I finally went through all of my outdated gadgets and put them out on eBay. I'm always amazed by what people will buy online, so I've listed an old bluetooth headset, an audio adapter, an MP3 receiver and a 4GB iPod. It's all in good shape, and I've had good luck in the past with listing my stuff online. Living on a strict budget has made it tough to acquire new stuff, so as I get rid of the old it only seems right that I can spend that on new gadgets. My list right now is prioritized as follows:
1. Digital SLR Camera (not sure which one - probably a Minolta, so I can use my old lenses)
2. 60 GB Video iPod
3. TomTom Bluetooth Treo GPS System.

Velvet Elvis

I've got a pile of books next to my bed that I'm going through. I read 1 non-fiction book for every 5 fiction books, hence I'm not good at staying up on the latest in reading - either business or spiritual stuff. By the time I buy a non-fiction book, place it in the queue and finally read it, it's normally about a year out. I got the book Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell (shameless Raitz-style name-dropping - "I went to high school with Rob and he lived a block away from me") for Christmas from Cathie's parents and decided to make an exception and start reading it. I've been listening to his teaching's at Mars Hill (Jon and Beth used to go there when they lived in Grand Rapids) for the past year or so. His teachings have impacted my paradigm in a big way, so I figured his book would be a good one to read as well. So far, so good. It's written like you're listening to one of his messages, which I like. Pretty easy to read. I like it. (how's that for profound?)

I decided to update my sidebar to list the books I'm reading at any given time and those I've just finished. (Anyone know of any good sites that provided scripted lists that I can update and have it publish out to my blog via scripting?)

Car 'o Skank

Not exactly sure why, but my car smells like rotten garbage mixed with armpit. I've vacuumed it, cleaned it, but I just can't figure it out. I turn the car back in in February. For now, I've got a big 'ol air freshener. Nothing like the smell of Vanilla garbage mixed with armpit.

8th Wonder of the World

Nate and I went to Lucky's today to play video games for a while and then to see King Kong. The movie was long (3 hours), but it was tremendous. The special effects are so good that you forget about them after a while. King Kong really grows on you and at the end, you're rooting for him to wail on the army as they attack him. Jack Black was good in his role, but not "Jack Black" enough for me. I guess people will finally take him seriously as an actor.

Here's the latest update on my Mom's Pancreatic Cancer from my Dad:

Lynn has now had two chemo treatments. On December 16th, we left for U-M Cancer Clinic in Ann Arbor at 8 a.m. and didn't arrive home until 8 p.m. Each visit, Lynn will have blood drawn so they can monitor the impact of the two chemo treatments. We met with the doctors and they were pleased with the results of the blood work and discussed their approach to the chemotherapy. They are treating her very aggressively, so Lynn is receiving two different chemo treatments each visit. They are administered intravenously and take 4 hours to administer. As expected, the affects from the chemo are mostly nausea and fatigue and an overall crummy feeling. They indicated she would feel the worse two days after the treatments, but it is lasting much longer than that.

She had her second treatment on Friday afternoon, December 23rd. Besides being the day before Christmas Eve, they couldn't fit us in until late in the afternoon, which meant that we didn't get home until 10:30 p.m. She was able to attend Christmas Eve church service and enjoyed the family, while leaving the meals up to the rest of the family to deal with. She knows her limits and was not afraid to get some rest when she felt tired. This week she continues with the nausea and fatigue, despite the many different anti-nausea drugs she has available. Lynn has 8 more chemo treatments between now and mid-March,with the next one being January 6th. That will be followed by radiation and a different chemotherapy for 6 weeks.

Please continue to pray for my Mom!

Blue is Blue

Eli, Will, Brad and I went out to Mongolian BBQ for dinner and then to Lucky's to play 18 holes of Golden Tee and then watch the Pistons game. Brad lost at air hockey, even after cheating.

Will got Brad, Ted and I very thoughtful gifts - for me this 'The Dude Remains' t-shirt. Brad got Will a bottle of Boones Farm wine. Brad got me squat, which must have been awkward, sad and campy, since both Will and I got him very, very thoughtful gifts. We're all awaiting our gifts from Ted.

My Vacation

I've accomplished almost nothing "productive" so far during my vacation. I've played games with my kids, caught up on some movies (including The Big Lebowski), not worked out once and eaten horribly. I'm planning on heading to Lansing at some point to go visit my Mom/Dad and go see my Grandma as well. Well, I guess I'mve almost finished with the latest Wilbur Smith book, Triumph of the Sun, which is excellent once you get past the first 100 pages.

I am the Phase 10 Champion of the World

Nate got the card game called Phase 10, so Cathie and I decided to give it a try. Cathie suffered an embarrassing defeat - 170 - 295. Ouch. If you have a moment, send her a note offering your condolences.

Giant Pile of Putty

When you work for Google and your stock is worth billions, you can work on side projects, like making a giant pile of silly putty.

I'm guessing that many of these guys who do large scale lego-artwork live at home with their Mom's.

Loser at Spoons

We got together with the Niemi's, Girards and Muzzi's for dinner and ended up playing spoons. Cathie lost at spoons and ended up having to wear this sweatshirt. It's a beauty.

We followed it up with a game of Pop Culture Trivia Pusuit, guys vs. girls. The guys crushed the women. I came to realize just how much useless information is trapped in my brain, after pulling out answers like "Mr. Hinkey the Christmas Poo" and knowing what the dinosaurs are doing in the Far Side cartoon captioned "The real reason the dinosaurs became extinct".

The whole family went to see The Chronicles of Narnia today and we all loved it. The story just captures my heart, and some of the parallels to the Gospel story are great to see. Nate had asked me how Lewis wrote the book, so I did some research and found the following on Wikipedia:

Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument, then collected information about child psychology and decided what age group I'd write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out 'allegories' to embody them. This is all pure moonshine. I couldn't write in that way. It all began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn't anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord.

Apparently, there's been a fair amount of debate in some circles on whether or not this story truly is allegorical. Here's what Lewis said:

If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair represents despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, 'What might Christ become like, if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?' This is not allegory at all.

Guess not. Regardless of where your faith's at, I think there are some universal themes in the movie of sacrifice and redemption that hit everyone at a deep level, and point to an ultimate truth inside of each of us, whether we realize it or not.

New addition to the Family

As part of Maddie's present from Santa, she got a Guinea Pig cage set and a gift card from Petco to get the Guinea Pig. Emily, Maddie and I headed up to the store today to pick out the pig. We ended up with a four month old pig which Maddie has named Baily. Maddie is on cloud nine right now, playing with it and reading about it. Prior to getting the pet, she'd meticulously gone through the book that came with the set, took copious notes and sat down with my brother Jon, who used to have one, and took notes based on what he told her about the pet. Of the three, she's very meticulous and diligant in these kinds of things.
Here's Maddie and Baily in his cage:

A number of you, including my girl Ingrid, have asked how my finger is doing lately. I considered giving it it's own blog, but decided against it. The finger has gone from swollen, to infected, to oozing, to having no nail. I'm guessing I could fetch a pretty penny for the entire fingernail on eBay.

My brother Jon brought Wasabi Cashews to Christmas that he picked up at Trader Joe's. They really grow on you after a while. They're pretty unsuspecting looking, to the point that both Nate and Emiliy grabbed them out of the bag and popped them in their mouth as they proceeded to scream and spit them out from sheer pain.

Christmas Day

I ended up sleeping on one of my Dad's air mattresses, which seemed comfortable at first. My brother Jon shared with me this bit of prophetic wisdom "The only thing worse than no air matresss, is a half-full air matress". I woke up in the middle of the night to find that the dumb thing had slowly deflated enough so that more than half the air was out of it, and the only thing off the floor were my feet. I was pretty confident my brother Jon had come up in the middle of the night and deflated it, though he denies. If he'd done it, it'd have been a genius trick. Nate was kind enough to wake up about 6:30, and I held him off until about 7. In the past, my mother received a set of bells (we believe these have come straight from Satan) that she would send her grandkids running throughout the house to wake us up. This year, we missed out on them, but still got up somehow (there's a lesson to be learned here).

We started opening the gifts from Grandma and Grandpa, which everyone loved. The most impressive thing was that my Mom was still able to get Christmas Shopping done on her days while she was feeling well, which made them all the more special. Almost better was that my Dad had to help with christmas shopping this year.

We had a great breakfast, including oatmeal with Baily's, which was really, really, really good. After breakfast the kids played with their toys and I started getting all of our stuff together (with help from Beth and Susan). Cathie normally pulls everything together, making sure nothing gets forgotten and that it's all neatly packed away. Not so much this year. My Dad gave Em, Nate and I a ride over to Cathie's parents where we went to check on Cathie. Maddie and I then headed back to my folks where Maddie opened her presents and got a chance to hang out with my parents a little while

Around one, we started Christmas Celebration #3. Cathie's brother Ed and my sister-in-law Stacy came over (tan from a recent trip to the Bahamas) and we always have a fun time. It's a nice contrast to the craziness of my family Christmas, giving us all a chance to chill a little and enjoy the day. By this time, Cathie was feeling a little better, but it's tough to tell, because she rarely complains when she's sick.

Voice recognition stuff was big this year. Madeline got a voice recognition diary which only opens based on your voice password (which Ed was able to duplicate with a very high pitch imitation of a girl). Cathie's parents got Emily the creepiest present (but one that she loves dearly), a doll called Amazing Amanda. The thing recognizes your voice and interacts with you pretty realistically via voice commands. The face moves in a really detailed way, to the point that it's creepy. It recongizes the various acoutraments - food, outfits, toilet via electronic tags embedded in them. The thing even grunts when it poops on the toilet. If you don't get it on the toilet, it has an accident. Emily finds great joy in setting it next to me and getting it to say that it had an accident next to me. The instrutions say "Please replace batteries if doll starts acting erratically." I believe this means it will someday come at me with a knife in the middle of the night, like Chucky in Child's Play.

We had another huge dinner after presents. I crashed hard after dinner, taking a great nap, waking up with a stuffed animal stuck on my head and people laughing. The kids played with their presents and we hung out until about 8:30, when we headed out. We got home and Emily was crashed in the van. We unloaded everything, put the other kids to bed, and took a deep breath and exhaled, amazed that the whole thing was over with.

You can see more pictures of Christmas Eve and Day here, in the Kurt Family Gallery. If you're a real glutton for punishment, you can see everyone's Christmas pictures by clicking through each person's gallery.

Christmas Eve

We woke up Christmas Eve morning and pulled everyting together to head to Lansing to meet up with my family for church. You'd think not leaving until 2:30 would give us plenty of time, but somehow, we found a way to still be scrambling at the last minute.
We got to my Mom's church, where she'd bribed the youth pastor to rope off two full rows for the Kurt clan. The service was great and I got to hold my new niece Libby for most of the service, which was nice, almost made me want a forth. After church, we headed over to my parents house to take our annual Christmas pictures and then eat.

We got the pictures done in record time this year, mostly because we didn't take every stinkin possible permutation of people. We stuck with families, families with Mom and Dad, and the annual Grandkids picture, which gets a little more chaotic every year.

Dan and my Dad forgot to tell the rest of the guys about the ugly-tie contest that was going on:

We had an awesome dinner, and we were all suprised to see that my Dad had sprung for better beer than Killian's. Jon had brought a six pack of Sam Adams, which Dan, Kevin and I made sure we polished off before Jon had finished his first. After gorging ourselves, we settled into allowing the kids to open presents from their Aunts and Uncles. My Mom had gotten the kids matching pajamas, which they soon turned into a gang. They chose the name "Blue Snowflake Ninjas" - not the toughest name, I'll agree...

But I was able to direct them into delivering a beating to my brother Jon, which was fun to watch:

She kept it quiet, but throughout all of this, Cathie was slowing feeling nautious. We'd been wondering if Nate's flu would catch up with us, based on him having it a days back. It did. After getting sick, Cathie headed over to her parents, not wanting to infect my Mom (who's somewhat suseptible due to her Chemotherapy)about five minutes away. Maddie was very concerned about her and went with her to watch over her. We missed her, as this was the first Christmas not to have everyone there.

My sister Susan is following in following in my mother's MuMu footsteps with this outfit, as well as making sure that after three kids, her husband keeps far away as well:

Dan and Kris decided this year not to stay over. We weren't sure if they were mad at us, or what the deal was - frankly, this came as a shock to all of us that they left. This quited things down for us and gave us a chance to hang out. For the second night in a row, Emily asked to go to bed. Having all the beds taken up, Emily decided to sleep in the Den on the chair, and seemed relatively comfortable.

Jon was very excited about the whole thing, as seen by his hat. Kevin, Jon, Nate and I hung out playing the new King Kong video game until about midnight, when we finally crashed.


(You can find additional details of the event on my brother Dan's blog as well)

Great story that my brother Dan shared about my newphew Steve-O:

His teacher was asking one of the other students how he wanted her to refer to
him, as Nathan or Nate. My nephew over heard this and explained that from
now on, he'd like to be referred to as "The Great Brain". Genius.

The Night before Christmas, Eve.

After a long negotiation with Santa, we were able to get him to come Thursday night to deliver presents. We made a deal with the kids that they couldn't wake us up until 7am. Ever minute before that, they would have to wait a minute afterwards to go see what Santa brought, so 6:45=7:15. It worked. 7AM on the nose we were up and heading downstairs to see if any presents had been delivered.



We put ourselves on a pretty strict budget this year, but the kids didn't seem to notice and were thrilled with what they got. Madeline ended up getting a guinea pig cage and a gift card to pick out the guinea pig on Monday. She spent the rest of the day reading through the guinea pig book while taking notes and periodically asking me lots of questions, because my brother Jon used to have one, which makes me pretty much an expert in her eyes.

Nate got the new Rachet and Clank Deadlocked game for PS2, which has cool multi-player capability and online play as well. We made a couple different kinds of Christmas cookies and mostly hung out playing with the kids new toys. Emily got the game "Whack-a-Mole", which I've been able to beat her at every time.

I think it started because of the number of people in our church who go out of town for Christmas Eve, but we end up doing a Christmas Eve-Eve service. The girls love getting all dressed up, and we normally put on a big 'ol extravaganza. This year we had an awesome choir (my friend Nicki was in it), a five piece orchestra (is that still considered an orchestra, or is it just called something else?) and a 30 minute drama that was excellent. There were a ton of people there - around 400. I got to see a lot of people I haven't seen in a while, which was great. The Kohne family came with us to check it out as well. A ton of people worked really hard to pull this whole service off and the end result was great.

We topped the evening off by having some friends over - The Shinns and the Kohne's joined us to hang out - eat, drink and be merry. The kids played hard. Emily asked to go to bed around 11:15. I went up to check on her five minutes later and she was in her PJ's, out cold in bed already.

Today, we're heading to my Mom's church in Haslett for a 3:30 Christmas Eve service, then over to my parents with the whole family - My two parents, 10 grandkids, 8 Kurt kids (yeah, we count Kevin as a Kurt). It's total chaos, but it's my favorite family tradition. More on that when we're back on Monday.

Will's Christmas Blanky

Every year at Christmas, Will breaks out his "Christmas Blanky". There's nothing Will loves more than snuggling up with his Blanky, his Mom and a nice warm cup of cocoa. He loves to curl up in the fetal position with his blanket and watch How the Grinch Stole Christmas. I guess we've all got our Christmas traditions.

Performancing for Firefox

Performancing is a pretty cool blogging tool that integrates into Firefox. You click a button in the browser and it splits the screen, with half the screen for the blog entry. A trained monkey could use it. I like it.

Smack the Penguin

Love clubbing baby seals? This game is just the thing for you. It's the good 'ol Smack the Penguin game. This deserves to be played. Beat 593.

I love playing video games, but don't normally have a lot of time to do it. I normally take the week off between Christmas and New Years, which is when Nate and I get a chance to catch up and do some quality gaming. We just finished playing Marvel Nemesis - Rise of the Imperfects (great game, fun super hero action) and now we're working on the new King Kong game for PS2, which has amazing graphics. Nate and I saw it in the store in high-def on Xbox 360 and couldn't believe our eyes. If Nate gets any new games for Christmas (which I happen to have the inside track on), we'll be guaranteed to drive my wife crazy with our marathon gaming episodes.

This flash video pardody of the Black Eyed Peas song My Humps - Our Humps, just in time for Christmas. Ingrid would hate this. Frankly, I think it's pretty goofy myself.... I guess Ingrid and I agree on some things. (The difference being, I wouldn't assume that they're going to hell and are the anti-christ for doing a parody on an already bad song)

I thought this was genius thinking at 3:00 AM: Nate filled me in this morning that he woke up in the middle of the night and threw up, but didn't quite get to the toilet with all of it. Instead of just leaving a nasty suprise for someone to step in when they woke up, he locked the door of the bathroom. Now if only I could find the key....

Here's a complete list of every job that Homer Simpson has had on the 18 years on the show.

Long live the CS50!

When the kids are home, Cathie's gone and I'm on a conference call working, the last thing I want to hear is: "Dad, Nathan threw up." The beauty of my Plantronics CS-50 headset is that I was able to clean up the puke in the bathroom and clean the carpeting, all while on a call for work.

This printable coupon site is perfect for the frugal Kurt family.

I beat Noel in this Googlefight.

Big Lebowski

I've you seen the movie, you'd understand why I want this shirt:

The Goonies Reunited!

Where's Chunk and who's Choco?

I took some pretty horrible video of the kid's christmas concert last night and messed around with editing it. I'm getting better with iMovie on my mac, and as easy as it is, I still haven't figured it all out.

This video is really only for Aunts, Uncles and Grandparents because I can't imagine who else would want to watch. Maddie's class was pretty quick and pretty straightforward. Of special note is Nate's speaking role, where he says the word "Almost" into the micropohone. He explained to me that they drew numbers for the different speaking parts, and he ended up with the worst part. Actually, it's pretty darn amusing just watching Nate try and stand still and sing. Even after watching the video a few times, I still can't figure out why that word was significant to the song. They sang one song about Christmas in Ireland, which Will explained to me is from some Bing Crosby movie, which is his favorite apparently. They had another song where they sang about all of the holidays people celebrate at Christmas time. There were about 15 kids lined up, and after they hit Haunakkah, Kwanza and Christmas, I couldn't figure out what the rest of the kids were going to say. They just made up weird holidays, apparently.

The Emily Show

We got back from the concert and Emily decided to put on a show for Will and I. The show included the "Five little speckled frog" poem and an interpretive dance. You can watch it here. (Note the way she chucks each frog after she's done with it).

This llama song is not only horrible to listen to, it also reverberates in your skull. This is torture, but I gotta share it, kinda like drinking bad milk and trying to get someone else to taste how bad it really is.

With Christmas coming, thought it'd be important for you to see this compiled list of everyone who's claimed to be Jesus in recent years.

Primer

While catching up on e-mail tonight, I watched a pretty cool movie tonight called Primer. It's about a couple of guys who invent a time machine and how they figure out what they want to use it for. It was decent.

Make a Million

This is perfect for my brother Jon. Amazon has this online service that allows you to make a little side money with their Mechanical Turk system. It alows you to perform a bunch of different jobs for money, jobs like: Transcribing Podcasts, Summarizes bullet points, Validating Album Artwork's correspondance to the correct album, etc.

Cathie pulled a deck of cards out tonight and the entire deck was full of the three of clubs. We thought it was a freak accident, until Will figured out that it was a deck from Nate's magic set.

Best line of the day

Will came over tonight for dinner and then to see Nate and Maddie's Christmas concert.

Overheard at dinner, completely unprompted from me:
Nate: "Will, is it true that you live with your Mom?"
Will: "Yeah, but you live with your Mom too."
Nate: "Yeah, but you're a lot older than me."

I thought Randall on the Apprentice was a tool in his decision to not allow Rebecca to take the second job, even when he had nothing to lose. This commentary by MarkO was spot on.

Play Limit

This is a cool technology called PlayLimit that allows you to control kids tv watching/video game playing time by using a token-based system. Could work great for Nate.

MediaPortal Media Center

This is a very cool open source free Media Center application called MediaPortal. It seems pretty comparable to what the Mac has with their FrontRow application, with the addition of TiVo type functionality, comparable to the Windows Media Center Technology.

2nd City

Brad's vet clinic had their company Christmas Party Saturday night at Second City in Novi, and he had some extra tickets, with which he invited Cathie and I to join them. The show was hilarious, and we hung out afterwards in a posh Martini Bar that's connected to the resturant. