I finally went through all of my outdated gadgets and put them out on eBay. I'm always amazed by what people will buy online, so I've listed an old bluetooth headset, an audio adapter, an MP3 receiver and a 4GB iPod. It's all in good shape, and I've had good luck in the past with listing my stuff online. Living on a strict budget has made it tough to acquire new stuff, so as I get rid of the old it only seems right that I can spend that on new gadgets. My list right now is prioritized as follows:
1. Digital SLR Camera (not sure which one - probably a Minolta, so I can use my old lenses)
2. 60 GB Video iPod
3. TomTom Bluetooth Treo GPS System.
I've got a pile of books next to my bed that I'm going through. I read 1 non-fiction book for every 5 fiction books, hence I'm not good at staying up on the latest in reading - either business or spiritual stuff. By the time I buy a non-fiction book, place it in the queue and finally read it, it's normally about a year out. I got the book Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell (shameless Raitz-style name-dropping - "I went to high school with Rob and he lived a block away from me") for Christmas from Cathie's parents and decided to make an exception and start reading it. I've been listening to his teaching's at Mars Hill (Jon and Beth used to go there when they lived in Grand Rapids) for the past year or so. His teachings have impacted my paradigm in a big way, so I figured his book would be a good one to read as well. So far, so good. It's written like you're listening to one of his messages, which I like. Pretty easy to read. I like it. (how's that for profound?)
I decided to update my sidebar to list the books I'm reading at any given time and those I've just finished. (Anyone know of any good sites that provided scripted lists that I can update and have it publish out to my blog via scripting?)
Not exactly sure why, but my car smells like rotten garbage mixed with armpit. I've vacuumed it, cleaned it, but I just can't figure it out. I turn the car back in in February. For now, I've got a big 'ol air freshener. Nothing like the smell of Vanilla garbage mixed with armpit.
Nate and I went to Lucky's today to play video games for a while and then to see King Kong. The movie was long (3 hours), but it was tremendous. The special effects are so good that you forget about them after a while. King Kong really grows on you and at the end, you're rooting for him to wail on the army as they attack him. Jack Black was good in his role, but not "Jack Black" enough for me. I guess people will finally take him seriously as an actor.
Here's the latest update on my Mom's Pancreatic Cancer from my Dad:
Lynn has now had two chemo treatments. On December 16th, we left for U-M Cancer Clinic in Ann Arbor at 8 a.m. and didn't arrive home until 8 p.m. Each visit, Lynn will have blood drawn so they can monitor the impact of the two chemo treatments. We met with the doctors and they were pleased with the results of the blood work and discussed their approach to the chemotherapy. They are treating her very aggressively, so Lynn is receiving two different chemo treatments each visit. They are administered intravenously and take 4 hours to administer. As expected, the affects from the chemo are mostly nausea and fatigue and an overall crummy feeling. They indicated she would feel the worse two days after the treatments, but it is lasting much longer than that.Please continue to pray for my Mom!
She had her second treatment on Friday afternoon, December 23rd. Besides being the day before Christmas Eve, they couldn't fit us in until late in the afternoon, which meant that we didn't get home until 10:30 p.m. She was able to attend Christmas Eve church service and enjoyed the family, while leaving the meals up to the rest of the family to deal with. She knows her limits and was not afraid to get some rest when she felt tired. This week she continues with the nausea and fatigue, despite the many different anti-nausea drugs she has available. Lynn has 8 more chemo treatments between now and mid-March,with the next one being January 6th. That will be followed by radiation and a different chemotherapy for 6 weeks.
Eli, Will, Brad and I went out to Mongolian BBQ for dinner and then to Lucky's to play 18 holes of Golden Tee and then watch the Pistons game. Brad lost at air hockey, even after cheating.
Will got Brad, Ted and I very thoughtful gifts - for me this 'The Dude Remains' t-shirt. Brad got Will a bottle of Boones Farm wine. Brad got me squat, which must have been awkward, sad and campy, since both Will and I got him very, very thoughtful gifts. We're all awaiting our gifts from Ted.
I've accomplished almost nothing "productive" so far during my vacation. I've played games with my kids, caught up on some movies (including The Big Lebowski), not worked out once and eaten horribly. I'm planning on heading to Lansing at some point to go visit my Mom/Dad and go see my Grandma as well. Well, I guess I'mve almost finished with the latest Wilbur Smith book, Triumph of the Sun, which is excellent once you get past the first 100 pages.
Nate got the card game called Phase 10, so Cathie and I decided to give it a try. Cathie suffered an embarrassing defeat - 170 - 295. Ouch. If you have a moment, send her a note offering your condolences.
When you work for Google and your stock is worth billions, you can work on side projects, like making a giant pile of silly putty.
I'm guessing that many of these guys who do large scale lego-artwork live at home with their Mom's.
We got together with the Niemi's, Girards and Muzzi's for dinner and ended up playing spoons. Cathie lost at spoons and ended up having to wear this sweatshirt. It's a beauty.
We followed it up with a game of Pop Culture Trivia Pusuit, guys vs. girls. The guys crushed the women. I came to realize just how much useless information is trapped in my brain, after pulling out answers like "Mr. Hinkey the Christmas Poo" and knowing what the dinosaurs are doing in the Far Side cartoon captioned "The real reason the dinosaurs became extinct".
The whole family went to see The Chronicles of Narnia today and we all loved it. The story just captures my heart, and some of the parallels to the Gospel story are great to see. Nate had asked me how Lewis wrote the book, so I did some research and found the following on Wikipedia:
Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument, then collected information about child psychology and decided what age group I'd write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out 'allegories' to embody them. This is all pure moonshine. I couldn't write in that way. It all began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn't anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord.Apparently, there's been a fair amount of debate in some circles on whether or not this story truly is allegorical. Here's what Lewis said:
If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair represents despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, 'What might Christ become like, if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?' This is not allegory at all.Guess not. Regardless of where your faith's at, I think there are some universal themes in the movie of sacrifice and redemption that hit everyone at a deep level, and point to an ultimate truth inside of each of us, whether we realize it or not.
As part of Maddie's present from Santa, she got a Guinea Pig cage set and a gift card from Petco to get the Guinea Pig. Emily, Maddie and I headed up to the store today to pick out the pig. We ended up with a four month old pig which Maddie has named Baily. Maddie is on cloud nine right now, playing with it and reading about it. Prior to getting the pet, she'd meticulously gone through the book that came with the set, took copious notes and sat down with my brother Jon, who used to have one, and took notes based on what he told her about the pet. Of the three, she's very meticulous and diligant in these kinds of things.
