Today is Garage Sale day in South Lyon. This is a huge deal around here. Traffic drives slowly, non-stop through the neighborhoods as people look for deals. I think I counted almost 16 garage sales in our subdivision alone. Most of the stuff people put out is stuff that they'd be throwing out otherwise. I didn't want to have a grage sale this year, but ended up having one anyways, kinda. I started just by taking a couple of boxes of books to our neighbor's, the Lanams. As I went through the house, I slowly kept bringing stuff down, including my old grill. I offered the Lanam's 8 year old son Austin a comission if the grill sold, but I told him he needed to talk to each person who came in and tell them what a nice grill it was. He did it. Still hasn't sold.

The kids and I went out garage-saling today. Kind of ironic as we're trying to get rid of garbage. The stuff I got was stuff that I can replace old crap with. I got a new umbrella for our patio furniture for $7, I got a new set of very nice golf clubs for $30, Nate got a few books and Madeline got some fiber optic light thingy. Bob Rays would have been disappionted in my lack of bargaining skills.

Trash day is Monday, so the trash scavengers come digging on Sunday night, scrounging through the trash. As we've been cleaning out our house over the past month, we've had huge trash piles, and in turn lots of scavengers. The kids would stand by the front door and watch people pick through our stuff asking, "Dad, why are these people in our trash?" Good question. One man's trash, another man's treasure.

You'd never from looking at the jacket (or touching the jacket for that matter) that this is a leather jacket. Not just any leather jacket - it's a Member's Only leather jacket. Member's Only is very popular to the older generation. My dad used to have a Member's Only sweatshirt that he would wear on a pretty regular basis when I was growing up. Why all this talk about this jacket? Why is Will wearing this jacket? This is Brad's leather jacket. He bought it about 10 years ago. Due to either age or quality, the jacket feels very unique, as in, pleather unique. We all agreed last night that Will should try the jacket on. We were right.

Yesterday was my 34th birthday. Not a big deal as far as significant years go. After I got over turning the 30, the rest were easy. We have this strange tradition in my family on a birthday. Every family member must call that person. This means that every niece, nephew, aunt, uncle, grandma, grandpa, mom, dad and Will must call and wish a happy birthday. Doesn't matter if you're out of town. My brother Dan's called me from Korea before. You get bonus points for being first.


Cathie and the kids got me a grill for my birthday (The Weber Summit Gold C4). I'd always had the el-cheapo gas model from Sears. This thing is amazing. It is the cadillac of grills. My friends Will and Brad have the same grill, but my wife was smart enough to get me one model better.

To make the day better, some of my friends took me out to dinner at Morton's steakhouse as a suprise and a joint celebration of Ted's lateral move within his company. We started the night out at Bob's, having drinks and sampling his extensive tequila collection and then we headed to Morton's Steakhouse. I've sampled all of the big steakhouses in the country and I don't think you can get any better than Morton's for the quality of beef and overall service. We ate like kings. I had a Prime Rib that was as big as my head. We even got Kirk (Mr. Men's Journal Top Trainer in the Country) to eat dessert. It was a 3 hour meal and we all waddled out of there full and really thankful about what an amazing group of friends I have.

Xerox's CEO, Anne Mulcahy, spoke as a part of a lecture series on the turn-around of Xerox. This is a great summation of it and an example of why I have such huge respect for Anne. She is an amazing leader and it's cool to work in the same company and watch how she leads and occasionally get to interact with her. I can't reference her without showing the picture of me sitting in a meeting sitting next to her, looking like I've fallen asleep.

Watch this Kevin Smith video clip on Leno, talking about his new book Silent Bob Speaks. After finding his review on the new star wars flick, I've been reading his blog... He's a great story teller, but this goes into everything he does, all day long... everything. Probably way too much for most people, and a little graphic at times. To see a great example of his story telling, check out An Evening with Kevin Smith sometime - great example of his story telling.. (Joe's still got my copy).

The new Batman Begins trailer is out.

This is a great review from Kevin Smith of the new Star Wars movie. Beware: Language and Spoilers.

Another example of knowing that we're doing something right with our kids. Madeline left the following note on our bed tonight:
Dear Mom,
Thanks for all the hard work you do for us around the house. You are the best mom ever.

Love Maddie

Emily got a gold fish tank and 4 fish for her birthday. She keeps changing their names every day. Nacho is my favorite fish. One died the other day. I took it out of the tank for Cathie with a spoon, but forgot to put it in a bag to return it. I left it sitting on the counter and headed out to the airport. Cathie called me, thanking me for scaring. Apparently, she couldn't find the fish in the tank, which she thought was odd. She just happened to be walking up to the sink for something, she looked down, and there was the fish sitting on the edge of the sink. Apparently it was scary because it was unexpected. A single dead gold fish wouldn't really scare most people, in my opinion. We returned the dead fish and got a new one, a black one, which Emily named Carl. We were watching Carl in his death throes in the tank today. Emily was so excited that her fish had learned tricks. Now it's just laying there in the tank. Nice trick, Carl.

The good news is that DirecTV just launched a new satellite and they'll soon have the ability to bradcoats 1500 HD channels, including HD local channels to the Detroit area. The bad news is that it won't work with my freaking HD Tivo that I spent almost a grand on. Bummer.

This is an hilarious mac ad.

