Allergy Meds

We went over to Dana and Eli's last night for dinner and hung out. They have four of the strangest cats I've ever seen. They're all pretty huge - one the size of a small puma, the other with some weird nerve damage in his paw, so he carries his front paw like a pirate hook, kind of dragging himself around. Anyways, my allergies were killing me, so I took one of the 12 hour Claritin tablets and all was well.... Until 2:30 this morning when was wide awake after 2 1/2 hours of sleep. I tried to go back to sleep and couldn't, so I cracked open my book and read until now, about 5:30, when I decided to get up, have some coffee and get an early start on my day.

Tags: Claritin

KC

I was in Kansas City yesterday at a customer site and had the chance to catch up with my friend Matt. We hit the poker room at one of the local casinos and sat down at the 3-6-12 table. He won, I lost, but not much. Lots of guys who were better than me, and therefore better than Eli. I got back late and got up very, very early to catch a 6am flight home. Kansas City was 100 degrees+ yesterday and supposed to get up to 104 today. Ouch.

Kill the Wabbit

I was happy to live and let live with the Woodchuck under my deck, until Brad explained two things:
1. There's not just one living under there. There's probably a whole family, I'm just seeing one at a time.
2. They'll trash your foundation and gnaw at your deck.

Now, in true Caddyshack fashion, it's on. I went up to the police station and got a live trap all setup in my backyard ready to go, chock full of Woodchuck goodness. They were very clear at the police station that what I do with the animal is my responsibility, so I can either relocate them somewhere, or find a humane way to kill the things. (Yes, I know I could pay a company to come get the thing, but what can I say? I'm cheap.)

Nate and I talked through different options of how to off the little fella, including using the broadsword Cathie had gotten me for my birthday a while back. The best we could come up with was to take them somewhere and let him go.

Cathie was hesitant to let Nate help with this because she'd heard that serial killers all start off killing animals. I used Will as an example of someone who kills a lot of animals and is not a serial killer, but maybe it wasn't a good example. Will is referred to as a Chicken Hawk for many reasons, including the fact that he was given the nickname as a kid for his love of killing chickens and rolling in their blood (Who am I to judge? We have our traditions in our family, Will has his)

Firefox 2.0 Beta 1

I'm running the beta release for Firefox 2.0 and so far, so good. They've really taken it to the next level in terms of the integrated features. They've added in a lot of the functionality that you previously had to get with extensions - things like spell checking, feed subscription and anti-phishing pieces. spell checking and feed subscriptions. The only problem with running the beta is that many of your old extensions might think they're not compatible. You can resolve that by installing this extension.

So far the app is very stable, but still somewhat of a memory hog.

Tags: Firefox 2.0, Nightly Tester Tool Extension

Saturday

Saturday was hot. Really hot. The Jeffrey's were kind enough to invite us and the Schultz's over to hang out at their cottage in Pickney. We got there and we all jumped in the lake as the kids launched themselves off the dock into the water, as Brad lay there sunning himself, cuddling with his water noodle.


We took the pontoon boat out onto the lake and floated out there for a while, swimming in the middle of the lake. We took turns launching ourselves off the seats on the boat, with the lake water being the perfect temperature. Brad gave each of the kids a chance to drive for a while, which they loved.

The Jeffrey's got a new ski-doo, which is wicked fast. It's top speed is 80+. I had it up to 72, but couldn't get it any faster. The thing is a rocket. Nate and Maddie are finally at an age where they really like driving it (with our help, of course).



After dinner, Jim was tasked with building a fire, which he did - thanks to his friend mr. lighter fluid. We broke out the sparklers, and I got some cool pictures of the kids and the adults playing with them.

The pictures don't capture how much fun we had or how amazingly hospitable the Jeffreys are with their cottage. It was an awesome day. You can see the rest of the pictures here in the Kurt Family Photo Album.
Update: I just updated the photo album link above, because somehow a bunch of the pictures got left out

Sunday at the Pool

Sunday was fantastic. We went to church in the morning and then headed straight over to Cathie's parents in Dewitt. The temperature was in the 90s, so we pretty much hunt out in the pool all day. Cathie's brother Ed was there and Stacy was up from Ohio as they're getting ready to move, so the kids had a blast playing with them.


Emily and Ed had fun playing in the pool as Ed did tricks under water and Emily watched.

Ed couldn't figure out why the spatula was so flimsy until his Mom asked him where the fly swatter was.

Mom made the girls rasberry daquiris (non-alcoholic, of course) which they loved.

The kids are all swimming like fish now, and they've both started doing flips off the diving board. Some of the practice jumps were a little painful to watch - Nate had a couple where he landed square on his back and another where he landed on his stomach. Ouch.

We had so much fun swimming and hanging out with the family. We barely got out of the water the entire time we were there.

Scoopy Doos

After spending the day in the pool at Cathie's parents, we went to my parents house and they treated us for ice cream at Scoopy Doo's in downtown Dewitt. My Mom's ice cream cone was the gigantic, as you can see.

We live in a fairly small town, and have our own small town paper - The South Lyon Herald. The main reason we subscribe is for the Police Blotter. Each week, we get to see who had what run-in with the police. This recent one was a personal favorite. Basically, a guy riding a bike flipped off an old guy who almost hit him. The old guy threw the car into reverse and ran the guy on the bike over:

A 42-year-old South Lyon man said he was riding his bike when the driver of a car drove close to him and honked his horn. The cyclist waved his hand in anger at the driver, setting off a verbal argument. The driver then backed the vehicle up and struck him with teh car, knocking him off of his bike and onto the ground. he suffered minor injuries to his leg. Several witnesses at the scene gave similar accounts of the incident, deputies said, and one followed the driver as he fled the scene, noting his license plate number.