Here's Maddie and Baily in his cage:
A number of you, including my girl Ingrid, have asked how my finger is doing lately. I considered giving it it's own blog, but decided against it. The finger has gone from swollen, to infected, to oozing, to having no nail. I'm guessing I could fetch a pretty penny for the entire fingernail on eBay.
My brother Jon brought Wasabi Cashews to Christmas that he picked up at Trader Joe's. They really grow on you after a while. They're pretty unsuspecting looking, to the point that both Nate and Emiliy grabbed them out of the bag and popped them in their mouth as they proceeded to scream and spit them out from sheer pain.
I ended up sleeping on one of my Dad's air mattresses, which seemed comfortable at first. My brother Jon shared with me this bit of prophetic wisdom "The only thing worse than no air matresss, is a half-full air matress". I woke up in the middle of the night to find that the dumb thing had slowly deflated enough so that more than half the air was out of it, and the only thing off the floor were my feet. I was pretty confident my brother Jon had come up in the middle of the night and deflated it, though he denies. If he'd done it, it'd have been a genius trick. Nate was kind enough to wake up about 6:30, and I held him off until about 7. In the past, my mother received a set of bells (we believe these have come straight from Satan) that she would send her grandkids running throughout the house to wake us up. This year, we missed out on them, but still got up somehow (there's a lesson to be learned here).
We started opening the gifts from Grandma and Grandpa, which everyone loved. The most impressive thing was that my Mom was still able to get Christmas Shopping done on her days while she was feeling well, which made them all the more special. Almost better was that my Dad had to help with christmas shopping this year.
We had a great breakfast, including oatmeal with Baily's, which was really, really, really good. After breakfast the kids played with their toys and I started getting all of our stuff together (with help from Beth and Susan). Cathie normally pulls everything together, making sure nothing gets forgotten and that it's all neatly packed away. Not so much this year. My Dad gave Em, Nate and I a ride over to Cathie's parents where we went to check on Cathie. Maddie and I then headed back to my folks where Maddie opened her presents and got a chance to hang out with my parents a little while
Around one, we started Christmas Celebration #3. Cathie's brother Ed and my sister-in-law Stacy came over (tan from a recent trip to the Bahamas) and we always have a fun time. It's a nice contrast to the craziness of my family Christmas, giving us all a chance to chill a little and enjoy the day. By this time, Cathie was feeling a little better, but it's tough to tell, because she rarely complains when she's sick.
Voice recognition stuff was big this year. Madeline got a voice recognition diary which only opens based on your voice password (which Ed was able to duplicate with a very high pitch imitation of a girl). Cathie's parents got Emily the creepiest present (but one that she loves dearly), a doll called Amazing Amanda. The thing recognizes your voice and interacts with you pretty realistically via voice commands. The face moves in a really detailed way, to the point that it's creepy. It recongizes the various acoutraments - food, outfits, toilet via electronic tags embedded in them. The thing even grunts when it poops on the toilet. If you don't get it on the toilet, it has an accident. Emily finds great joy in setting it next to me and getting it to say that it had an accident next to me. The instrutions say "Please replace batteries if doll starts acting erratically." I believe this means it will someday come at me with a knife in the middle of the night, like Chucky in Child's Play.
We had another huge dinner after presents. I crashed hard after dinner, taking a great nap, waking up with a stuffed animal stuck on my head and people laughing. The kids played with their presents and we hung out until about 8:30, when we headed out. We got home and Emily was crashed in the van. We unloaded everything, put the other kids to bed, and took a deep breath and exhaled, amazed that the whole thing was over with.
You can see more pictures of Christmas Eve and Day here, in the Kurt Family Gallery. If you're a real glutton for punishment, you can see everyone's Christmas pictures by clicking through each person's gallery.
We woke up Christmas Eve morning and pulled everyting together to head to Lansing to meet up with my family for church. You'd think not leaving until 2:30 would give us plenty of time, but somehow, we found a way to still be scrambling at the last minute.
We got to my Mom's church, where she'd bribed the youth pastor to rope off two full rows for the Kurt clan. The service was great and I got to hold my new niece Libby for most of the service, which was nice, almost made me want a forth. After church, we headed over to my parents house to take our annual Christmas pictures and then eat.
We got the pictures done in record time this year, mostly because we didn't take every stinkin possible permutation of people. We stuck with families, families with Mom and Dad, and the annual Grandkids picture, which gets a little more chaotic every year.
Dan and my Dad forgot to tell the rest of the guys about the ugly-tie contest that was going on:
We had an awesome dinner, and we were all suprised to see that my Dad had sprung for better beer than Killian's. Jon had brought a six pack of Sam Adams, which Dan, Kevin and I made sure we polished off before Jon had finished his first. After gorging ourselves, we settled into allowing the kids to open presents from their Aunts and Uncles. My Mom had gotten the kids matching pajamas, which they soon turned into a gang. They chose the name "Blue Snowflake Ninjas" - not the toughest name, I'll agree...
But I was able to direct them into delivering a beating to my brother Jon, which was fun to watch:
She kept it quiet, but throughout all of this, Cathie was slowing feeling nautious. We'd been wondering if Nate's flu would catch up with us, based on him having it a days back. It did. After getting sick, Cathie headed over to her parents, not wanting to infect my Mom (who's somewhat suseptible due to her Chemotherapy)about five minutes away. Maddie was very concerned about her and went with her to watch over her. We missed her, as this was the first Christmas not to have everyone there.
My sister Susan is following in following in my mother's MuMu footsteps with this outfit, as well as making sure that after three kids, her husband keeps far away as well:
Dan and Kris decided this year not to stay over. We weren't sure if they were mad at us, or what the deal was - frankly, this came as a shock to all of us that they left. This quited things down for us and gave us a chance to hang out. For the second night in a row, Emily asked to go to bed. Having all the beds taken up, Emily decided to sleep in the Den on the chair, and seemed relatively comfortable.
Jon was very excited about the whole thing, as seen by his hat. Kevin, Jon, Nate and I hung out playing the new King Kong video game until about midnight, when we finally crashed.
