had to start searching for good movers that work in metro Atlanta, and in and aorund the powder springs, Marietta area. Now we have moved a handful of times, and had a few bad experiences so I wanted to try to find a place where I could get some unbiased ratings from actual customers how had used certain movers. I had heard about a website called Angie’s List. 

Bascially some friends of mine who have used the site referred me to it. There is a small fee for signing up, but I would have to say that after using it once, I can think of many reasons I will be referring back to the site. After reading the reviews, we were able to find a mover that did a very professional job, and did not try to coerce us by hinting about tips to hold us hostage to ensure they did a good job, (past experience) a bad one.

Once we got a huge amount of furniture moved into the rental house, where might I say is where we will most likely be for the next few years to save and plan where our final destination will be. I.E. the last move we will make, fingers crossed.

Sooo… back to the huge project ahead of us in preparing our home in Powder Springs to be sold. First we had to find a home improvement contractor to finish out the part of our basement that I had previously started. I am sort of AADD, meaning I have a lot of projects that I have started and never finished.

I have been told that a finished basement with a bathroom and toilet in the basement can add allot of value to your home, and in this market we need all the attraction we can get. Again we sought out the reviews on Angie’s List to get a feel for a contractor with a quality rep that people rated as reliable.

We got estmates from a few home improvement contractors that we found, and we where able to get one to finish the basement for the price we could live with. It took over a month for them to finish the project, but they held to the price we agreed on. This guy and his strange bearded partner had a picture book of jobs that they had completed in Buckhead, Dunwoody, Powder Springs, Marietta, Alpharetta, Duluth, basically all over metro Atlanta. Really that photo album gallery of their completed jobs was the thing that sold me on chosing them over a few of the others, the price was key too.

I would have to say, these guys were really more than your average handymen, overall we had a few blips but I think that the research we did on Angie’s List
paid off.

Now we can focus on staging our home for a quick sell, I think in this market you really have to step it up a notch to get your house sold. One of my favorite shows TV right now is called  The Unsellables. Home staging is their speciallty, and it does seem to make a huge difference. If you get a chance watch it, I think it airs everyweek on HGTV on Sundays at 10:30 AM EST, this is the comcast programming for this show I think?

Well I will try not to go quite again, we got busy and blogging dropped to the bottom of my priorities.

Next Project… landscaping

Posted under Family, Finance, My Life, home, homelife, projects

I will be the first to admit that songs from the late 60′s and 70′s go on forever in a day, but this is one of my favorite youtube videos of Pink Floyd at Pompeii. The sound that David Gilmour gets out of his Fender Stratocaster is one of kind. I want to do more research on what type of gear he was using to get this effect. This is the second part of a song called Echos, a cut off of the Meddle Album, the lyrics are abstract, but I still love them to this day. I am not so much a fan of the first part of this song as it starts very dark and scary, but then leads into this classic second half.

So can you imagine performing in an ancient amphitheater that Archaeologists had uncovered from the ashes of pompeii, could there be a better setting for Pink Floyd to perform in.

I was lucky enough to see them during their Animals tour at the Omni in Atlanta Ga, there was a huge pig floating around in this indoor arena. The Omni has long since been destroyed, literally blown up to make way for something bigger and better, for the life of me I can’t remember what, maybe some type of international convention center?

Anyway here you go, mark my words you will drift off by the end of this, hang in there though it is still an all time classic, music of all types will forever be a big part of my life.

Ten Thousand years from now I will be basking in the glory of music that has never been heard by human ears, God is great.

Pink Floyd – Live at Pompeii (Director’s Cut)

Posted under Music, My Life

Since the first day I listened to Keane’s Under the Iron Sea CD I was hooked. Great music that fits right in with rainy days, fog and the feeling that goes with it. These classmates from School days garner a unique sound that I can’t let go.

I really like this youtube video if the shooting of the music video and song “Is it any wonder”.
A mini roller coaster with a camera mounted on it, as the brits would say brilliant.

I after all am still just a kid at heart, and this kind of thing sets along side in my childhood fond memories of a makeshift 3ft tall model rocket on a pitchers mound, packed with saltpeter sulfur and charcoal that only made it three feet off the ground.

Enjoy

Hopes and Fears

Posted under Music, My Life, childhood memories