Deputies tracked the suspect, a 65-year-old Northville man, and spoke with him at his home. The report said he admitted to being at the scene of the alleged assault, but refused to discuss the incident. He was arrested for suspected felonious assault and held in Oakland County jail.

Freakonomics Blog » Will New Wal-Mart Policy Help Catch More Drunken Drivers?

Very interesting article from the Freakonomics Blog on how Wal-Mart's new shoplifting policy might help the police catch more Drunken Drivers. If you've never read the book Freakonomoics, I highly reccomend it. It's a fascinating look at the correlation of seemingly unrelated trends and patterns.

Tags: freakonomics, wal-mart, shoplifting, drunk driving

I can't help myself

It's official. I have a genetic predisposition towards Neophelia. This is a great excuse. Plus it's on the internet, so it has to be true.

Tags: Neophelia

Moms Prefer Smell of Their Own Baby's Poop

Reading this article, I wonder if my brother Jon feels the same way.

Cool Technology

This is a very cool piece of new technology called Sharpcast. It's a photo album syncronization program. It lets you create photo albums on one computer and share them across multiple people, computers and devices. I have the albums setup on my desktop, and I can automatically sync those with other computer in my house. As I make changes on one album, it pushes those to the other computers or people that I have them shared with.

The very cool part of it is the Smart Phone syncronization. It will then automatically sync those same photo albums out to my phone. If I take a picture, it pushes that back to my desktop album as well. It takes care of all of the resizing of the images to fit the device as well. It works on my Treo 700W and the Motorola Qs, not sure of what else. You can read Mossberg's Sharpcast Review.

This would be great functionality to build into a photo album manager like Picasa, but the photo album functionality in this thing is still lacking relative to Picasa

Tags: Sharpcast, Picasa

Covered in Shaving Cream

On my way to bed, I went into my bathroom to find the entire bathroom: ceiling, walls, shower, mirror - everything, covere din shaving cream, but I couldn't find the can anywhere. At first I thought one of my kids had done it. I went and got Nate to show him, and we found the can, which normally sits on part of my shower mirror, 6 feet away on my sink, with a big puncture whole in it. Using our Sherlock Holmes like skills of deduction, I the shower mirror fell, punctured the can, and sent it shooting all over the bathroom, spraying shaving cream everywhere. Pretty impressive, really. They really fit a lot of shaving cream in that little can.

Superman and Spiders

I've tried to re-tell the story of Kevin Smith and his role in the Superman script to some of you and not really done it justice. Kevin Smith is one of the best story tellers in the world, and this story is fantastic, as told during An Evening with Kevin Smith. You can watch the video here. (Warning: It's 20 minutes long and has explicit language).

Tags: Kevin Smith, Superman, Spiders

Weird Al Interview

I'm a big fan of Weird Al Yankovic. I listened to him as a kid, and now my son Nate listens to him as well. A while back, he'd parodied one of Eminem's songs, Lose Yourself, but wasn't allowed by Eminemw to make a video for it. He did an interview with Eminem on his TV show, edited it up, and it was hilarious. Thanks to Todd for turning me on to this.

Tags: Weird Al, Eminem, Lose Yourself, Couch Potato

Solve Soduku

I'm not a man of patience. I've tried doing Soduku puzzles without much luck. This is a great walk through that explains how to quickly solve the Soduku puzzles in a way that even I can understand.

Wild Video

Check out this video of the unluckiest skydiver ever. Almost makes me not want to parachute any more. Almost.

Cool New Technology

This is very cool technology. It's an FM iPod transmitter/charger for your car that also broadcasts via RDS, which puts your song/artist information on your car radio, the same way radio stations do. The downside is that it only supports the 4Gen iPods. I'm always looking for a reason to upgrade.

Tags: Kensington RDS FM Transmitter

Life Lessons #327-#329

#327. If you go on vacation, make sure you have someone put your trash out or it will get maggots.
#328. If you forget to put your trash out and it gets maggots and there's a nasty brown liquid all over the can, don't touch it.
#329. If you forget to put your trash out and it gets maggots and you touch the nasty brown liquid, don't touch it.

I violated rules 327-329 today. I went to check on how Nate was doing with bringing in the trash cans and saw one still sitting in the street. He told me it had some nasty brown stuff on it that smelled, so I went down to help him bring it up. While Nate was watching, I accidentally touched the stuff, smelled my finger, and threw up in the street while Nate was laughing his head off. It smelled worse that my belly button on a really, really bad day.

Skyline Chili in BFE Ohio

I got up early this morning to meet up with Todd, Raitz and the 311 Band (Drew, Chad, James, Zack) to head down to Oxford, OH on the University of Miami Ohio campus to get setup for one of the camps for the Project 311 team. On the way down we stopped at Skyline Chili for lunch where I had three cheese-filled-chili wieners. It was in a small town in the middle of Ohio, and you'd of thought that our group had walked in naked. We caught some pretty strange looks from most of the guests and the wait-staff as well. Must have been Chad with his multiple piercings. We unloaded and Todd and I turned around to drive home. Ohio pretty much has three things: Roadside Sex Shops, Roadside Pond Vacation Homes and Fireworks. My conversation was cut short with Todd because every time I'd try and tell him an amusing story or recent happening, he'd cut me off and tell me he'd already read it on my blog.