(You can find additional details of the event on my brother Dan's blog as well)
Great story that my brother Dan shared about my newphew Steve-O:
His teacher was asking one of the other students how he wanted her to refer to
him, as Nathan or Nate. My nephew over heard this and explained that from
now on, he'd like to be referred to as "The Great Brain". Genius.
After a long negotiation with Santa, we were able to get him to come Thursday night to deliver presents. We made a deal with the kids that they couldn't wake us up until 7am. Ever minute before that, they would have to wait a minute afterwards to go see what Santa brought, so 6:45=7:15. It worked. 7AM on the nose we were up and heading downstairs to see if any presents had been delivered.
We put ourselves on a pretty strict budget this year, but the kids didn't seem to notice and were thrilled with what they got. Madeline ended up getting a guinea pig cage and a gift card to pick out the guinea pig on Monday. She spent the rest of the day reading through the guinea pig book while taking notes and periodically asking me lots of questions, because my brother Jon used to have one, which makes me pretty much an expert in her eyes.
Nate got the new Rachet and Clank Deadlocked game for PS2, which has cool multi-player capability and online play as well. We made a couple different kinds of Christmas cookies and mostly hung out playing with the kids new toys. Emily got the game "Whack-a-Mole", which I've been able to beat her at every time.
I think it started because of the number of people in our church who go out of town for Christmas Eve, but we end up doing a Christmas Eve-Eve service. The girls love getting all dressed up, and we normally put on a big 'ol extravaganza. This year we had an awesome choir (my friend Nicki was in it), a five piece orchestra (is that still considered an orchestra, or is it just called something else?) and a 30 minute drama that was excellent. There were a ton of people there - around 400. I got to see a lot of people I haven't seen in a while, which was great. The Kohne family came with us to check it out as well. A ton of people worked really hard to pull this whole service off and the end result was great.
We topped the evening off by having some friends over - The Shinns and the Kohne's joined us to hang out - eat, drink and be merry. The kids played hard. Emily asked to go to bed around 11:15. I went up to check on her five minutes later and she was in her PJ's, out cold in bed already.
Today, we're heading to my Mom's church in Haslett for a 3:30 Christmas Eve service, then over to my parents with the whole family - My two parents, 10 grandkids, 8 Kurt kids (yeah, we count Kevin as a Kurt). It's total chaos, but it's my favorite family tradition. More on that when we're back on Monday.
Every year at Christmas, Will breaks out his "Christmas Blanky". There's nothing Will loves more than snuggling up with his Blanky, his Mom and a nice warm cup of cocoa. He loves to curl up in the fetal position with his blanket and watch How the Grinch Stole Christmas. I guess we've all got our Christmas traditions.
Performancing is a pretty cool blogging tool that integrates into Firefox. You click a button in the browser and it splits the screen, with half the screen for the blog entry. A trained monkey could use it. I like it.
Love clubbing baby seals? This game is just the thing for you. It's the good 'ol Smack the Penguin game. This deserves to be played. Beat 593.
I love playing video games, but don't normally have a lot of time to do it. I normally take the week off between Christmas and New Years, which is when Nate and I get a chance to catch up and do some quality gaming. We just finished playing Marvel Nemesis - Rise of the Imperfects (great game, fun super hero action) and now we're working on the new King Kong game for PS2, which has amazing graphics. Nate and I saw it in the store in high-def on Xbox 360 and couldn't believe our eyes. If Nate gets any new games for Christmas (which I happen to have the inside track on), we'll be guaranteed to drive my wife crazy with our marathon gaming episodes.
This flash video pardody of the Black Eyed Peas song My Humps - Our Humps, just in time for Christmas. Ingrid would hate this. Frankly, I think it's pretty goofy myself.... I guess Ingrid and I agree on some things. (The difference being, I wouldn't assume that they're going to hell and are the anti-christ for doing a parody on an already bad song)
I thought this was genius thinking at 3:00 AM: Nate filled me in this morning that he woke up in the middle of the night and threw up, but didn't quite get to the toilet with all of it. Instead of just leaving a nasty suprise for someone to step in when they woke up, he locked the door of the bathroom. Now if only I could find the key....
Here's a complete list of every job that Homer Simpson has had on the 18 years on the show.
When the kids are home, Cathie's gone and I'm on a conference call working, the last thing I want to hear is: "Dad, Nathan threw up." The beauty of my Plantronics CS-50 headset is that I was able to clean up the puke in the bathroom and clean the carpeting, all while on a call for work.
I took some pretty horrible video of the kid's christmas concert last night and messed around with editing it. I'm getting better with iMovie on my mac, and as easy as it is, I still haven't figured it all out.
This video is really only for Aunts, Uncles and Grandparents because I can't imagine who else would want to watch. Maddie's class was pretty quick and pretty straightforward. Of special note is Nate's speaking role, where he says the word "Almost" into the micropohone. He explained to me that they drew numbers for the different speaking parts, and he ended up with the worst part. Actually, it's pretty darn amusing just watching Nate try and stand still and sing. Even after watching the video a few times, I still can't figure out why that word was significant to the song. They sang one song about Christmas in Ireland, which Will explained to me is from some Bing Crosby movie, which is his favorite apparently. They had another song where they sang about all of the holidays people celebrate at Christmas time. There were about 15 kids lined up, and after they hit Haunakkah, Kwanza and Christmas, I couldn't figure out what the rest of the kids were going to say. They just made up weird holidays, apparently.
We got back from the concert and Emily decided to put on a show for Will and I. The show included the "Five little speckled frog" poem and an interpretive dance. You can watch it here. (Note the way she chucks each frog after she's done with it).
This llama song is not only horrible to listen to, it also reverberates in your skull. This is torture, but I gotta share it, kinda like drinking bad milk and trying to get someone else to taste how bad it really is.
With Christmas coming, thought it'd be important for you to see this compiled list of everyone who's claimed to be Jesus in recent years.
While catching up on e-mail tonight, I watched a pretty cool movie tonight called Primer. It's about a couple of guys who invent a time machine and how they figure out what they want to use it for. It was decent.
This is perfect for my brother Jon. Amazon has this online service that allows you to make a little side money with their Mechanical Turk system. It alows you to perform a bunch of different jobs for money, jobs like: Transcribing Podcasts, Summarizes bullet points, Validating Album Artwork's correspondance to the correct album, etc.
Cathie pulled a deck of cards out tonight and the entire deck was full of the three of clubs. We thought it was a freak accident, until Will figured out that it was a deck from Nate's magic set.
