I just got into my hotel.... Not really a hotel so much as a giant maze. I think I complain about this place everytime I come here... so this is really no different, just accentuated by the fact that I arrived at midnight half asleep, which made it a little tougher. The place is the National Conference Center in Virginia. It was built in the 60's as a training facility for Xerox. It was designed to put you in a learning frame of mind and is a giant multi-level pyramiding maze, color coded and numbered to "help" you find your way around. Check out this map... This is how you figure out where you're supposed go. Simple enough, right?

I'm here through Friday for the pilot course of some Principal training that we're going through. The challange with training like this is that it's like a vacation, except you're still expected to perform the same amount of work, e-mail and voice mail as you would during a normal work week. Fun, eh?

Project311.com is up finally up and does a nice job of giving an overview to what we're all about. If you haven't heard of it, Project 311 is a ministry that I'm a part of that focuses on teaching students to love God passionately and love others selflessly by equipping churches and youth pastors with the tools they need to make this happen. Our first big event is coming up in June, Blitzfest, where we'll have 75 bands at a two day festival, complete with skate park, climbing wall and inflatable crap.

One of my co-workers, Chris Jones, was traveling on a project and somehow was selected as the guest of the day at the Hampton Inn. They do a random drawing, put your name up, give you a parking place and free breakfast in bed.

Buck sent me this bumper-sticker site. Some of my favorites:

This has been my first whole week at home without traveling in a long time. I had a chance to get out and go mountain biking today, the first time of the year. It was phenomenal! I went out to Maybury State Park's Singletrack, which is about 4.5 miles. It's my new favorite trail. They lengthened it and added some really technical stuff with rock piles and tree-falls. You get a lot of speed without any really nasty uphills. I'd forgotten how much I love mountain-biking. I love the danger, the adventure, the exercise, the challange, the peace and quiet, the smell of the woods, the sweat, the speed and again, the danger of it all.

Today felt great. I think the cardio and circuit training I did for my legs this Winter paid off a little bit. I'm going biking wtih Bill and Noel tomorrow. I'll know just how out of shape I am then.

I was just in awe as I looked around me today biking. It smelled so good, looked so green, it was just beautiful. Made me wonder how heaven can be better. I got to thinking about something I'd read on the can this morning in the book Epic, by John Eldredge. He was talking about the ultimate restoration of things as referenced in Revelations 21:5 (Behold, I make all things new.) He goes on to talk about a great passage from the end of The Chronicles of Narnia, when everything was restored:

It was the Unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling. He stamped his right fore-hoof on the ground and neighed, and then cried: "I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this.

I got to thinking that what I was blown away by out there in the woods was just a glimpse of what the world will be like once it's restored to it's original beauty. Wow.

Emily's pre-school class had their mother's day celebration today. The kids made the mom's these beautiful hats out of wallpaper. Cathie came down into my office wearing these piece of art and I could hardly keep my hands off her. I suggested that she wear it around for the rest of the day, she declined.

We had a second couple come through our house last night and another tonight. The second couple is looking at making us an offer once they confirmed that the lot behind us is zoned residential. That's fair. Apparently this is pretty good traffic for having listed our house mid-week. Our agent told us that we wouldn't normally get anyone until the weekend. It's loads of fun keeping the house spotless. My threat of breaking the kids fingers for messing the house up is losing it's effectiveness.

We're on day 5 of the grill-a-thon. So far we've grilled steaks, bratwurst, hamburgers, hotdogs and a chicken on the grill. Tonight is ribs! This grill is awesome.

Spring is here! Even though we had frost this morning, it warmed up enough so that I can begin one of my favorite Spring and summer time traditions: Sitting on the deck, listening to the birds chirping while reading a good book, smoking a good cigar and having a glass of scotch. I had a chance to smoke one of my Cuban cigars that I brought back from the Bahamas. It was a Cuban Cohiba, first one I've ever smoked, and probably the last. Very rich ciar, great draw, too peppery for my taste, but very smooth.

Our house is finally on the market and we've already had a couple of showings. One couple was ready to make an offer, but haven't sold their home yet. Not sure on the other one. During the showings, I have my mac hooked up to my 52" HDTV showing a slideshow of the home, the yard, the rooms. Digital pictures look amazing on there. The feedback we got was that the people loved the home and were blown away by the TV, saying they stood there for 10 minutes watching the pictures.

We're pricing our home at $269,900, which I think is just right. There's this whole funky balance of wanting to price it to move, but not too quickly. If you sell too quickly, then you know you probably priced it too low. Checking realtor.com, we're the only 4 bedroom in the area in our price range, but we're one of the more expensive houses in our neighborhood, which brings the price down. We'll see what happens.

Something I overheard at the gym today as two guys were working out together:

"Dude, did you see my butt moving?! Whoah, that was wild! Check it out, it's still doing it!"

