Dave Kurt's Blog

Great news. Makenna is coming home from the hospital. She's got pneumonia and RSV, but the cast is off of her arm. Pray for Dana and Eli also. The kids have ear infections and just about every other kind of illness you can get.

My iPod died again for the fourth time. It's a 4G 40GB iPod and it's done pretty well for me over the past 2 1/2 years. I take the thing everywhere I go - in my car, on the plane and to the gym so it takes a beating. I bought the Best Buy extended service plan which (as I understand it) when it dies for the fourth time, they'll replace my iPod with the original cost of the one I bought (for $400 2 1/2 years ago). In theory, I should be able to get one of the 80GB Video iPods. We'll see.

Cool concept. Not sure how well it works. This guy's site talks about how to host your iTunes repository on Amazon's S3 service via PC or Mac. Not a bad way to host it and not a bad way to back it up.

Led Zeppelin is touring again. I'm there.

It's my brother-in-law Kevin's birthday. He's 30. Old. Old and bald.

Here's some stuff you might not know about Kevin:

• Kevin has a large head and has passed that head size down to his children.
  
• My brothers and I like to believe that Kevin has had relations with my sister only the three times that their children were conceived.
• Kevin coaches girls basketball for East Lansing.
• Kevin is a video game ninja. He can beat any level of any game and learn any game within seconds. It's creepy.
• Kevin can fix or build just about anything.
• He played college basketball for Huntington College even though he is only 5'6" tall (I think).
  
• Aside from holidays, I've only seen Kevin wear t-shirts and
  
• Kevin has helped us move every single time and even helped pack for some of them.
• Kevin is a super generous guy who is willing to do whatever is needed - watch a million kids, build a deck, spend a whole day fixing a hot water heater - you name it. That's the kind of guy he is.
  

I set Nate and Maddie up with e-mail accounts to teach them how to use e-mail responsibly and so that they can send me notes I'm traveling. I got two e-mails from them today:

Dear Dad,
I love you a lot. I cant wait till you come back! I miss you. I'm writing this to you because well I don't know! Do you ever get lonely when your on your trips? well I love you. Bye. love, Maddie

Hi dad,
I miss you. Where are you at right now?Can you send pictures with emails?I love you. You are the best. i HOPE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THAT TWILIGHT PRINCESS COMES TODAY!!!!!!! Cross your fingers for it. BYE!!!!
Sincerely
Nathan

I was checking their e-mail accounts tonight and I found this e-mail that Nate had sent to Maddie:

Dear Maddie,
I love you in every way possible. When I see you I say to myself what a good sister!
you're an awesome sister . Yes I know we may get in fights at times but still you are the best! Once again you make my heart warm when I am near you. Also I love you very much.

Sincerely,
Nathan

I know my kids aren't perfect, but gosh I'm proud of them.

I'm in beautiful Hot Springs for a couple of days of meetings. After dinner we went downtown to Hot Springs version of Hollywood's walk of fame and saw Johnny Cash's 'star' since he was born here. My brothers Jon and Will both will be excited to see that Mario Lopez

(of Saved by the Bell and Dancing with the Stars fame) will be the grand marshall of their St. Patricks Day Parade.

Sunday was a family day. We went bowling after church and I couldn't believe how expensive bowling is getting. For an hour of bowling and shoes, it cost us over $40 for a family of 5. Wow.

After bowling we decided to go play outside. Last year we'd built a fort in the wood behind our house and spent the night in it. The kids and I decided to build it out a little bit, so we built a new roof for it and dug out the inside so that it be a little larger. Our plan is to get the fort ready for another all-nighter.

We tried to build a big enough snow pile to jump off the swingset, but we just don't have enough snow to do anything too spectacular, but Maddie tried a few jumps before we moved on to the tire swing for thrills.