Will came over tonight for dinner and then to see Nate and Maddie's Christmas concert.
Overheard at dinner, completely unprompted from me:
Nate: "Will, is it true that you live with your Mom?"
Will: "Yeah, but you live with your Mom too."
Nate: "Yeah, but you're a lot older than me."
I thought Randall on the Apprentice was a tool in his decision to not allow Rebecca to take the second job, even when he had nothing to lose. This commentary by MarkO was spot on.
This is a cool technology called PlayLimit that allows you to control kids tv watching/video game playing time by using a token-based system. Could work great for Nate.
This is a very cool open source free Media Center application called MediaPortal. It seems pretty comparable to what the Mac has with their FrontRow application, with the addition of TiVo type functionality, comparable to the Windows Media Center Technology.
Brad's vet clinic had their company Christmas Party Saturday night at Second City in Novi, and he had some extra tickets, with which he invited Cathie and I to join them. The show was hilarious, and we hung out afterwards in a posh Martini Bar that's connected to the resturant. Dana and Eli and Sue and Ron came over and hung out afterwards, playing cards until about 2AM, which was fun.
Tonight, I went to the Project 311 Christmas party, which was fun. I love good stories, and I heard a few of them last night from a few interesting people. One was a girl who grew up as a missionary over in East Africa. She eventually ended up in an American Boarding school over there, but for much of her childhood, she lived on a Gilligan's Island style island, in mud-huts and tents, 2 1/2 hours from the mainland. To her, it was nothing, but her husband explained how cool her childhood really was. There were a million poisionous snakes on the island, and she raised giraffes. Her back yard was filled with Hippos and Corcodiles. She told me about some of the pet monkey she had as a kid, including one chimpanzee. They ended up having to get rid of the chimpanzee because it kept fighting them (no kidding), coming up to them and punching them in the chest. She looked at me strangely when I asked her if the chimps could be dressed up in army and trained for friendly hand-to-hand combat.
The second guy I talked to used to be in a local group that made it fairly big, called Son of Adam. By fairly big I mean that they had one of their songs played on an episode of Smalleville and opened for other bands at DTE Music Theatre - both of which are much more than my band has ever done. He was telling me about the time they opened for Air Supply, and how he'd never heard of them, until he heard them play and figured out that he knew all of their songs. He explained that the most disturbing part was when he found the lead singer of Air Supply naked and passed out in the shower of the changing room at DTE Music Theatre. Creepy.
We ended up having a white elephant gift exchange. I had a gray golf pullover that I'd gotten from a work training event that seemed to go over alright. I ended up with stuff that I could regift to my kids for Christmas.
Yesterday morning Brad, Mark Kohne and I headed downtown Detroit with a woman from my church, Linda Bentley and her husband Ron. Linda's been going downtown Detroit for 17 years to feed and clothes the homeless. The five of us went over to a church in Dearborn Heights and spent a couple of hours sorting and loading to 15 passenger vans with clothes, toys, blankets and food for people. Around noon a bunch more people showed up and we all headed downtown for the first stop, right outside the Cass Corridor, over by the Masonic Temple. If you've been here, it's a pretty scary area - although with a fresh coat of snow, it really didn't look too bad. We setup tables to give out food, clothes and then gifts for kids and adults. There were about 50 people at the first stop where Brad handed out the gifts and Mark and I worked with people to hand out clothes and blankets. After everyone had been taken care of, we moved onto the next stop, over by Temple and Brush Streets, another interesting area. We had a lot more people here, over a hundred. One of the guys there who does this on a regular basis explained that this is a pretty transitory group in the winter because of how they rotate through the homeless shelters, which only allow them to stay for three days at a shot before they have to move on. Someone had donated an artificial christmas tree and when I told one of the guys there about it, his response was "What am I going to do with a tree when I don't even have a house. I can't very well set it up in my car, can I?" He had a point. The people were mostly kind and appreciative, but Linda had done a great job explaining where some of them were coming from, many of them not having eaten at all up to that point and maybe a little ornery.
This whole deal really blew me away and hit me at a heart level. I've been trying to figure out exactly what it's been that impacted me since yesterday. Part of it was around how I look at my stuff. As we helped people find clothes and blankets, watching how grateful they were for this stuff, and how they needed this stuff for them and their families to survive. I've got so much crap that I'll buy and forget about on a regular basis. The other thing that struck me was being close to these people - shaking their hands, getting hugs from them and talking to them about their world. I walked around with this smile on my face the whole time as I watched what was going on. I wondered about how tough it must be to humble yourself enough to take a hand-out like this. I saw how the church could get beyond stupid infighting and start to change the world around me. It got me thinking about what I've been reading in the book The Holy Longing, about Charity and Justice - going from giving out pieces of bread to trying to change the system so that people don't go hungry to begin with.
I'm still trying to process all of this. It was a phenomenal exerience, but I'm trying to figure how I can make sure it doesn't stop with just one visit out there. It has a huge potential to affect my heart and I want to figure out how I can keep allowing this stuff to change me. Watching Linda, the woman who coordinates all of this, gives me a feel for what Mother Teresa is like. Linda is such a quiet, unassuming woman, who so deeply loves these people that she interacts with on the streets. She does this every Saturday. I watched one homeless many come up to her and give her a Christmas gift - a chipped precious moments coffee mug wrapped in a paper bag. She treated it like it was gold. She's so thankful for every person that comes and helps. The whole thing really rocked my world - I'm still trying to figure out exactly how and why.
Cathie and Madeline went out to dinner together last night and then they came home and we just hung out as a family. Cathie and Emily were coloring together last night, I was bored and I grabbed a marker and ended up drawing on Emily. Big sister Madeline thought she'd get revenge for her sister and drew a few lines on my face while I wasn't looking. Not to be outdone, I held maddie down and drew a few things on her face.
This escalated from there and I gave Maddie the chance to draw on me, which she did gladly. I'd made the mistake of telling Madeline about a guy in college who after he'd "fallen asleep" we wrote all sorts of stuff on his face and the word "Stupid" on his forehead, which he went to class without checking the next morning. (Yes, that's the word "Dummy" on my forehead")
As you've seen over the past few weeks, the kids and I have been building a snow fort outside. At the time, sleeping over night in the snow fort sounded like a great idea. We went out Friday afternoon and got a few bales of hay to finish it up and pad the ground. It was about 20 degrees last night as Nate and I headed out to the fort to sleep. We sealed ourselves in, and hung out the rest of the night playing cards and playing 20 questions until we fell asleep. We stayed really warm out there, considering. The only thing I'd of done differently would of been to fill in all the cracks in the log framework with snow to keep more of the wind out.