Simpson's Highlight from Sunday's Episode The Heartbroke Kid: Watching Homer dance around in leiderhosen to entertain german tourists while singing both verses of Ninety Nine Luft Balloons
- in German.

It looks like the Treo 650 is going to be out for Verizon on May 11. I've heard lots of dates, and this one seems the most firm. I'm in.

I had a first this weekend. Not necessarily a good one, but a first, none-the-less. A couple Sunday's a month I work with a group of guys, starting around 7AM to load up a semi-trailer full of all of the stuff it takes to do church at a high school. We jave everything packed in 15 of these huge 8'x5'x3' containers that we bring into the school, unload, do church, re-pack and then reload in the trailer. We have breakfast in between unloading and setting up and church, which gives us a chance to hang out and talk. Believe it or not we have fun doing it. This last Sunday Matt Gielow, Brad Jeffrey, Ted Haase and I loaded it up and counted 13 containers. On the way back, we counted 12. Odd. We went back through, checked for a missing container and didn't find it, so we figured we'd miscounted. The High School called today and let us know that it had been left behind. Amazing that in 15 years of doing church in a high school that it's never happened before.

Cathie heard Emily shouting "Mooooooommmmm!" from her room this afternoon while Emily was taking her quiet time. Cathie went up to her room and found Emily tied to her dresser, unable to move. Apparently, she had taken the strings from her dress and tied herself to the handles of her dresser in a giantic knot, eventually discovering she couldn't get free.

I got a chance to play with a Sony PSP the other day and I was blown away. What a piece of technology! The screen quality is amazing, the controls are great, awesome sound quality. Tough to justify for $250. But I wouldn't complain if I got one for a gift.

Good new torrent search engine: Torrent Typhoon.

I was listening to David Sedaris, Live at Carnegie Hall this morning while I was working out this morning, which in hindsight was a bad idea. If you've never heard of David Sedaris, he's on NPR (National Public Radio) quite a bit, especially on the show This American Life. He's one of the funniest story tellers out there. His books are good, but hearing him tell the stories live is hilarious. I was in the middle of lifting and would spontaneously start laughing. Didn't work well. But damn, he's funny.

We sat down with the kids and had a family meeting to talk about moving. We've been talking about it for a while, but the kids are in denial. Nathan and Madeline don't want to move away from their friends, Emily is just saying it because they do, since the friends she plays with aren't in our neighborhood. It's hardest on Nate, who's best friend Austin lives two houses down from us. They're inseperable, and we love the guy kid. I threw some paper up on the wall and we brainstormed on the good and bad things about moving. We talked through them and prayed about it as a family. The only consolation Nate had was that I told him we'd set up a DLP projector in the basement for video games and movies. This whole part of it is making moving hard.

I sold $80 worth of my crap at our neighbor's garage sale! I was going to toss it all. My neighbor did all the work and I collected the money. Nice setup.

I worked some more on the yard yesterday, trimming the shrubs and cleaning all of the leaves and crap out of our back lot line. Not a lot of fun, but it looks nice now. We had our real estate agent over on Saturday to do a walk through of our house and let us know what more we needed to do to get things ready to sell. She said we're good to go. We've got a couple coming over to check the house out on Tuesday before we put it on the market to see if we can work a deal. If that doesn't work out, we're listing it on Tuesday, sign in the yard and all. I'm impressed with our real estate agent so far. She's extremely high energy, talks a million miles a minute, but knows her stuff. We've started looking at houses online also. I think we're looking outside of the City of South Lyon, which is pretty much across the street from where we're at now. The tax differences are huge. We save about $4k/yr by NOT being in the City. The downside is well water and no snow removal. I gave Cathie our budget and I'm good with letting her pick out the house. She's picky and knows what she wants. If it's good enough for her, I'm sure I'll like it. The only restriction I have is making sure that the living room has appropriate acoustics and location for my HDTV. And an office for me. Other than that, I'm good with whatever she likes.

Cathie and I went to see The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on Saturday night. These books were the staple of computer geeks 20 years ago (wow that makes me sound old) when I was in high school. I'm a huge fan of all of the late Douglas Adam's books. They're style is a cross between an intelligent man's Monty Python and Space Balls. I remember playing the text based adventure game of HHGTTG of my TRS-80 Color Computer a long time ago. Anyways, I've been looking forward to the movie and I wasn't disappointed. I thought it was a great representation of the story and the characters. The big themes came through from the book, but I'm not sure how it would come across for people who hadn't read them. Screw 'em. I liked it.

The last of the fish were flushed today. Emily stood above the toilet watching them swirl around telling them, "I love you fishies! Bye! I love you!" We're trying things a little differently this time, letting the water sit for 48 hours first and only putting one fish in at a time. We'll see how many fish deaths we can add to the five we've already got.