Bill Keith Dave Mack Black Olive Picture

3 others dressed alike. Bill Belanger, Keith Rouser, Myself and Mack. Apparently, this was the outfit du'jour.

It was also a pretty safe combination of colros as many of us got our pictures taken as part of our executive bio's. They had to do a full thing of makeup for us and the makeup gal spent an additional 5 minutes trimming my eye-brow hair. She left my ear-hair alone.

Mack and Dave Black Olive Picture

Nothing like dressing like another guy, right down to the color of your t-shirt. I got a chance to spend some time last week with Mack, whose been a mentor and a boss for me over the past couple of years. He's also responsible for turning me onto the show 24, which started off last night and is on again tonight. I'm hooked. As my friend Will puts it, 24 is like TV Crack.

Dave and Will Bangham

.

I met this guy last week and had to have a picture taken with him, just based on name: Will Bangham.

Tsunami before and after satellite pictures.

In the meeting we were in today, they showed a video to 400 of us of one of the great leaders of Xerox, Joe Wilson from 60 years back. In the video, Joe talks about his comittment to the people and customer service. Great video, no big deal - until the end. After doing his spiel, Joe Wilson says, "And now and I want to turn it over to Dave Kurt...." and the video ends. There was a mumble and a lot of people looking at me to see if I had a clue what was going on. I didn't. Apparently, there was a great leader at one time here named Dave Kurt. I probably found this more amusing than anyone else, just because people have no idea whether it was a joke or actual.

There's a new virus out there, called the "It Takes Guts to Say Jesus" virus. Apparently if you open it, it will erase everything on your hard drive.This information was announced yesterday morning from IBM; AOL states that this is a very dangerous virus, much worse than
"Melissa," and that there is NO Remedy for it at this time.

I'm fairly sure this virus actually came FROM Jesus, because he got tired of people sending out those stupid freaking "Forward this e-mail if you love Jesus as much as I do" e-mails.

Apparently Evil Knievel can't take a joke.... Knievel loses 'pimp' appeal

After having a photo appear on a web site calling him a pimp, he sued, lost and an appeals court responded:

Considering the target audience, the Knievel caption "was most likely intended as a compliment,'' said Judge A. Wallace Tashima, citing one Web site's definition of pimp as a slang term whose meanings include "cool.'' At the very least, he said, any reasonable reader would have considered the caption "an attempt at humor.''

But Bea said a jury should be able to consider reactions from a more diverse audience. "What about those dowdy corporate bourgeois who are Knievel's clients and who allegedly have abandoned him because of the photograph and caption?'' he asked.

I just like the fact that they were able to work the term "dowdy corporate bourgeois" into a sentance.

One other highlight from the meeting yesterday was when one of VP's, Rich, quoted Napoleon Dynamite in his presentation.... The part about going back in time to replay the fourth quarter. Cracked me up.

They brought in Outward Bound tonight to lead some team building activities. There were about 30 teams participating, 10 people each. The things they gave us were youth group games - like buliding a tower out of newspapers and throwing balls. The Outward Bound team did an amazing job of facilitaing a huge group - enough to make any youth pastor proud.

Interesting day today. The company brought in a consultant from Disney to talk through some of the theory behind Disney's customer experience. In one example, he shared the magic behind how they help guests find lost cars. Seems impossible when people barely remember what their rental car looks like, let alone where they parked amongst 100,000 cars. What they do is ask the guest when they arrive, which most remember. As the cars arrive in the morning, they mark down every five minutes where they're parking people. All the attendant has to do is match the arrive time with the appropriate location and whallah!

A good friend of mine who I happen to work with (Bill Belanger) was a part of a roundtable discussion in front of the group. If you don't know Bill, he's about 5'2" tall and built like a tank - a hockey player. Bill goes to sit down in the raised chair on the stage, but the chair is too tall for him, so his feet dangle down like a kid sitting in an adult chain. Everyone laughed, including Bil. He has a good sense of humor about his height, but I figured Will, Brad and Noel would appreciate the story....

I was asleep before 11 last night, which was nice. The nights get longer and longer here, so I'm getting my sleep while I can. I got up this morning at 5:45 and played raquetball with a friend of mine, Matt. He beat me pretty badly both games, but it sure beat running on a treadmill for 40 minutes. The weather is amazing here - 60+ degrees!

I know I didn't blog much last week, but I had an amazing week at home. My days consisted of going to bed late and sleeping in, all while hanging out with the family throughout the day, doing very little that was productive. I watched a lot of movies, played lots of games with the kids, took some naps and read a lot of books. I was so recharged by the end of it, but it made it that much harder to go out of town for a week.

I got together on Wednesday with a couple of guys from work at BW3's and then had my family came over later in the day to go sledding, but weather didn't premit, so we just hung out for a while doing. We had a fun new-years, but pretty low-key. We hung out at the Reynold's house with a bunch of friends, ate a lot and laughed a lot. The next couple of days were just spent recharging. I ate like a pig throughout the whole holiday season. On December 26th, I decided I needed to shed some weight, as I was topping 210lbs. I went to the gym every day and hit it hard, doing hard-core cardio and weights every day. I finished up the week getting down to about 203 and feeling a little better about things, but still needing to change my eating.

I'm in Leesburg, VA at the National Conference Center for our company kick-off meeting all week, outside of Washington, D.C. I hate this place. It was designed back in the 70's with a maze in mind, to create a "learning environment". They were fools. If you check out the web site, it shows a very kind and simple map that would fool the ignorant. It took me a long time to find my room and even longer to find the cafeteria. Each room is like a self-contained dorm room, 12x12 with a bed, bathroom and desk. I've been coming here on and off for the past 9 years and it's gotten better over the years. We no longer share bathrooms with our wall-mate.