Google has released two cool new extensions for FireFox:
One is a tool that allows you to spot phishing sites that try and steal info from you, the other pops up comments based on which web site you're on.
Apparently my brother Jon has been having a tough time with the Stay at Home Dad thing. His wife Beth has kindly laid out this set of guidelines that's she's asked him to follow in order to be the best Man-Mom ever.
Freakin flight was just delayed again... At this rate I should be home about 1AM. What kind of fool chooses a connecting flight when he could have flown direct and been home 3 hours ago? A greedy one who wants to get his platinum upgrade status for 2006.
The good news is I was able to get on an earlier flight out of Boston, the bad news is that I'm now sitting in the airport no further ahead, as the 7:35 connecting flight to Flint was pushed back to 10:00PM. I swear I'll never take a connecting flight from Lansing or Flint just to get the extra miles to push me to the next level of my Worldperks status. I get hosed almost every time I do it.
Interesting thing: I was connecting to the internet at the airport and noticed that someone had set a connecting point called "Free Internet Access". It was an evil twin site, setup to lure people to connect to it and then grab your credit card information from you.
One piece of good news. I am no longer the worst Dad in the world, well, kinda. Because of all of the snow, Nate and Maddie's Christmas concert was moved from being tonight (which I would of missed) to Monday. I'm supposed to have a work Christmas party on Monday, which I'll gladly miss or try and move in order to get back in the good graces of my children.
I'm in Boston tonight, flying back tomorrow. I flew out of Flint (yes, I'm close to my Northwest Platinum status, trying to get miles) and just barely made my flight. My laptop died yesterday, and my new one did not come until 10AM. My flight was at 11:40 and the Flint airport is under an hour away. In theory, it all should of worked out IF I'd of allotted time to reassemble my laptop and resync my files. I made it - barely. I'm driving out here, something I hate doing in Boston. Downtown sucks for driving and the Cambridge area, where I'm at, is equally confusing. All that being said, it's by far my favorite city. This should be my last work-related travel for the year.
I was messing around this evening with MyHeritage.com online facial recognition software. Here's the picture I plugged in:
Here are the two hits I got back. Mel Gibson is VERY understandable, but Ravi Shankar????
Other hits included Gerald Ford, Harry Belafonte and Jeff Goldblum.
This is an interesting new service. It's called GotVoice.com and it will communicate with your cell, home and office voice mail system, pull down your voice mail and send it to you via e-mail as an mp3.
We had Emily's pre-school Christmas party tonight. All three kids have gone to the same pre-school and had the same two teachers, both of whom are awesome. This is Em's last year at this school, and our last event with the co-op preschool. Maddie and Nate are getting to that age where they've just about figured out what's going on with Santa, but we're letting them get through this one more Christmas before letting them know what's going on. Emily asked for a goldfish and Maddie asked for a guinea pig.
Emily sat down with Cathie and Emily dictated the following letter to santa:
Dear Santa,
I would like some real puppies for my dog so she can be a mama.
I would also like a farm in our backyard
I would like some baby cows and all kinds of animals
I would like a toy doll for Christmas and some toy trains.
I would like a teddy bear with a bow because we have a playhouse.
Love,
Emily
Noel turned me on to this hilarious Colbert Report on The Family Stone, Brokeback Mountain, and the Chronicles of Narnia. From the Colbert Report Movie Clips, click on the Movies Destroying America icon.
I've never seen a movie review quite like this on any movie. This one is for Napoleon Dynamite.
We finally got Crossroads weekly messages online via a podcast. If you're running iTunes, simply click on the PodCast section and drag the following image into iTunes to subscribe: 
I started using this great free application called Weather Watcher. It's a no-cost ad-free tray-based weather application. Very nice interface and functionality. You can download it here.
I've been messing with Google and YouTube's video services. Google's takes a while to verify the content, but has a better uploader and fewer restrictions on size and formats. YouTube is quick and painless. Here's Maddie's Cheerleading Video via Google Video.
Before doing the biopsy today on my Mom, they did another ultrasound on my Mom and it looks like the cancerous mass has come back on my Mom's pancreas. They thought it would be too dangerous to do the biopsy based on where it was at. Chemo starts on Friday. This sucks. Please pray that God does something humongous in all of this.
We had a great day today, starting with a head full of curlers. I ended up having to stay home from church with Emily, so she and I amused ourselves by playing competitive Mario Cart and watching some goofy cartoon Christmas special.
Nate spent the night at Austin's last night and Em wasn't feeling great, so Maddie and I decided to go out and play in all of the new snow and work on our snow fort. Last week, we'd gotten the snow fort started, so we thought we should finish it up by building bigger walls and a roof. We put in cross-beam-supports and branches on top to camoflauge it (I know it's still visible, it's a blue tarp for peat's sake)
We spent about an hour working on it, securing the room and cleaning out the inside. We were pretty proud of it, so we got Nate, Cathie and Emily to come out and check it out also.
After checking out the snow fort, it turned into a famlily snow fight. Ever since football, Nate's gotten pretty accurate with his snowballs and got Cathie a few times before she decided to take Nate down hard (I just know that Will and Monaca are going to have our kids taken away by social services):
With the additional snow, we built up our pile at the bottom of the swingset and continued our base-jumping tradition. Here's Maddie getting some air:
The kids took it to the next level, complete with belly flops and falling straight back. You can see all of the pictures here.
Tonight is Ground Zero, our Youth Church deal. Jason's talking tonight about "The Life and Faith of Johnny Cash", which should be cool.
Good column this morning by Mitch Albom about John Lennon and whether or not fame and fortune really fill the void in our lives.
Ever since my gal Ingrid started sending her strange little love notes my way, I've been getting a daily laugh out of her blog. It's basically a place where she takes a fact or two of out context, applies her own hatred to it and then allows readers to post comments that support her world view. Reading through it, I started compiling a list of everyone she hates based on the views she states in her posts. So far:
- Catholics
- Jews
- Non-Whites
- Willow Creek and Saddleback Churches
- Brian McClaren, Rick Warren, etc.
- Muslims
- Hindus
- Emergents
- Charismatics
- Fun
- Me
- Joe
*No offense to my friends that homeschool (Mike/Sarah/Noel, etc). You know as well as I how many Christian fringe whack jobs home school. I'd think you'd agree that this is a pretty safe bet.