I talked to Eli this morning and Mckeanna is still in the hospital, hooked up to an IV, oxygen and getting breathing treatments. Mckenna and Dana slept well last night in the hospital. Once she can keep her oxygen levels up on her own and starts eating they'll let her go, but she's not doing either right now.

I just read this interview with Rick Rubin, founder of Def-Jam records and producer of Johnny Cash's 5 disc American Anthology. In the interview, Rubin talks about the process behind Johnny Cash selecting the songs he did for the CD and how they recorded them.

Dana and Eli's 15 month old, Makenna Schultz, was admitted to the hospital this evening with pneumonia and a 105 degree temperature. Please take a sec and pray for her.

My Dad took us to see the Harlem Globetrotters tonight at the MSU Breslin Center in East Lansing. Growing up, my Dad took us to see them a bunch of times and we always enjoyed it. My father-in-law, Nate and my nephews Gabe, Shabadu (Matthew), Andy and Steve-O all enjoyed it too. Before and during intermissions there were a group of trampoline basketball players launched themselves in the air and made some ridiculous shots. 20 years later, I still loved it and was amazed at what these guys can do.

Whenever Brad makes it another year, we're always impressed. Every time we watch our all time favorite movie Old School, the scene of Blue's funeral (Brad's name sake) comes on and we discuss how this is exactly the way we want Brad's funeral to go. In the movie, it went like this. In Ted's world, it goes like this (be sure and click on the video and check out the comments people have left. They're even funnier than the video):

Happy Birthday Brad "Blue" Jeffrey (as pictured in Key West toady mode)

To celebrate Brad's 53rd birthday, here are ten things you may or may not know about Brad:

• Brad is a veterinarian who likes to kill animals: Deer, Pheasant, Bear, Duck, Elk and the occasional puppy. He feels that he makes the herd/flock stronger every time he offs one of them and puts it in his belly.
  
• Brad has a son, Mitch, that is the same age as me.
• Brad and I went on our first official "friendship outing" 11 years ago to a Rolling Stones concert that I'd won tickets for on the radio. He was the only person that I knew in the South Lyon area that was old enough to want to go. A guy one section over was drunk enough to fall off of the upper deck at the Silverdome and die.
  
• Brad's shoulder was dislocated and broken a couple of years ago by our friend Will. (Will often hurts people when he gets angry.)
• At one time, Brad had to extract a sheep's head from a frozen pail of water after his wife was not able to euthanize the sheep with a 2x4.
  
• Beyond his new found fame (read here, here and here) at introducing his family to the lost art of cannibalism, Brad was a pretty big deal in Detroit, being the resident TV Vet for the morning show "Good Morning Detroit" and would do regular spots on the show. He's been a vet to the stars, including Mitch Albums dog.
• At one time, Brad knew the location of a large field of government marijuana was grown as Hemp during the war. Rumor has it that he visited it immediately after the birth of one of his children way back when.
• Brad and I both think that Dallas Willard is the smartest living guy in the world when it comes to theology. (This makes Joe Muzzi very angry for some reason).
  
• Brad has a spermatic testicle, which means a big 'ol growth on his nut.
• Although my wife disagrees, Brad is a pretty good source of medical information even though he's not a people doctor. I go to him for advice before I go to my doctor with most medical questions, and occasionally take the antibiotic or other drug on the side from him that may cure what ails me.
  
• Brad is one of the wisest men most generous and humble men I know and one of my closest friends Everyone needs a Brad in their life that when the world goes to crap, Brad has either just the right words of advice, encouragement or ability to tell you that he has no clue what to do. Either way he will stand beside you come hell or high water.

Brad is very, very old and likely close to death. Will and I have dibs on much of his stuff and will miss him when he passes on.

I've worked at Xerox for ten years and it's a far from perfect company, but I'm very proud of this place. Xerox has a social leave program that employees can apply for. Xerox pays these employees salaries for a year while they use their work place skills to help non-profits make the world a better place. They've also recently given 122 scholarships to minority students for technical studies.

We've been in a turn-around for the past few years when things were pretty ugly. Our CEO Anne Mulcahy has done an amazing job turning things around while keeping the company motivated. We just reported our earnings and we're getting continued positive news from Wall Street (with the exception of a few naysayers).

Anyways, I like working for Xerox. I wake up every morning looking forward to doing my job.

I've got my new receiver setup and I'm in love. Deeply. I had to gut my entire AV system which consisted of a rats nest of wires. I finally pulled my 300 disc CD changer off my rack since I haven't used it in the two years since I've had my MacMini running my Audio. My new receiver allows me to switch all of my video with component and HDMI and it will actually pull the audio off the HDMI channel instead of having to run separate audio and video signials. When cleaning up my system, I pulled out 20 different AV connectors out of the mix and I feel like I had a digital enema. The sound quality is phenomenal, the interface is simple and I love the way it uplifts my RCA and S-Video inputs up to component video. It took me another hour to reprogram my Harmony 520 Remote and I'm back in business.

It reminds me of what we talked about at our junior high youth group on Tuesday: Stuff. "The stuff you own ends up owning you."

I finally upgraded to Amazon Prime. I buy most of my stuff online. Stores seem pretty inefficient and inexpensive. One of the rare reasons I'll go to a store and buy something is if I need it quickly. Amazon Prime gives you the ability to get free 2nd day shipping from Amazon and $3.99 next day shipping. Through my job I've had the opportunity to work with Amazon and TE hooked me up with a free preview of the service. What I finally just got (it takes me a while) is that it's not just a free upgrade to second day shipping, it's free second day shipping no matter what the item or dollar amount. I always figured that it was only an upgrade option, but you'd still need to do the $25 minimum before it would happen.

I've had Sony audio/visual equipment forever, but it seems like lately their quality has slipped. A recent Sony DVD player only lasted a year before dying and my current Sony receiver has had the front right channel start to die, which makes it pretty useless. After putting up with this for a year, I finally broke down and ordered a new receiver (via Amazon, using my Amazon prime feature and getting it the next day). The Onkyo TX-SR6045S (which happened to be the top model from consumer reports) lets you do HDMI and Component video switching and lets you configure the unit from the TV and microphone-based calibration of the unit.

My good friend Brad is old and with that old age comes a lot of great stories. Some of the greatest stories I've ever heard have come from Brad. Mark Kohne, Brad and I had sushi for lunch today and I laughed hard when he told me this story. Warning, half of Brad's story is how he tells them. My story telling skills pale in comparison:

Brad was cooking dinner last night for his family, making shake-and-bake type chicken. As he was cutting the chicken he cut off the tip of his finger. Try as he might, he couldn't find it in the cut chicken anywhere. He shook the chicken, cooked it and served it to his family. Before they ate, he explained to them, "After dinner, I've got a surprise for you." The family was excited about the surprise and as they ate their dinner, finger tip and all.

After dinner, the family gathered around waiting for their "big surprise". Brad went to the trash and pulled out the loads of paper towels he'd used to try and stop the bleeding of his finger and explained to them that one of them was the lucky person who'd eaten his finger tip. You would think they would feel lucky and thankful, but instead they gagged and screamed.

I'm not sure why, but Rascal loves Emily. Emily loves to grab the cab and cuddle and squeeze her any chance she gets. We found Rascal sleeping with Emily last night and this morning the two were back together cuddling.

Although Will makes me out to be a borderline stalker, I do think Sara Silverman is funny (can I help it if she was drawn to me at the Jimmy Kimmel show?). This is a very funny video clip promo for Sara new show, mocking Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth documentary (or should i say, Mockumentary).

This is a good comparison of the Apple TV vs a Mac Mini. After reading this, I canceled my pre-order for my appleTV. I like the HDMI and digital audio output, but my concern is how dumbed down the interface, network and codec support will be. It looks good in theory, but I'll wait until someone else gets one before i buy this and sell my current MacMini.

Thanks to Tom for this amazing video. This must have taken weeks to film and edit.

Cathie worked in Emily's kindergarten class this morning. One of the little girls working with at a table stared at her for a second and then began this conversation:

Little Girl: What's your name
Cathie: Mrs. Kurt
Little Girl: You're not as pretty as my Mom. My Mom's a hip-hop Mom.

Maybe she had seen the picture on Susan's blog. After seeing this picture of Susan, she didn't feel as bad:

We celebrated my Grandma's 89th birthday yesterday. Even with only 9 fingers (Emily still prays that it will grow back), Grandma is still going strong. She'd broken her ankle right after my Mom died and was in a rehab home getting back to walking. She moved back into her apartment on Saturday to see if she can get around on her own. If you look closely at her name tag, you'll get a sense for my Grandma's sense of humor and why she fits so well into our family.

We were at my Dad's house celebrating my Grandma's 89th birthday yesterday and after the party Dan, Kevin and I took the kids sledding at the nearby Granger Hill. This is by far one of the best sledding hills I've ever been to in Michigan. It's got three separate hills, all of which generate some wicked speed.

The snow was hard packed and fast, but it made for some wicked wipe-outs. If you were turned sideways when you hit the washboard at the bottom of the hill, you were pretty much assured of a wipe-out, which felt about the same as rolling on concrete. The kids went non-stop for two hours and I was able to get some fun video:

You can see the rest of the pictures here in the Kurt Family Photo Gallery.

I found this note from Madeline (8) to Emily (5) taped on Em's door tonight:

Dear Emily,
You're the best sister ever. You're fun to be around, you cheer me up when I'm sad, and you're so nice. If I lined all the sisters up in the world and picked one, that would be you. I love you and nobody else could take your place in my heart.

Sincerely,
Maddie
XOXOXOX

This song from Scrubs sums up the 'Guy Love' between Will and I very nicely (I'm the Zach Braff character in the relationship)

Nate's team had their first pratice yesterday and their first game today, which they lost (Mike, if this were you son, you would be angry, wouldn't you?). Nate's coach is a friend of mine, Tim Hill, who I served with on the board of Project 311. Tim love basketball and actually owns a pair of every Air Jordan show style ever made. He is also one of the few black men in the South Lyon area. He was sharing with me that people often ask him if he actually has a kid in the school district, because it's such a white community. We were joking that he's a pretty hot commodity as a coach in this area, due to his uniqueness. He's a phenomenal coach who played three years of college ball and has a great understanding the game, how to coach and motivate the kids while teaching them the fundamentals.

I flew into Atlanta yesterday and went over to a friend of mines house for dinner. My friend Mack is the ultimate gadget guy. He me makes me look like a technophobe, frankly. Arriving at his house, I wasn't sure if I was in the right place until I saw the box for an infra-red auto-opening trash-can sitting outside his garage, so I knew I was there. His 13 computers and 2 multi-terabyte file servers makes my technology infrastructure pale in comparison. We went through gadget after gadget as he showed . He's got a fully digital recording studio, a huge collection of signed guitars and a separate digital DJ/Karaoke setup with full intelligent lighting setup. This picture is of his office, with the center screen being a touch screen tablet that he can take notes on with a pen and have it translate them to text.

Mack's always had a large music collection, but he's taken it to the next level. He figured out what it takes to make iTunes break. Apparently a 170,000 songs is more than iTunes was built to handle.

Mack was my boss and mentor a couple of years ago and we've still stayed in touch now that we work in different divisions of the same company. I finally had a chance to meet Mack's wife and daughter who are great and love the technology as well, taking all of his hand-me-downs.

I'm in week three of the Bible in a Year thing I'm doing with some friends. So far, so good. It's about 15 minutes per day of reading, which I do first thing in the morning before or after working out. I've gotten into a good rhythm of reading and journaling each morning that gives me a good chance to reflect on the day coming up and connect with God.

It's funny how a few weeks ago I was in a slump, but I figured I was managing life pretty well on my own. The more I've taken the time to sit back, journal and reflect on where I was at, the less "under-control" I saw my life. I'm not out of my funk, but I've got some rhythms back in my life that are good and fulfilling.

I was reading someone's blog post a while back about how stuff can make you happy. I guess it can, for a while. My computers are a double edged sword. I buy them, sure that they'll make me happy forever and they end up giving me a headache. I just got done re-doing my office computer infrastructure, which consists of four computers, not to mention the three others I have dispersed around the house. i recently bought a new Dell system because my own desktop was getting to be five years old, which is ancient in computer years. It was a top of the line system when I bought it and I'd upgraded it to the point that it was a souped-up duct taped system that was choking with all of the load I was putting on it.

I took that system and turned it into a central file, multimedia, backup, web and application server. I re-loaded it from scratch and have it set up to mirror all of my data around the house, and serve my iPods, stereo systems and other desktops with music, pictures and video. I've got it setup with a scheduled on-line off-site backup, so that I'm not at risk of losing any data should my house burn down or if i were to spill a cup of coffee on my system. I need to pick up another disk and set it up as a mirror for my data, but that can wait a little while - I hope. I've also got it setup as a centralized torrent server that my other systems can feed as well as running all of my web services to give a more stable environment for the family photo gallery and my iTunes playlist publisher for my blog.

I think everything is just how I'd like it for now, until another computer dies. I've finally rebuilt the kids computer and got that up and running and I still have a laptop that needs a new hard drive. Some guys have a honey-do list of home-repairs, I have one of computer infrastructure.

I'm redoing my computer infrastructure so the Family Photo Gallery is down right now.

Cathie and i watched the second part of 24 tonight. It's the wrong show to watch before bed-time because you end up so amped from the intensity of the show afterwards, you can't sleep. I can't believe Jack shot Curtis. Had to do it, though. I'd of shot Will in the throat in similar circumstances. And in the leg, just for emphasis.

If you don't watch this show, you need to rearrange everything in your life so that you can watch it. Seriously.

Maddie's class did an exercise in segregation today. The teacher gave half of the kids stickers and those with stickers could do all of their normal activities, get drinks of water and had erasers. At one point, Madeline got her name put on the board for laughing. It was a cool object lesson in racism for the kids that had a big impact on Madeline.

While other schools were taking the day off to celebrate Martin Luther King day, the kids at our school were actually learning about the segregation that MLK fought against.

We got hit with a big 'ol Ice Storm last night. It's snowed since then, so the ice hasn't had a chance to thaw and my trees are pretty stressed out about it, bent over at half mast. I think we're expecting more of the same weather tonight.

I got back last night from our Winterblast Retreat. Our youth group went with Calvary Baptist church's youth group. In the past we'd gone to Spring Hill Camp, camp up North with amazing facilities. We decided to do it on our own this year because Spring Hill's food keeps getting worse, the camp more expensive, their pre-registration and cancellation policies tougher and for groups as far away as ours, we're never able to sign up for stuff by the time we get there.

We went to Grace Adventures camp in Mears, MI on the West side of the state, right outside the Silver Lake Sand Dunes. The retreat was called "Who Am I?" looking at Jesus in terms of our false images and the reality of who he is. I MC'd the retreat and before each speaker, Reagan would come up dressed as Jesus and act one of people's mis-conceptions of Jesus: King James Bible Jesus (quoting shakeperean King James scripture), Magician Jesus, Wimpy Relativist Peacenick Jesus and Dictator Jesus, as seen below. Reagan and I would talk as Reagan would do his hilarious spiel in character as we'd come to the conclusion that he was not the real Jesus.

Jason Shinn, Mark Butler and Phil Woodman taught the sessions and did an amazing job with the teachings. They did a great job using scriptures, story and video to hit the kids.

The camp had a great climbing wall also. 10 of us went climbing and it was fun watching the kids climb and cheer each other on as they scaled the wall.

We had no snow, but we made due by hitting the Silver Lake Sand Dunes close by. The place was deserted and the sand was frozen, but the kids had a blast. We climbed up, slid down and ran down the dunes, loving every second of it. The side benefit was that we wore the kids down hiking up and down the dunes.

The two pictured above are Matt and Seth, two of the more amusing kids. Saturday night around 12:30 in our cabin, the lights were out and these two started making farting noises, and being junior high guys, the rest laughed. You'd assume that after about five minutes they would stop. This kept going for about 30 minutes with the kids making the noises and others laughing. Twenty minutes in I just could stop laughing at the absurdity of the moment, but also realizing that this is exactly why I like working with junior high kids. I fell asleep to the noises while Shinn was forced to be the bad cop 30 minutes in.

We got home around 4:00 on Sunday and I was beat. It was an amazing event. I got to spend a ton of time with the kids and see them impacted by a message that will stick with them for a long time and have the potential to impact their eternity.

You can see more of the pictures here in the photo gallery.

What a way to end the week. The Catholic Shopper (one of my Dad's favorite stores) has new Jesus Sports figurines. What better way to communicate to your loved one that Jesus is with you always? This skiing one makes me a little nervous, because Jesus is skiing too close for safety - and I question whether someone who could walk on water really needs ski poles. My Dad was on the ski patrol at a few different ski resorts in Michigan over the years and taught all of the kids in our family to ski. What better way to tell my Dad I love him than with a statue like this?

I just came across this picture of my Mom just before she found out she had cancer. I love it.

I'm embarrassed to say that I watched the entire 2 hour Apple keynote address that highlighted the much acclaimed iPhone and AppleTV. I am in love with both. The iPhone probably isn't the most effective phone for what I need for business, but it's amazing. Thanks to Will on this very interesting perspective on the iPhone from the Palm SmartPhone community.

For the past two years, I've been using a macMini as a multi-media center for all of my video, photos and music. The appleTV does this and does it better with HDMI and digital audio ports, capable of 720p video quality and built in wireless network. I pre-ordered one for when they come out in February.

Wow. I just saw this amazing Johnny Cash video for the folk song God's gonna cut you Down, done by Rick Rubin and Tony Kaye. They got every celebrity whose anyone to appear in the video, which is shot in all black and white. My brother Jon's hero Justin Timberlake was actually the guy who came up with the idea for the video.

I got a great Nyko iPod car mount for Christmas. The clips the manufacturer sent were defective and I noticed that the air freshener in my car had the same kind of clip. It seemed like a great idea to take the clip off the air freshener and put it on the iPod docking station. It didn't seem like a bad idea at the time to set the air freshener on the console of my car, but I was wrong. Very wrong.

Somehow the air-freshener stuff spilled in my car, on my workout gloves and on my iPod headphones. This horrible smell has been following me everywhere. It smells good in small doses, but is killing me in heavy doses. I can't get rid of it.

My brother Jon got the kids these crazy butt sleds. In theory, you can strap the sled-harness on and sled down the hill without having to drag a pesky sled. Kind of an "inspector gadget" approach to sledding. Emily was more than happy to test this sled out with our first dusting of snow since the Fall. Emily was loving having the snow and was just happy to be playing outside.

We had our Junior High Chaos meeting last night. The series is called "The Losers Lounge" where we're looking at how God used all sorts of imperfect people in the Bible to do great things. We had some fun games, including the one from the picture above involving tape and balloons and another involving Alphabet Spagettios.

For the last part of the meeting, we broke off into small groups and we went through the stuff in more depth. Jess's girls didn't even get through half the questions, with the guys it can be like pulling teeth to get multi-word answers.

We've got our retreat this weekend. We leave Friday afternoon and get back Sunday afternoon. We've got 12 junior high kids going and Calvary Baptist (the church we're putting this retreat on with) has around 60 kids going. We've got snow, and it should be a blast. The weekend's topic is entitled "Who am I?" looking at the reality of Jesus and all of the false images we have of him. The T-Shirts are some of the coolest ever:

You can see more pictures from the Chaos meeting here.

Cathie and Monaca had been planning for a while to re-do Maddie's room as a surprise. Monaca came over early yesterday and the two of them painted and re-decorated the room in pure Trading Spaces fashion. They had new furniture, blinds, light fixtures and wall hangings along with a new border and re-painting the entire room, everything color-coordinated, of course.

They worked for about 10 hours straight to get things ready for the unveiling, which you can see here on video:


Maddie was surprised and loved it. Will and I did the heavy lifting with the furniture and hanging the curtains. Thankfully Maddie made it through the night, surviving a room full of paint fumes.

I just got done reading this article about Dallas Willard, a Christian Philosopher one of the deepest thinking and most articulate guys out there. As I've mentioned before, I've read a few of his books, including The Divine Conspiracy, which rocked me like no other book has.

I like this excerpt from the article on the subject discipleship, which unfortunately is way too true:

Generally, what I find is that the ordinary people who come to church are basically running their lives on their own, utilizing 'the arm of the flesh'—their natural abilities—to negotiate their way," he says. "They believe there is a God and they need to check in with him. But they don't have any sense that he is an active agent in their lives. As a result, they don't become disciples of Jesus. They consume his merits and the services of the church. … Discipleship is no essential part of Christianity today.

Our Nintendo Wii is having problems. Nate brought the Zelda disc up to me and there were some deep scratches in the disc in a circular pattern very close to each other. I looked at one of the other games and saw the same thing. I called Nintendo's tech support and they asked me to send in the Wii and scratched disc for repair. By the time I get the shipping label, send it in, have it fixed and get it back, we're probably talking three weeks, which sucks.

--

Dave Kurt

For the past 4 or 5 months or I've been in this slump in my faith. There's been this distance been God and I that's not normally there, or at least not for long periods of time like this. It's tough to describe. During my Mom's death I felt this intimacy with God, not that I was pursuing Him through that, but that He was right there beside me as I was going through it, knowing that I didn't have much to give and He was there to just be enough for me, but I didn't have it in me to pursue Him. Over the past months, I've tried to meet God where I'm at, but it's seemed hollow on my side, like I was going through the motions. I'd sit down to read the bible or pick up a book and just not connect with what I was reading. Normally, I feel like I can just push through this. In the past I felt like if I was diligent in spending time each day reading, journaling and praying that I could snap myself out of my slump. Given enough self-discipline, I could pick myself up by my own bootstraps. This time, I felt like I didn't really even want to do that. It's a weird place for me to be. I've been dealing with life on my own terms and doing alright at it. My communication with God has been more of an on-the-go kind of conversation, but nothing intimate. I know it's not a great long-term solution, but it's been working alright and I just haven't been able to move on my own. I'm all for talking about the good stuff God's doing in my life and the way I'm being challenged and changed, but it's not as easy to throw out there the stagnation. Luckily I've got great friends who know me well and meet me where I'm at with this kind of stuff.

I sat down the other day and wrote in my journal for the first time in 4 months. I did it after reading the Bible as a part of this "Reading the Bible in a Year" thing that my friend Brad setup for Will, Mark, Eli, Bob, Matt and a bunch of other guys. It's a cool setup managed through Crosswalk.com's web site. It gives you a list of sequential readings each day (about 15-20 minutes worth) and allows you to see what you're supposed to read and update your progress accordingly so your friends can see where you're at as well within the group and offer encouragement and accountability. At the very least, it's got me moving. Inertia is always tough for me to get through, so this is a good start. I'm reading with some renewed interest, I'm journaling again and trying move towards a deeper level of intimacy in my walk with Jesus, back to where I know it can be, to where it's been for me in the past.

Fun facts about Pi:
You might assume that it'd be useful to know a trillion digits of pi. However, if you had a circle the size of the observable universe, and you wanted to compute its circumference with an accuracy equal to the size of a proton, the number of digits of pi that you'd need is only 50.

I thought this was an hilarious story about a guy who got fired from the night shift at Wal-Mart and decided to get back at them. Read it here at The Wal-Mart Prank

Nate and I went to the Ray's tonight to watch Michigan do what they do best in the Rose Bowl. Matt Gielow brought over this game called Lightning Reaction Extreme. It's a game where each person holds the handle and watches the light in the middle. When it turns from red to green, the last person to hit their button gets shocked. Fairly hard. It's a fantastic game. Nate and I immediately took to it, not sure everyone else was too excited about the game. When we got home, Nate handed it to Cathie to play without explaining how the game worked and Cathie had a very shocking experience with the game.

My nephew Bender (Ben) Mayes cracks me up. He's almost two and he's almost always got a smile on his face. He's oepn to anyone who will pay attention to him and he seems to like everyone.

As a side note, his sister Allie really took to our kitten rascal when they were over yesterday. Allie has her own little way of speaking, and can't quite say the word "kitty" so instead uses a word that sounds a lot like kitty but rhymes with a part of the female anatomy in the chestal region. It never stopped being funny.

After midnight, our neighbors (the Hannigans, Lanams and Lowers) came over and silly-stringed our front door. Not to be outdone, we silly-stringed them back and decided that to turn it up a notch. Kevin and lugged my old hot water heater over to the Hannigans front porch - because who doesn't want to wake up int he morning with a 250lb hot water heater at your house.

We woke up the next morning to find our dryer, hot water heater and a Christmas tree on our porch.

We've got a running thing going with these neighbors. When Buck was visiting once, we went over and took a road-barrier complete with flashing lights and put it on their front porch. We've done a bunch of stuff back and forth, but this was the first time it involved appliances.

Last night we had most of my family over for New Years Eve. The Dan/Kris family were there, The Kevin/Sooze family, our family and my Dad were all there. Everyone got here around 7 and we ended up getting to sleep about 2.

Around 10pm the kids decided to put on a show for us. They sang and danced to four different songs for us. The video's pretty darn funny. I'll post it later.


My Dad was the real hero, playing cards with the the kids for about four hours straight, while the rest of us

Kevin taught us a fun game with scrabble pieces that goes pretty quickly and doesn't use a scrabble board. I'm not much good at it, but I was able to get some big points by twice using the combination of Eh and Ho to double-use the letter H.

We had all sorts of interesting drinks - from Jello shots (tequila/lime, vanilla stoli/orange, coconut rum/rasberry), a peanut butter, jelly drink and one that tasted like a red tootsie roll pop. We had enough food to feed a small army with everyone bringing different appetizers and desserts, including guacamole. I'm not sure exactly what Cathie and Sooze are doing in these pictures, but it had something do with the fact that old Guacamole looks a lot like baby diarrhea. I know Cathie's going to love this picture.

As you can see from the picture below, my sister Susan wasn't happy when Ben kept getting out of bed, but at least Ben got to bang in the new year. My friend Nicki told me a while back that her family would always bang pots and pans on their porch for New Years. I thought this was the goofiest tradition in the world, but it turned out that Cathie used to do the same thing as a kid. At midnight, all of the kids have their pots and pans ready to go, but it was raining too hard and even

Another tradition that my nephew Matthew has always loved is his new years eve kiss from his Aunt Susan. Maybe it's the hair on her chin-mole that tickles Matthew that he loves so much, but we this is one tradition that Matthew never misses out on.