I'm still laughing from watching Napoleon Dynamite a few days ago. Some of my favorite lines, most of which will be meaningless without watching the movie.... Actually, they're pretty meaningless even watching the movie, but they're much funnier with Napoleon's delivery..

Napoleon Dynamite: Pedro offers you his protection.
--
Deb: What are you drawing?
Napoleon Dynamite: A liger.
Deb: What's a liger?
Napoleon Dynamite: It's pretty much my favorite animal. It's like a lion and a tiger mixed... bred for its skills in magic.
--
Napoleon Dynamite: You know, like nunchuck skills, bowhunting skills, computer hacking skills... Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills.
--
Napoleon Dynamite: What kind of bike do you have?
Pedro: It's a sledgehammer.
Napoleon Dynamite: Dang! You got shocks, pegs... lucky! You ever take it off any sweet jumps? Napoleon Dynamite: [Cut to Pedro jumping] You got like three feet of air that time.
--
Kip: Napoleon, don't be jealous that I've been chatting online with babes all day. Besides, we both know that I'm training to be a cage fighter.
Napoleon Dynamite: Since when, Kip? You have the worst reflexes of all time.
Kip: Try and hit me, Napoleon.
Napoleon Dynamite: What?
Kip: I said come down here and see what happens if you try and hit me.
--
Jock No. 1: Hey, Napoleon. I hear you're in a club for girls.
Napoleon Dynamite: Shut up, I am not.
Jock No. 1: Yeah? Why are you in the Happy Hands Club then?
Napoleon Dynamite: Cause I didn't have a freakin' choice. All the other sweet clubs were filled up. GOSH!

One of the gifts I received for Christmas was a framed collection of pictures of myself and the kids from this past year. Madeline wrote a poem to go along with it, which for obvious reasons, I love:
Our daddy is nice
Our daddy is strong
Our daddy is fun
Our daddy is never wrong
He likes his kids
He plays with them too
We all love him
Merry Christmas to you!

I just posted the pictures from Christmas online here:
Lebbon Christmas
Kurt Christmas

These are probably only of interest to my family.

This is either:
a. My mom displaying her new Christmas present from her kids.
b. My Mom taunting PETA enthusiasts around the world to throw red paint on her.
c. My mom modeling a coat that we found in the back of her closet that was cool 20 years ago.

Every year at Christmas we do our family photos. At just about every family get together we do these grandparent/grandchildren picture, and every year they get a little more chaotic as the crew grows. Notice that out of nine grandkids (and grandparents) how many are actually looking at the camera. I'm just trying to figure out what words of wisdom my dad was about to say before this picture was snapped.

The picture in this frame was taken at Jason and Jess's wedding and given to me as a Christmas gift by them. They thought that if I didn't want it, my Mom surely would....and they were right. Probably the best Christmas gift she's ever received.

This is going to be a great week... Last week was crazy between trying to finish up everything for Christmas, wrapping things up at work before vacation and my computer dying. It took reloading my system 6 different times to finally get the issue resolved... resulting in me doing a complete reformat of my system. Luckily, no data was lost. Keeping the four systems in my home up and running is becoming a full-time job.

Santa visited us Thursday morning - Christmas Eve-Eve. We did it then to try and space things out and give us some more breathing room in a time that's typically pretty hectic. We woke up, opened presents and the kids had all day to play with their presents. In the evening we had our annual 'Birthday party for Jesus' and then our church had their Christmas eve-eve service (Not having a building makes doing a christmas eve service tough to schedule). It was a great day overall.

On Friday, we woke up, pulled things together and headed to my parent's house for Christmas #2. I love getting together with my family - but between my 3 siblings, spouses and eight nieces and nephews, it's so high energy the whole time. My mom cooks amazing meals for lunch, dinner and the following breakfast - each meal consisting of at least ten different things, not including dessert. We had something to eat, got dressed for church and took our annual family pictures -which are no small ordeal, especially with my brother jon antagonizing everyone possible. I made the mistake of giving Jon my camera to take picture during parts of it and I ended up with a collection of people's butts and crotches. Thanks Jon.

We went to church that night at my Mom's church, which is a traditional Lutheran church. We've been doing this since I can remember. We take up 3 rows between all of us and it's pretty comical watching all of the kids who range from age 1 - 9. We sing all of the great christmas hymns and have a candle light song at the end, which is awesome. It's so different from Crossroads, but I love it just the same. I have so many great memories of going to church, especially going and sitting with my Uncle Bill (deceased). We'd sing and laugh, all while trying to stay under the radar of my mom and grandma's watchful eyes.

We came home, had a huge meal and the opened some of the presents from the aunts and uncles to the kids, and to our parents. The girls had gone through all of our families pictures and put together a scrapbook chronicling our family all the way from my parent's childhood through now. My mom loved it. I mixed up some of the hurricane mix that I brought back from New Orleans, which threw Dan, Kevin and I for a loop. We hung out, played with the presents and laughed a lot. Dan, Kris and family headed home and the rest of us finally crashed sometime after midnight, ready for an early morning.

We woke up Christmas morning early, with Madeline and Gabe running around and signing some obnoxious Christmas song, but it beat them ringing the bells my Mom's given them in the past years. The kids and grandkids opened presents from my parents and played until about noon. I got to go pick up my Grandma from her aparentment in Haslett. She's old (not sure how old - she'll never tell, but I think it's in the mid 80's). She moves at a snail's pace and is really fragile, but she amazes me at how sharp she is. We had a great conversation on the car ride back about Christmas in the past, my grandpa, my uncle, my kids an my job. It was one of the best parts of my Christmas. Around noon, we loaded up and headed for Christmas #3.

We got to Cathie's parents in Dewitt in the afternoon and were able to exhale after a crazy 24 hours. It's such a different atmosphere than my parents and I really look forward to it. There are only our three kids, my brother-in-law Ed and his wife Stacy, and of course Cathie's Mom and Dad. We opened a ton of presents and had a huge meal with at least 10 desserts. It's such a nice, slow-paced time, We hang out, eat and eat some more. The kids have so much fun, just loving hanging out with Grandma and Grandpa and their Aunt and Uncle. By the end of the night, we were beat and headed home. Loading the van becomes an interesting exercise in packing, but I got it done.

I'm thrilled to see that it's looking like airlines will NOT allow cell phone usage on planes: Phones in flight

Top 10 Cheesiest Movie Lines Ever:
1. “Titanic”: Leonardo DiCaprio’s “I’m the king of the world!”
2. “Dirty Dancing”: Patrick Swayze’s “Nobody puts Baby in the corner.”
3. “Four Weddings And A Funeral”: Andie McDowell’s “Is it still raining? I hadn’t noticed.”
4. “Ghost”: Demi Moore’s “Ditto,” to Patrick Swayze’s “I love you.”
5. “Top Gun”: Val Kilmer to Tom Cruise: “You can be my wingman anytime”
6. “Notting Hill”: Julia Roberts’ “I’m just a girl... standing in front of a boy... asking him to love her.”
7. “Independence Day”: Bill Pullman’s “Today we celebrate our Independence Day!”
8. “Braveheart”: Mel Gibson’s “They may take our lives, but they will not take our freedom!”
9. “Jerry Maguire”: Renee Zellweger to Tom Cruise: “You had me at hello.”
10. “The Postman”: A blind woman says to Kevin Costner: “You’re a godsend, a savior.” He replies: “No, I’m a postman.”

Jon sent me this. Gotta love public speaking. Nice save by the news woman at the end... Check this video clip out.

If you haven't already, download MSN Messenger v7 Beta. It has a much improved interface and some great new interactive features.

I'm in my hotel room getting ready to go into a big presentation and noticed that I had about a three inch hole in my pants. Great news. Luckily the thread had come out on the seam, so I sewed it back up. I grabbed the sewing kit, sewed it up, and it looks pretty decent, not great, but decent.

Emily brought home an ornament from pre-school that she'd made as a gift in pre-school. She told Cathie "Ms. Barb told me to give these presents to you, but I'm only letting you hang it on the tree until I want it back - because it's so beautiful."

I flew in to Galveston, TX (just outside of Houston) yesterday and it's not quite what I expected. I think Texas, you think warm and dry. It's in the mid-40's and rainy - but I can see palm trees and the ocean from my hotel room window. I once read that there are more churches and more strip clubs per capita than any other city in America. Driving to Galveston through Houston I must have seen 50 strip clubs along the expressway. I saw an interesting example of this dichotemy (good word, eh?) as I drove by a huge billboard for a strip club called "Heartbreakers" and behind it was another billboard that read "Jesus Heals the broken hearted".

image001.jpg

Very interesting article entitled Eminem Is Right out of Policy Review that looks at music today and why it resonates with kids:

In a nutshell, the ongoing adult preoccupation with current music goes something like this: What is the overall influence of this deafening, foul, and often vicious-sounding stuff on children and teenagers? Nonetheless, this is not my focus here. Instead, I would like to turn that logic about influence upside down and ask this question: What is it about today’s music, violent and disgusting though it may be, that resonates with so many American kids?

As it turns out, such an exercise yields a fascinating and little understood fact about today’s adolescent scene. If yesterday’s rock was the music of abandon, today’s is that of abandonment. The odd truth about contemporary teenage music — the characteristic that most separates it from what has gone before — is its compulsive insistence on the damage wrought by broken homes, family dysfunction, checked-out parents, and (especially) absent fathers...........

Check this out. It's the entire It's a Wonderful a Life movie in 30 seconds re-enacted by rabbits. The next question is... Why?

I'm a huge Donkey Kong fan! This is fun.

Why Jesus Likes Kids:
I think I know what it takes to be socially acceptable, and for some reason I’ve tried to be like that in my relationship with God—prim and proper. Forgetting that before Him I really am just a kid (no matter how old I may dress), in need of His loving help and grace, to the point that maybe I should be quicker and more persistent to ask for it. I’m not pretending to really understand prayer or what it does, but I think it probably involves being more kid-like, even if it annoys me.

This is Elvis... and my nephew Matthew. They both have a lot in common. Except Matthew is not an honorary member of the FBI. And Matthew's not dead. Other than that, lots in common.

These are the masks I brought back from New Orleans for the kids. The tough party was explaining to Emily why she couldn't wear her mask to her pre-school Christmas party Thursday night.

I've been trying out a new photo service called Flickr. It's not your typical picture site, most of which center around selling you photos. This site is around the storage and tagging of pictures for sharing, especially for blogs and e-mail sharing. It integrates in with all of the blog services, hosts the pictures, organizes them and lets you upload them via e-mail - including from cell phones. You can create various style-sheet templates that allow for a very customized look and feel to your blog post.

Here's a good article in Wired Magazine about flickr..

2004_maddie_xmas_tree

2004_maddie_xmas_tree,
originally uploaded by fusionmonkey.

We worked on getting the tree up yesterday. Okay, Cathie worked on getting the tree up, I carried some boxes and a tree into the room. Once Cathie got the lights on, the kids all helped decorate it. Every year they pull out the ugly ornaments that I made when I was a kid and ask why we've got it on the tree. This year was no exception. Emily had a stool and put every ornament within a one foot radius.

Lesson for the day: Just because Nate's seven, doesn't mean he can't hurt me with boxing gloves. A blow to the head with 16oz gloves hurts. In order to make it fair, I get on my knees as we box. Mom's still "helping" us come up with the ground rules for when the guys can use their gloves.

Mike, my son Nate and I went to the Novi Expo Center for the annual computer show. Half the fun of this thing is people watching. You get all kinds at this thing. I needed to pick up some stuff for our home system that kept randomly locking up. I'd tried everything and I finally broke down and bought a new board and CPU. I got a great deal. Mike and I installed it this afternoon and it all worked... well almost... the power light on the front is on when the computer is off and vice versa. But the thing clocks in at 3.3 GHz, all for $99, including the onboard video.

Half of the show was wall to wall computer junk, in the most literal sense. The other half was typical flea market type stuff - fake purses, cheap shoes, stereo systems and more knives and swords than you can imagine. We spent more time messing around with all of the knives and swords than we did looking at computer gear. They had a great deal on boxing gloves, so Nate and I picked up a pair and we've been boxing around the house all day long. I've got a longer reach, but he's at the exact wrong height - so it's even in the end.

One of the people I was with this week had one of these 20 Q games in their car and I played with it non-stop. This thing was borderline creepy. You think of something and it proceeds to ask you 20 questions to which you answer "Yes, No, Sometimes or Unknown". It was almost always right. I guessed stuff like: Soccer Ball, Jaguar, Tree and it nailed it.

Alright, this is something my dad sent me. It's a little corny, but I like the point:

I CORINTHIANS 13 - A CHRISTMAS VERSION a
If I decorate my house perfectly with plaid bows, strands of twinkling lights and shiny balls, but do not show love to my family, I'm just another decorator.

If I slave away in the kitchen, baking dozens of Christmas cookies, preparing gourmet meals and arranging a beautifully adorned table at mealtime, but do not show love to my family, I'm just another
cook.

If I work at the soup kitchen, carol in the nursing home and give all
that I have to charity, but do not show love to my family, it profits me
nothing.

If I trim the spruce with shimmering angels and crocheted snowflakes,
attend a myriad of holiday parties and sing in the choir's cantata but do
not focus on Christ, I have missed the point.


Love stops the cooking to hug the child. Love sets aside the decorating to kiss the husband. Love is kind, though harried and tired. Love doesn't envy another's home that has coordinated Christmas china and table linens. Love doesn't yell at the kids to get out of the way, but is thankful they are there to be in the way. Love doesn't give only to those who are able to give in return but rejoices in giving to those who can't. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.

Video games will break, pearl necklaces will be lost, golf clubs will rust, but giving the gift of love will endure.

I thought this was a great quote:
"The truth is that wherever a man lies with a woman, there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relation is set up between them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured."
-C. S. Lewis

I'm in Baton Rogue and I'm still full. After our workshop yesterday, we took our customer out to dinner at Juban's, a famous Creole resturant out here. The people down here are very hospitable to us Yankees and wanted to make sure I tried all of their cuisine. I sat at dinner with my plate of food, surrounded by 8 other smaller plates from our customers who wanted to make sure I had a taste of what they'd ordered. Really tremendous people down here, not quite as laid back as New Orleans, not quite as much debauchery, but a great place. I'm flying back this afternoon.

I got up, worked out, had some meetings and then headed down to the French Market Area to go to Cafe Du Monde. It's a great area with some amazing architecture.

So I went to the original Emril's resturant tonight down here in New Orleans. The service was the best I've ever had and the food was phenomenal. Across the street, they were filming a movie - I can't remember which ones, but it was starring Kevin Spacey. I was with one of our local sales reps, Dee, who grew up in this area and knows everyone. She knows everyone down here, even spends Christmas with the Manning family (ie. Payton, Eli, Archie, etc). On the way out of the resturant, we ran into Wayne Huizenga, founder of Blockbuster video, who said hi to Dee by name. She used to date the guy.

Tomorrow, before we head to Baton Rouge for customer meetings, I'm going to stop by the infamous Cafe du Mond for a Beignets and Cafe o'lait. It's in every movie that takes place in New Orleans - I just can't remember which.

I'm in New Orleans today, Baton Rogue tomorrow. My hotel is right off of Bourbon Street. I had lunch today at one of the best oyster places around, Acme Oyster. I had a po-boy. Check out the menu. They actually have something called a poopa. We're heading to the original Emril's tonight for dinner. Should be good.

My brother Dan turned me on to a great new author, Lee Child. The books have the same character through out all of the - a really cool guy named Jack Reacher. I think there are seven books in all so far. These are books that you cannot put down once you pick them up. The guy reminds me of John Clark in Tom Clancy's novels, but a little more down-to-earth and a little less serious and less psycho. Anyways, very well worth checking them out.

My brother Jon and I were both amazed that Dan would actually reccomend a book, seeing how he barely reads. If you loan Dan a book, you'll get it back in 6 months - maybe. The only time he claims to read is if he's on a plane ride to Korea, and then he supposedly reads 9 books each way. I think he's getting the cliff notes to try and impress Jon and I.

We had our big Dodgeball playoffs tonight and we went from third place to last by losing all but one game! The last game, Will Brown and Jason Monstrola caught everything thrown our way so that we went out big! I think I've finally figured out how to throw the ball so that my arm is usable in the week that follows. Dodgeball starts up again in January, and the movie comes out on DVD tomorrow. Dodge, dip, duck, dive and dodge!

I just got a new Uniden TRU8885 cordless phone for about $20. About 10 years ago I bought my cordless phone at Sears for about $150. For some reason, I bought the product protection plan, which was about $25 and is good for 2 years. In my house, the average cordless phone is lucky to make it that long. I bring it back, get a full credit towards a new phone, pay another $20 for the new product protection plan and get the latest, greatest phone. It's one of the few times that the product protection plan has ever really worked for me.

Here are technologies I'm still using after a few weeks:
X1
DirectTV HD Tivo
Firefox
iTunes/iPod
allofmp3.com
Treo 600 (Although I now want a 650 with Bluetooth capabilities).

Great article about the need to know, which I think I suffer from. As I was reading this, I was thinking about all of the different information sources I digest regularly... I love the newspaper I subscribe to three: Wall Street Journal, Detroit News and the South Lyon Herald - and I try and read them cover-to-cover as often as possible. I subscribe to 7 different magazines (Mens Journal, Entertainment Weekly, Money and a few others I can't remember). On top of that, I my computer and my phone push headlines over to me constantly through various blogs and RSS Feeds.

Check out this video from Jeopardy. Ken Jenning's question to the answer is "What is a Ho, Alex?"

According to this article Jesus was spotted in this dental X-Ray.

I found this on Dan's blog regarding U2's new single Vertigo off of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb:
According to this:

"The counting Bono does in the beginning is uno does tres catorce is spannish for one two three fourteen. According to several sources in the U2-Talk mailing list, the album is U2's 14:th album (including Wide Awake in America) and Lillywhite has been involved with U2's first, second, third and now fourteenth album. There have been some debate to which albums to include to get fourteen albums, if the "Best of" or "Wide Awake in America" should be included etc., but nobody knows for sure what Bono is referencing to yet. It might be so he just thought it sounded cool. "

Other sites list the lyrics as the numbers would be "en espanol" not in french. I wondered about the same thing myself and was just makng jokes to my roomie the other day about that.

I was dumping the pictures from the digital camera today and ran across this picture. Occasionally, Emily likes to grab the camera and take all sorts of crazy pictures. You can make up your own story on what Cathie's doing here.

Emily had been telling us about a boy in her pre-school class that she'd been playing with. Apparently the boy's name is cardboard. We got to class and she pointed out cardboard. Apparently, his name is Carter. Having a kid named cardboard seems funny to me.

As I lay sleeping on Saturday morning I heard the kids up and running around. I heard the door open and the kids proclaim "Hey, where did these come from? Let's play manger!" I heard the girls singing Away in a Manger as I faded in and out of conciousness. When I woke up, I found this collection of 2 foot tall figurines. I called the Niemi's and Girard's to find out which it had been. Turns out it was Dan Reynolds.

The three couples got babysitters at 9PM last night and exacted our revenge. It was really pretty elaborate. We decided to decorate Dan's house, in a bad way. We had pink christmas tree lights, huge strands of gaudy pearls and an entire nativity scene linked together by rope which we put up in their pine tree. The lights went over their doorway and bushes. I took part of the manger scene and used Liquid Nail to glue it to one of Dan's landscaping rocks. I'm just not sure that's ever coming off. The costumes? They just seemed funny at the time. Except the clown. The clown always seemed scary. Not funny. Can you guess who that is in the clown? One hint: It's not me.

Ya know, Justin looks pretty creepy here as well. Dan is probably the wrong person to start something like this with. I'm sure he'll have no problem escalating this out of control very quickly.

I went with a friend of mine in my neighborhood, Mark, to the Lions game yesterday. He has great seats. We were about 15 rows back from the field. It was interesting that at the beginning of the game they don't even announce a number of players to avoid the booing. Joey Harrington for one. John Navvarae (ex-U of M Quarterback) was in for Arizona. Did my heart good to see him fail miserably. How many U of M quarterbacks do we really need in the NFL right now anyways?

On Friday night, Brad, Ted and I took Will out for his birthday... At least that was the idea. For whatever reason, he ended up having to work until 9, which got him back to this area closer to 10. We ended up meetnig Will at Ted's house around 10 after the whaler's game and sat around watching Old School.

I just added a cool iTunes plugin that allows my blog to dynamically show what I've been listening to in iTunes. It's called Now Playing and it outputs my iTunes info to XML to which I've got a PHP script that puts both the song name, the image and a link to Amazon to buy the track. Heck, I'm just impressed that I was able to pull all of the pieces together to get this to work.

I've been messing with Audioscrobbler lately. It has plug-ins for both Mac and PC that work with every music player out there. The plug-in uploads a list of the tunes you listen to, compiles it with everyone elses and gives you some very good reccomendations.

A friend of mine, Kirk Vickers, was on the news on Monday night talking about the exercise aspect of the Dance, Dance revolution game. You can read more about it here. He was telling me that at one point during the kid's playing, his heart rate got up to 250/beats per minute... which is a lot.

I was listening to this message by Rob Bell of Mars Hill Church on Suffering. There was a part of 2 Corinthians 6 that he read that hit me between the eyes, particularly in light of the stuff my church has been going through for a while now. I sometimes get so discouraged about our church, about where we're at, the people that are being impacted - focused on everything we're not doing instead of what we are doing. This verse just resonated with my heart in such a huge way when I read it.

⁴Our work as God's servants gets validated--or not--in the details. People are watching us as we stay at our post, alertly, unswervingly . . . in hard times, tough times, bad times; ⁵when we're beaten up, jailed, and mobbed; working hard, working late, working without eating; ⁶with pure heart, clear head, steady hand; in gentleness, holiness, and honest love; ⁷when we're telling the truth, and when God's showing his power; when we're doing our best setting things right; ⁸when we're praised, and when we're blamed; slandered, and honored; true to our word, though distrusted; ⁹ignored by the world, but recognized by God; terrifically alive, though rumored to be dead; beaten within an inch of our lives, but refusing to die; ¹⁰immersed in tears, yet always filled with deep joy; living on handouts, yet enriching many; having nothing, having it all.

The second part reminded me of a conversation I'd had with a friend of mine on Sunday night. We were talking about how easy it is to get wrapped up in our own worlds, and the best way to get out of our funks can be to focus outside of ourselves. Paul continues on in 2 Corinthians 6:

12We didn't fence you in. The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren't small, but you're living them in a small way. ¹³I'm speaking as plainly as I can and with great affection. Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively!

Noel's message last week talked about the concept of Open Theism which is basically the. According to this, I'm a Freewill Theist. The first I'd heard of the idea of Open Theism was when I read the book, Letters from a Skeptic by Gregory Boyd
. Great book, but the part that didn't sit with me was the part where he explained his perspective on God's fore-knowledge of the future and free will.

This is a video of Yale punking Harvard. They get 1800 harvard fans to hose themselves. Check out the video and web site at www.harvardsucks.org

Had a pretty uneventful morning. The kids and I let Cathie sleep in for a while and then I went to the gym and then picked up Riley from Nicki's (Thanks Nik!). Nate and I went out to buy the gifts for the Angel Tree child we were helping out and then out to lunch. We had a great time, getting lots of unhealthy food, like milk shakes. We have great conversations when we go out, coming up with hypothetical questions for each other like "If you could choose between shooting a rocket laucher or a sniper rifle, which would you choose and why?" As we're driving, our favorite past-time is for me to pick random songs on my iPod and tell him the story behind the song. Today, we were talking about and listening to songs by Peter Gabriel, U2 and Yes.

We got back last night from our Thanksgiving extravaganza. On Thursday, we got together at my parent's house and had our annual Kurt Family Thanksgiving dinner. Between my mom, dad, grandma, brothers, sisters, spouses, nieces and nephews there are 19 1/2 of us. My mom cooked an amazing meal with 5 or 6 different desserts. We ate our fill as we watched the Lions lose miserably. That evening, we headed over to Cathie's parents house in Dewitt.

The next morning we got up and a bunch of us went on our annual Christmas Tree Farm expedition. We chopped down a tree as usual. We headed back to Cathie's parents where we began the annual Lebbon Thanksgiving extravaganza. Cathie's brother Ed and his wife Stacy were both there and we had a meal that could have easily fed twice the number of people there. Again, an awesome meal. We hung out there until about 7ish and most of us headed back. Madeline stuck around to spend the night.

I got back last night and met up with Matt, Will and Jason to play some Halo 2 at our church office on the big screen. What a game! I sucked, but not as bad as Will, so there's some solace in that for me.

We had our first big snow, so the kids and I went out first thing this morning to play while Cathie got things packed and ready to head out for Thanksgiving. Our dog Riley was having a great time until Emily tried to hook the sled up to her, convinced that she's a sled dog.

Reason #437 why you don't let a 3 year old maker her own hot choclate:

Couple of pictures from Monday Night Football:
This Ross, Matt and I - a couple of my good friends from work who I went to the game with:

This old gal is one of the die hard Cheifs fans I saw at the game. The cigarette completes the picture:

I've been listening to this message from Rob Bell at Mars Hills Church in Grand Rapids, part of the series 15 part on Mastering the Art of Living. Great series, but there are two messages on truth that have really caused me to think, which I guess is what a good sermon does. Part 11 deals with finding and claiming truth in the world around us as Christians. It was a concept I'd heard, but taken to a new point that I hadn't. Part 12 takes it quite a bit further, talking about God in terms of the definition of Ultimate Reality. I've been reading about this same idea in the book I just started called The Divine Conspiracy, by Dallas Willard.

In Rob's message, he makes a leap somewhere in the message iin how he interprets John 14:6 which is where Jesus states:

"I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him."

I'm just not sure I'm tracking with where he takes this. Rob seems to take the position that this is not about Jesus saying that he's the gatekeeper to heaven but that he's pointing to the ultimate reality that is God and himself. It seems to be such a fine line between Christianity and Universalism. It's caused me to do a lot of thinking and studying, which I guess is the goal of a great message. Take a listen and let me know what you think. I've had some great conversations with a friend of mine Mark who's been looking into Kaballah, about this verse and how it lines up with what he thinks, but I still can't follow how Rob Bell comes to the conclusions that he does with this.

As a family, we're participating in the Angel Tree program through church. Angel Tree helps prison inmates to provide Christmas gifts to their kids while their in prison. Cathie and Madeline, Nate and I each picked an family to help. I was talking with Nate tonight and he had a choice between getting the boy we chose one gift, or getting him two gifts at the expense of giving up one of his own christmas gifts. Being 7, I figured he'd go with giving the boy one gift and take the extra christmas gift. He didn't even hestitate to say that he wanted to get the boy the extra gifts. I'm a proud dad.

I just barely made it home from Kansas City this morning. For some reason, I woke up at about 3:30 AM and was wide awake. Since I had to leave the hotel in an hour and a half, I decided to stay up. When I looked out the window, they already had 6 inches of snow. There was none when I went to bed. I got the airport, and they'd closed it down to clear the runways. Our flight ended up taking off at 7:30 instead of 6. I'm not sure what I was thinking traveling today, the busiest travel day of the year. Rookie move on my part. Luckily, I made it home. I can't imagine the poor schmucks who travel later today with all of the weather problems going on around the country. I'm just glad we're driving for thanksgiving tomorrow.

In my message on sunday, I quoted from James 2, talking about the relationship between our faith and our actions. According to Jerry Fallwell and some of his buddies mentioned in this article, this shouldn't even be in the bible. I knew I should have checked with Jerry before using it. This is just one of those things you learn over time.

If you haven't already, check out the movies that Amazon.com's been showing. They're short features (<3 minutes) either starring or directed by big names, that have no product placement or amazon.com mention. They're very well done and worth watching.

Nothing like getting back form the gym to find that you didn't pack any changes of underwear.

I went to my first Monday Night Football game ever last night at Arrowhead stadium to wastch the Kansas City Chiefs play the New England Patriots. It was a great experience. When you first drive in, there is a huge haze over the stadium from all the barbecuing. Being Kansas City, people don't grill burgers or brats down here, there was the smell of steak in the air. People had some amazing tailgaiting setups. I've never seen a stadium so blanketed by the team's color. It was red everywhere you looked. I would guess that 98% of the fans there were wearing some kind of chiefs jacket, hat or shirt.

There was this really cool camera that was connected at four axis points over the stadium that could move three dimensionally to stay over the action. Seems like a fun job to have. My video games skills could truly be utilized there.

I thought my message today in church went well. I felt really good about the whole thing. The title of the message was "Duct Tape Christianity". It went longer than I thought, so I had to cut it on the fly to keep it to only 35 minutes. You can download it here.

I've been going back and forth with the nigerian royalty trying to figure out where he can send me the $15M. An exceprt of their e-mail to me:

IN ORDER TO FULLFIL THE WISHES OF HER LATE HUSBAND, SHE HAS DECIDED THAT SHE WILL ASSIST THE NEEDY AND THE LESS PRIVILEDGED PEOPLE IN OUR SOCIETY. BEFORE HER HUSBAND`S DEATH HE DEPOSITED SOME AMOUNT OF MONEY TO THE TUNE OF US$15.240,000(FIFTEEN MILLION TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY THOUSAND UNITED STATES DOLLARS) WITH A SECURITY COMPANY ,UNDER THE GUISE OF LOCAL GOODS TO BE PRODUCED IN EUROPE. THAT WAS WILLED TO HER AFTER HIS DEATH. WHAT SHE REQUIRES FROM YOU IS FOR YOU TO GO TO THE SECURITY COMPANY AND MAKE CLAIMS OF THE DEPOSIT , SEND 50% OF THE TOTAL SUM TO HER HERE IN AFRICA TO ASSIST THE LESS PRIVILEDGED,THEN YOU WILL DISBURSE 30% TO DO THE SAME ABROAD (SPECIFICALLY CHILDREN`S CHARITY) WHILE YOU WILL RETAIN THE REMAINDING 20%.

My latest communication with him:

My church and I would like to participate. We are in desparate need of money to feed the poor in our area. This money would be a huge help. Please advise on how we can be of assistance to you.

My son's cub scout pack collected 6,900 cans of food for our local food shelter. It's a great thing for hurting families, but it was a great thing for the kids. They got as much out of it as anyone!

I met a friend of mine for lunch yesterday. As we were leaving the resturant, my friend handed me something they'd printed out for me to read. Before heading outside, I told them I had to use the restroom. My friend then replied (rather loudly) "Can I hold it?" Of course they meant the document they'd just given me, but people turned around and stared as I laughed hysterically and my friend quickly added "....the document". We laughed very hard about this.

Like everyone else, I periodically get spam e-mails from people claiming they would like to deposit large amounts of money in my bank account in order to escape the tyranny of their country. I've started replying to the e-mails, telling them I'm all in and seeing how long I can string them along. I'm currently going back and forth with DR.EMMANUEL KUMAHLO. Occasionally I tell them I'm a pastor and my church would like to give him our bank account number in order to help them out. Suprisingly, this turns most of them off.

Madeline was sick and out of school last week three days. On his own, Nate made her a get well card. I have no idea what the picture is on the card, but the caption read "Get well soon. I miss you very much. You're the best sister a boy could ever have. I wish you good luck getting well. From Nathan."

Lots of you are probably wondering what to get me for Christmas. Okay, not lots, probably very few. As my good deed for Christmas, I'm putting my Amazon Wishlist out there for your amusement or shopping pleasure.

If you're not using it already, this is worth checking out: Firefox. Firefox is a free browser created by a consortium of programmers that works great, has better functionality that Internet Explorer and best of all IS NOT A MICROSOFT PRODUCT. One of the best features about it is the tabbed browsing feature, which lets you have multiple sessions going concurrently in the same window.

A9 is a search engine worth looking at. It's all about how it formats the output - allowing you to select various columns against your search criteria: Movies, Music, Books, Images, etc. If you use the toolbar, Amazon.com gives you a discount on your purchases. Not a bad deal.

This article about worship struck me this morning:

Jesus says I cannot worship two gods, that I will hate the one and love the other. Since I really do want God to be God in my life, I need to smash these singing and doing worlds together. I need to seriously look at where my love-caused action towards other things supplants my love-caused action toward God … and I probably need to break out in song a little more often.

On the list of annoying things: Watching a television show while Emily has the remote. She's learned how to use Tivo's pause function and she pauses it every few seconds to look at what's on TV or tell you about what she just saw or what the characters just said. Her favorite show right now is Zoboomafoo. She starts the show off by doing a crazy dance she's made up and then pauses it every few seconds for the rest of the show. Should I be proud that my three year old is proficient with the remote, or are we just letting her watch waaaay too much tv. I'm guessing the second.

Why you can't leave a three year old unattended for 30 seconds:

Nate's cub scout pack did the second part of a can drive today. Last week the kids left bags for people to fill up with canned food on people's doors and this week they were collecting them as people left them on their porch. Nate, his friend Trevor and I went out this morning to go collect the food. As we went around, we couldn't find any bags out there. Nate was in disbelief, asking "Dad, don't people care about the poor?" We began going door-to-door asking for cans. They would go up to the door, dressed in their cub scout uniforms and Nate would go through their spiel: "Hi we're with the cub scouts collecting cans of food for poor people. Would you like to help poor people?" How could you say no to that? It turned out that the reason no cans were out in our neighborhood is because another cub scout group came through our neighborhood accidently and picked up our cans.

Here's a picture of me almost, but not actually hang gliding. At least I have a picture of me not really doing it.

Great story on choosing life over convience.

Today is Spiro Agnew's birthday. Interestingly enough, you can rearrange the letters of his name to spell Grow a Penis

This is really cool. My friend (who happens to also be my trainer) Kirk Vickers was selected by Mens Journal Magazine as one of the top 100 trainers in the country, as stated in this article. He is one of the only two trainers in the state of Michigan who got this recognition. The votes came from other fitness professionals, Doctors, Physical Therapists and other trainers. If you don't know Kirk, he used to be the head trainer for the Detroit Red Wings and now owns his own gym, Triad Performance Training Center where he trains schmoes like me as well as professional athletes. I think it would be important for Kirk that everyone know that I can bench press more than him. Frankly, it probably should have made the article.

I went out to Torrey Pines to go hang gliding this afternoon. It's a world famous glideport (is that a real word?) by the Torrey Pines golf course. It's right on the ocean and is based at on a huge cliff hundreds of feet high. I was in the tandem harness, ready to go off the cliff when suddenly the wind died down. It never picked up, and I didn't get to go. Next time.

I was in a Starbucks today in San Diego that had a pay-for-use bathroom today. I had to borrow a quarter to use it. Just as I got ready to plop it in (the quarter), a starbucks Barista saved the day and handed me a quarter.

I got up at 4:30 this morning to try and keep my internal clock square, and I'm beat, it's only 5:30. I fly out tomorrow. First class both ways. Gotta love it. Additionally, I'm gold (almost diamond) in the Hilton chain. Gold gets me all sorts of perks when I check in, like a fruit basket waiting in my room, free room service breakfasts, etc. Diamond has the nice perk of being able to walk into any Hilton hotel anywhere and get a room, regardless of whether they're booked or not. They'll actually bump someone for you to get you a room.

I'm teaching in two weeks at Crossroads. I'm looking forward to it. We're doing a series based on the movie Saved, looking at some of the concepts from the movie.


I started reading the book Fearless Faith by John Fischer. A friend of mine, Ken Buck, had been harping on me to read this for a long time now, telling me it would help me articulate some my frustration towards the christian subculture out there. He reams out everything from Christian radio, music, books, movies - you name it. It's a good book for the most part, a few things I don't agree with so far, but I'm still processing what he's saying.

We lost pretty severely last night in Dodgeball. I think we only won a 2 or 3 games out of 9, butwe had a great time doing it. We've gotten to know the other teams pretty well, so the trash talking and sidline conversations keep things interesting, not to mention the side bets that go on to spice things up. We hung out at Ted's afterwards to watch Monday night football and complain about how bad our arms hurt us. I know I'm whining here, but my arm is pretty much numb by the end of the game. It's the equivalent of pitching a 9 inning game, I think (since i've never really played baseball in my life), but it hurts.... A lot. Our team is on average 10 years older than all of the other teams so we're hurting pretty bad by the third game.

For the past couple of weeks I've been using allofmp3.com to download music. It's very different from the other download services for a couple of reasons:
1. There's no copy protection on the music, so you can load it anywhere you want.
2. You can download it in any format and quality that you want.
3. It charges by the Mb for music. Where most music services charge $1 per song, songs here run from $.02 - $.05 depending on their size. You end up paying about $.50 per album as opposed to $10.
4. This site has every album or artist in the world on it.

I was a little skeptical to give my credit card to a russian site at first, but from everything I've read and experienced, it's trustyworthy. Apparetly, because of Russian Copyright laws, they can offer music from all artists and labels. They have an amazing collection of music out there. I haven't found anything they DON'T have yet.

Here's a review on the service that provides a good overview and other referenes. You can download the client software here.

I've got a delimma. I've always mocked the "My child was student of the month" bumper stickers. I'm not a big fan of bumper stickers in general, really. My daughter Madeline came running into my office this afteroon sharing with me that she was selected as her school's student of the month, showing me her certificate, the letter and what else, but a student of the month bumper sticker. She told me I could even put it on my car. Thinking quickly, I told her I wanted to put it some place EVEN MORE special than my car. Thankfully, she thought my office would be even better. I'm a bad parent, huh?

Nate and I went to see The Incredibles last night. It was phenomenal!
I've got to agree with Kevin Smith, who said it's the best Super Hero movie EVER MADE. Not only were the graphics, down to the last strand of hair amazing, but the plot was great and it was almost 2 hours long! There's a great article about the movie from a geek's perspective on Slashdot. Nate and I have been playing the video game on PS2, which is a lot of fun as well. Samuel L. Jackson is cool in just about any role he plays, let alone a super hero,

Two more reasons I love being a dad:
My three year old Emily fell asleep today on the couch while holding a large dill pickle in her hand. Cathie found her asleep and took the pickle form her. Emily woke up and told my wife "I'm going to fall back asleep with a pickle and see if it disappears again."

I came up to bed the other night and found that my 6 year old daughter Madeline had left a note by my bedside that read: "Keep this with you. I love you dad and I will never stop. Remember the fun times we have. Just a reminder. Madeline"

I voted. One successful approach I've had in past years is to vote for the most whacked out parties for University of Michigan's board of trustees. I picked the Natural Law party and the Green Party. Eventually, I hope their political ideology will trickle down into the football team.

We played Dodgeball last night. Had a couple guys from the neighborhood come to the game, which is ultimately how I was hoping it would go. We're not good, but we're not in last place. We're a bunch of old guy, relative to the other teams. We start off throwing strong, and by about the 4th game (we play a total of 12 or so), our arms are rubber while everyone else is still hurling the ball at us with full strength. My arm and shoulder was dying by the end of this. Wasn't there a time I could beat the snot out of my body and not suffer any ramifications?

Cathie and I watched a new show on MTV called You've got a friend. The basic premise is this:
A person agrees to be paired up with an actor for 48 hours who poses to be their friend. This "friend" can order you to do anything, and typically does. Anything from making them dump their girlfriend, quit their job or eat a booger. If the person refueses once during that time, they lose. If they successfully complete the 48 hours, they get $15,000. The guy they pick to be the friend has an amazing ability to know exactly which buttons to push on others, how to spot the weaknesses and go after them with gusto. I think I've found a great job. Pushing people's buttons and getting paid for it!