After the cheerleading competition, we went over to Dan and Kris's to celebrate Shabadu's (Matthew's) birthday. Everyone was there except Jon, Beth, Libby and my Grandma. Even my Mom was able to make it, which was great.
Allie digs her big cousin Maddie, and vice versa. Maddie let Allie try on her cheerleading outfit as they hung out together and Maddie read to her.
Being a Kurt, Dan likes to save a few cents by keeping it below 60 in the house. Having grown up with my father, I was fine, but Cathie and Susan obviously weren't.
You can see the rest of the birthday pictures in the Kurt Family Photo Gallery here.
We spent today at Madeline's cheerleading competition. Luckily we weren't there alone. The three Madeline's are on the same team so we hung with the Kohne's and saw the Wheelocks. I ran into B-Rad Wheelock at the event, who is in high school, but looks a lot older. The funniest part of the whole event was when B-Rad explained to how he needed to hang with his Mom throughout the whole event in order not be confused with a predator at the event (see predator picture below)
There was a lot of hard core positioning at the event for video taping, so Mark Kohne and I accidently went up during the wrong group, so we decided to stay there and pretended to tape the team before in order to optimize our position for taping our team.
This place was huge. I'd figured this was going to be three teams at an elementary school gym. Instead, there were 22 teams and thousands of people, just for our division. The Kohne's had kids in two divisions and had to stay around for 6 hours. Sucks to be them.
You can see more pictures of the event in the Kurt Family Photo Gallery here. I uploaded the video of the competition here.
My son wants to be a professional video game player when he grows up, but not like this. This New York times article talks about how video game players in the US are outsourcing the early levels of video games to people overseas:
The people working at this clandestine locale are "gold farmers." Every day, in 12-hour shifts, they "play" computer games by killing onscreen monsters and winning battles, harvesting artificial gold coins and other virtual goods as rewards that, as it turns out, can be transformed into real cash. That is because, from Seoul to San Francisco, affluent online gamers who lack the time and patience to work their way up to the higher levels of gamedom are willing to pay the young Chinese here to play the early rounds for them.Now if only I could outsource putting my Christmas Tree lights up to someone overseas.
Interesting Business Week article on The myspace.com Generation. If you've never heard of the company, News Corp bought it recently for $1.3B: Preeminent among these virtual hangouts is MySpace.com, whose membership has nearly quadrupled since January alone, to 40 million members. Youngsters log on so obsessively that MySpace ranked No. 15 on the entire U.S. Internet in terms of page hits in October, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.
I setup my own myspace account a while back to mess around with it. Most of the kids I'm connected with on it are either from my youth group or other youth pastors who are on it.
After crushing my finger, I was going to post another picture of my finger and give an update on how it's doing, but Cathie was very clear that ABSOLOUTELY NO ONE cares about my hurt finger nor do they want to see another picture of it. My Mom cares. I just know she does.
We finally got our tree up and the house decorated. The kids had fun decorating all of the ornaments that we've acquired and that they've created over the years. Emily got to hang the star on the tree this year.
Before Nate was born, someone (my Mom?) got him this pink girly precious moments ornament that he wants nothing to do with. I chased him around the house, trying to get a picture with him and the ornament at the same time, but this is the best I could do:
Quick Update on my Mom's Pancreatic Cancer:
My Mom has her first session of chemotherapy tomorrow. The whole thing takes about six hours. On Monday, she's back down in the morning and they're doing a biopsy to test something they found during a recent MRI . She's been feeling better and better, not sure if it's the medication or if her body's just adjusting to the surgery. Please pray for her. Thanks.
I nuked a couple of today's post off my blog today. Here's why:
Another site posted some things that were mean about me and my church. I found them funny and posted those things, along with some equally mean e-mails that some of their followers had sent. By not getting angry and laughing at what was said, I think I pour gasoline on their fire and they continued to rant. I was embaressed to let people see some of the infighting that goes in the Christian body, so out of embaressement, I've removed all posts and links from my my blog.
I was at Triad this morning working out with Kirk. It's always competitive, and Kirk cut me no slack even with a busted finger. Being a fellow Spartan, Damon Dowdell (MSU's 2003 QB) jumped in and helped me keep Kirk in his place, because that's just the way us Spartan's roll. Damon is at Triad training, getting ready for a couple of pro gigs. He joined in our workout and between the two of us, Kirk didn't have a chance.
Every few weeks Nate and I sit down in front of iTunes and we make him a CD. Each CD has about 20 songs and consists of a pretty broad musical spectrum, but mostly stuff from 1970 through the 1990s. When we lay down at night during bed time, we'll sometimes go through the songs on the latest CD he's listening to and talk about the stories behind the songs, the stories that the songs are telling, or about the music group and why they were influential. He'll often get stuck on a given song and listen to it over and over as he falls asleep. It's funny to see what he's listening to when I go check on him before I go to bed. I'd love to see him learn to listen to music with discernment, really asking questions and have a broad understanding of music to draw from as he figures out what he likes and doesn't like.
The current CD I made for Nate has the following artists:
Jethro Tull
Black Sabbath
Billy Joel
Dan Fogelberg
Procol Harum
Lenny Kravitz
Bob Segar
Alice Cooper
The Ramones
Lynrd Skynard
Jennifer Knapp
Pedro the Lion
Queen
Rich Mullins
Willie Nelson
The Who
Cathie and the kids and I went out tonight to pick up our angel tree gifts. Angel Tree is a cool thing we've participated in through our church over the last 4 years. The Prison Fellowship group goes into prisons and find out what prisoners want to get their kids for Christmas. Each of our kids picks a kid and we go shopping with them for the kid and buy them presents on behalf of the prisoner, which will be delivered to the children this Saturday. Each year, we talk to the kids about what we're doing, and that this means that they'll receive one less gift but will be helping someone out. They're into it, and have fun doing it and give a ton of thought into what to get the kid their sponsoring. (When Cathie's not around, I explain to the kids that when their Mom ends up in jail, wouldn't they want someone to do the same for them?)
This Camera Mail is an interesting idea. The people doing this have too much time on their hands, but the results are pretty funny. The guy has basically mailed cameras attached to post cards to various places and then developed the pictures of all of the postal workers that have used it to take pictures around the country. As I get to be my Dad's age with plenty of spare time, this might be something I'll do.
Got this from Rich:
1- Go to www.google.com
2- Type in, french military victories.
3- Instead of hitting "Search" hit "I'm feeling Lucky"
I'm torn between laughing and crying for my friend Will, whose life has come to the point that he's posted the following as part of his blog:
And yes, I am a 32 year-old man who lives with his mother and owns a cat to whom I just devoted a whole blog entry.
Best lines from tonight episode of The Office on the office Christmas Party:
Michael Scott (Boss): "Presents are the best way to show someone you care. It's like this tangible thing you can point to and say 'Hey man, I love you this many dollars worth.'"This show is damn funny. Not working in an office, I can live vicariously through these guys.
Michael Scott (Boss), after receiving a hand-made oven-mitt: "Phyllis is basically saing 'Hey Michael, I know you did a lot for the office this year, but I only care about you a homemade oven-mitt's worth.' I gave Ryan an iPod."
Michael Scott (Boss): "Reverse psychology is an awesome tool. I don't know if you know about this, but basically, you make someone think the opposite of what you believe and that tricks them into doing something stupid. Works like a charm."
I watched the movie Murderball tonight. It's a documentary about quadrapalegic rugby, following the US Wheelchair Rugby team. They changed the name from Murderball, because it was tough to get corporate sponsors with that name. These guys are amazing. They are as tough as any non-wheelchair rugby team and they beat the hell out of each other. They've got thier chairs decked out mad max style and hit each other full force, throwing themselves all over the place. It really gave me a new understanding of what goes on in the brain of someone in a wheelchair for life, along with some of the paralympic activites which I'd learned about from my work with the USOC. The movie tracks one of the guys (shown in the poster above) named Mark Zupan. This guy is a bad-ass, tough as nails who you just love to watch in this thing and would love to hang with over a beer. In the beginning of the movie, they interview some of his friends who explain (like any good friends would) "Mark was a prick before the accident — don't point to the wheelchair. He's just as much of a prick as he always was."
Ouch. I was at Triad today working out with Kirk (who incidently was selected for the 2nd year in a row as one of the top 100 trainers in the US by Men's Journal Magazine) when I crushed my finger. We were working out on doing bench presses on a stability ball when the thing slipped out from under me, I rolled and crushed my finger between two dumbells, instead of just letting go, like a dumbell. My finger swelled up to the size of a toe and hurt like I'd broken it until I finally poked it through the nail with a needle to let off some of the pressure. I've got ice on it, but it keeps seeping blood out the nail, which is kinda gross. On a more interesting and less gory note, while Kirk and I were warming up, I got to talking with a couple guys who'd just gotten done working out there with Kirk. Both used to play for MSU in the past two years, one being a quarterback and the other a wide receiver. It was interesting to hear their take on John L. Smith vs. Bobby Williams. Both are working to go pro, either with a canadian or european league.
Last year Nate and I went to one of the big geeked-out computer shows at a near by expo center, where, of course, they sold boxing gloves. We bought two pair which Nate and I used to have our own boxing matches. Soon, he and his buddy Austin started having boxing matches, which look pretty ferocious on video. Amazingly, no one ends up hurt (too badly) or crying out of these. You can see the Nate and Austin boxing video here .
As you probably know, Conan used to be one of the writers on the Simpsons. This is an excellent clip of Hank Azaria and Dan Castelleneta doing a bunch of their Simpson's Voices.
I've been noticing lately how badly my memory seems to stink. I read this article on how Mental awareness requires better filters
and realized that my "filters" stink. I can't figure out for the life of me how I can remember some of what i do remember, and be oblivious to other stuff out there. I suck at keeping irrelevent things out of my awareness. On the contrary, I seem to be drawn to the irrelevent, which doesn't do much for my memory.
Maybe this makes me a nerd, but this is cool video of an Exploding over-clocked CPU after the heat sink is pulled off.
After church today, the kids and I headed outside to play. It was a perfect winter day - fresh snow mixed with enough sun to having good packing snow.
We piled as much snow as we could underneath our swingset and the kids proceeded to launch off of it while I took pictures. My camera's got some great features for taking high speed pictures, so I messed around with those and got some cool action shots.
We were having a fun snowball fight until Maddie got Nate at close range....
And Nate turned around and pelted her in the side of the face from 2 feet away.
We then headed out to the woods and spent about a half hour building a pretty cool fort, we called Fort Kurt (okay, it was cool for us).
Maddie had a found a big crevice in the woods behind our house and Nate, Emily and I piled branches around it to wall it off. Nate wanted to try and set up some kind of booby trap to catch a deer which was a great idea, in theory. The plans were big, but we couldn't make it happen like it does in the cartoons.
We played some more as Emily came up with a game to see who could slide the farthest off the slide, and then headed in where Cathie had hot choclate waiting for all of us. I posted the pictures in our family photo gallery here.
Jesus must be coming soon, because you can now buy a $120 toothbrush with toothpaste built in. Why does a toothbrush need a CD? How lazy do you have to be to not want to apply your own toothpaste?
Cathie and I went out wtih our friends Justin and Lori tonight for dinner and a movie. I introduced Justin and Lori to the comedic genius music of Stephen Lynch and we laughed pretty hard the whole way there. After dinner, we saw the movie Just Friends. Good flick but I could've waited to see it on video. It was snowing hard by the time we got home, and everything was covered in beautiful freshly fallen snow. Cathie and I went for a walk about midnight and it was so peaceful and quiet as the snow fell (yes, we left our children alone, sleeping in the house like bad parents). We watched Dane Cook on Saturday Night Live and laughed hard. One of the best SNL's I've seen in a while.
Tonight i watched the documentary, or should I say rockumentary, Rock School. The movie starts off with this group of young kids playing Santana's Black Magic Woman, perfectly, note for note. It's about the Paul Green School of Rock Music. The guy is tough and can be a tool, the guy you love to hate. Great flick about music, about kids. It finishes up with an amazing version of Frank Zappa's Inca Roads.
Emily, tonight:
For Will's birthday, I want another pet catapillar like the on I had before. He did tricks for me. When I said roll-over, he'd roll-over. When I said flip, he'd flip. It did the tricks in the grass, so I couldn't really see it.
Rudy has brought clarity to my life. I had no clue until I read his blog (Jon will probably be angry that I referenced another blog. Tough.). If you watch family guy, you saw this crazy peanut butter jelly guy skit that made no sense at all. According to Rudy:
I finally understand this skit from The Family Guy. Dave was wondering what it meant too, because it was too random, even for the Family Guy. Apparently it all started with this internet skit of a banana dancing to this song. It all makes sense now.Even if you hate the Family Guy, watch this part of it. It'll stick with you.
While my Mom was at U of M for some of her chemotherapy prep, they did a cat scan and found something they didn't like. She's going in next Monday for an outpatient biopsy. They hope it's scar tissue and not more malignant tissue. Please pray for her.
I never go to the gym without my iPod. I'll bring written workouts and magazine articles with pictures of new exercises with me, but I saw this and thought it a cool idea. Pumppod.com is an awesome use for a video iPod. It lets you store the specifics of an exercise on your Video iPod and have it with you during workouts. Genius. (It works on my Treo phone also, but I already have one of those, and that wouldn't help me justify a new Video iPod)
Here's what I'm using with the latest version of FireFox Browser (v1.5)
LinkPreview - When you hover over a url, it shows you a thumbnail of the page.
Google Toolbar -Obvious
Adblock -Additional pop-up blocking functionality
Tab Preview -When you hover over a tab, it shows you an image of your current page.
IE Tab -Allows you to open an IE page within Firefox. Helpful for yahoo mail that doesn't support rich text in Firefox.
Yahoo Toolbar -Obvious
Thanks to MarkO for these beauties - Christian Sunglasses. They also get the award for: Most out-of-context use of scripture to sell a product by quoting this verse:
"The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light." Matthew 6:22So basically, if I wear these glasses, I'm all set. Excellent. The upside is, they give 30% of their profits to the needy.
Erik's full of this stuff this week. He passed on this tool for more intelligent e-mail reading, called SNARF from Microsoft:
The Social Relationship and Network Finder, or SNARF, is an application that uses the same database as a user's e-mail client to count the number of times users send and receive e-mails from people, said AJ Brush, a researcher in the community technologies group at Microsoft Research, who developed the tool. alling this kind of e-mail triage process "social sorting," researchers worked with graduate students to come up with the tool so it will help users prioritise e-mails based on how often they send and receive mails from contacts, she said.Here's a more indepth article on the technology."One of the core SNARF notions is that it’s about people," Brush said. "We’re really trying to remember information about the people in my e-mail rather than on a per-message basis. Then SNARF will know it’s that message from [for example] Julie, I talk to her all the time, so it will put that higher in order of importance."
I figured out a way to get Front Row to work on my Mac Mini and use the AirClick Remote I have on my Mac to control it all. All that being said, I'm not sure it's all that great. It uses iPhoto, which is a horrible app for picture display, especially when it's compared with a free application like Picasa. The video piece ties in nicely to iTunes, and it has some cool movie preview technology that's very slick, along with the ability to view music videos and tv shows you've downloaded. It looks sweet on my 52" HDTV - I'm just not sure the capability is all that special. It's really just packaged existing mac functionality into a nice interface - nothing real new that I can see. After dinking around in the core of the Mac OS, I continue to be blown away by how powerful it is and how it just crushes the Windows Operating system in terms of functionality, capability and architecture. The interface for application installation is so simple, but the unix core gives you the ability to customize at least at the same level as can be down in XP or a server environment.
When your son starts a conversation out with "Dad, did you know that a nutcracker doesn't really crack nuts?", you know what's coming next. A broken nutcracker. Nate took Madeline's nutcracker and tried to crack a nut with it, cracking the nutcracker in half. I can't really blame him for doing something that I might have tried first if he hadn't.
Check out Mossberg's latest WSJ review on the new iMac G5. This thing looks fantastic, especially the entertainment center functionality. The Front Row software looks great. Doesn't seem to be offered for my Mac Mini.
My son Nate now has someone other than me to aspire to. There's now this video game freak.
Erik turned me on to this cool new music site called Pandora. You pick an artist or song and it will play songs by that artist, as well as songs related musically, thematically and by related by others. It's free and pretty interesting.
Met with a friend of mine, John, for breakfast this morning. John Hedapohl has agreed to be a spiritual mentor for me, something I really haven't taken advantage of since we agreed to start doing this six months ago. We met today and I remember why I need this in my life. John has an amazing balance of knowledge, reflection and practicality of life, people and faith that I need. When I imagine a conversation with Jesus, I think it would be a lot like my conversations with John. Lots of listening, openess, acceptance, truth and love.
Technology I'm loving:
- Mac Mini
- Treo 650
- Plantronics 510 Headset
- Firefox 1.5
- Konfabulator
- Gallery2
- Plantronics CS50 Desktop Wireless Headset
- iPod (40GB)
What sucks is that i'm on a budget and trying NOT just to go out and buy what I want. novel idea, huh? With that being said, is there anything I'm missing on my lists?
Quick observation: As I look at my list of technology I'm currently digging, three of the items on that list (iPod, CS50 and 650) came from a friend of mine, Mack, having them before anyone I knew and nudging me towards them. He's currently got the 60GB video iPod and the TomTom system, which I want badly, but I'm having a tough time saving up for.
At least i don't still have a phone like Bill Belanger.
Today is my friend Will's birthday. I laughed so hard when Susan posted this picture of him. Will is (in the words of the immortal Bob Rays) my brotha-from-anotha-motha. Statistically speaking, the chances of him dying are much higher now than they were last year due to his age. I have many pictures of myself with both bad hair and flannel that I hope never make it into the public like this.
Will's holding my now-eight year old son Nate in the piture above. Here's a fun birthday story to tell you what kind of friend Will is:
Cathie was out of town on a women's retreat and I was at home with an 18 month old and a new born baby trying to survive. Will had come over to watch a movie with me. We were enjoying the movie when all of the sudden I heard a scream, only to find Nate in his bed, covered in Puke. I grabbed Nate, threw him in the bathtub while Will grabbed the puke-covered sheets and washed them. Greater love has no man.....
Will is also the only non-blood-or-married family member included in the Kurt birthday-phone-call tradition. It goes like this. Every Kurt (including Kevin and Susan) member must talk to another family member on their birthday. Doesn't matter where you are or what you're doing. You must call them. Some secretly hope that other's don't call so this can be used against them in the future. The calls have begun today to Will, with Dan/Kris and kids waking Will up at 7AM with a phone call. Funny thing, Will is typically the first person to call people and typically will remind me about my own family's birthdays.