I like this discourse on the f-bomb from the Dead Youthpastor Walking blog:

I find people who always have to cuss to get their point across to be fairly stupid. I recently encountered one such person and wrote him off completely because of his lack of self control.

But when is it appropriate? I think when you truly have something to be passionate about, to express extreme confusion at something; and most definitely not when you're talking directly to one person and addressing them with said f-word. Like I said, I think people who throw the f-word around without regard for its influence on the crowd are ignorant and not worth my time. I think if David, Job, or Jonah had the f-word at their disposal... it would be in our scriptures along with many of the other lewd references. Not sprinkled throughout like paprika... just placed in just the right spot to convey the tremendous combination of angst, confusion, and disgust at something that punctuates a low time-- not just a desert time, but a devil-standing-next-to-me-in-the-desert kind of time.

I think we spend a lot of time working on an image for the church... an image of infallability, of self-reliance for holiness. I know, they'll say "oh, our holiness comes from above..." -- and yet if you cuss that holiness just runs away like enron stockholders? Come on. Holiness belongs to God and no amount of vocabulary will secure or hinder it. It just is.

I think a moderate number of extreme times in our lives merit extreme phrases. I believe our forefathers through the scripture made that quite clear. And yeah, I still believe I tend to write people off when they cuss at me.

I had a big scare today. I almost lost everything on my laptop. What kills me is that it was a dumb mistake. I was moving my laptop out of our corporate domain onto a local workgroup, which worked great. I forgot to create a new account on the machine and I essentially locked myself out of my system. With some help from a guy at work, I was able to download a linux CD image, boot the sytsem up and reset my admin password on the system. From there, I was able to boot up, create a new account and migrate my account using this article. Phew.

I'm in Birmingham, AL for a couple of days. I flew out yesterday from Kansas City, and jumped in my car while I took a conference call. I should never take a conference call while I'm in the car in a new city without a map. Seems to be a good recipe for getting lost. Again. I finally got to my hotel and started getting caught up on e-mail and stuff. It's beautiful down here, 85 degrees and sunny, so I headed out by the pool to take a conference call. Why not do it in the sun? I'm in meetings down here for the next couple of days until Thursday when I head home.

Cathie and I are getting our house ready to sell and we made a lot of progress over the weekend, getting things cleaned up outside and the garage done. Our next-door neighbor is selling there house and our real estate agent called yesterday and told us that people had been looking at their house, noticed ours, somehow found out we were selling it and want to look at it before it goes on the market. We weren't planning on putting it on the market for a couple of weeks, but I told her we could have it in reasonable shape by Sunday. Guess we'll have a busy weekend.

Nate and I have his Cub Scout Pinewood derby race this weekend. Being pretty poor at wood working, Nate and I found a kit on the internet that had a lot of the rough woodwork already done so that we just fine-tuned the car, sanded it, painted it, weighted it and are getting it ready to race. It's amazing, you can easily spend $100 on specially machined axels, wheels, cars, etc. to win. Suprising, I didn't. The $10 I spent was well worth it. We'll see how we do. I was digging through my boxes of stuff I've saved since childhood and came across all of my pinewood derby cars from Cub Scouts and Webelos. They were hilarious looking, but I have great memories of working on my car with my dad.

Will got back from the project he's working on in Hawaii yesterday and brought the girls Hula outfits:


My dog Riley is a saint. Emily loves her dearly and my dog must hate her. If I were my dog, I would bite her, but Riley puts up with everything Emily throws at her. Emily dresses her in doll clothes, rides her, hugs her and takes for her walks in her own special way.

We celebrated Emily's 4th birthday today at my brother Dan's house in a joint party for Emily and my nephew Andrew (Photos here). I think her favorite gift was a large pickle that my brother Dan got for her. She ate it in the car ride home. Until she fell asleep, happy:


My brothers Jon and Will seemed to have fun:


Madeline explained how the nail polish on one finger came off and had to be redone as a different color. One of those things that's funny to us, and will make a great picture later, out of context.


Here's a picture you won't see often. Will dunking:

Buck has this picture posted as his personal photo on his blog. It's a guy we met at a Youth Specialties conference a few years back, dressed completely in orange with a giant orange ring around his neck. No idea why. I felt it needed a picture.

I did the message today in church. I thought it went pretty well, but I felt like I was staring at my notes quite a bit. It gets a little easier to do each time, but I really enjoy the whole process once I get rolling with it. I talked about Stuff (as in posesions), something I'm an expert in. You can download a mp3 of the message here.

Cathie and I watched the movie After the Sunset tonight with Selma Hayek, Pierce Brosnon and Woody Harelson. The movie takes place in the Bahamas, where we just were, and centers around a diamond heist taking place on the same ship we were just on, the Seven Seas Navigator. It's wild to see all of the places we were just at a few days ago, including the same tables, lounges, hot tubs, etc. Average movie, cool seeing that stuff.

I started watching this new series on the Discovery Channel called Deadliest Catch. It's a documentary on the Alaskan Crab industry. Huge pay for the fisherman (Upwards of $140k person for 5 Days if they're lucky), but it's unbelievably dangerous. The ice, seas, cold, storms. Huge numbers of people die. The show follows the crews of two boats through the season, which can last only days, depending on how much the crews catch. Within the first day, one ship sinks and five people die. Hardcore.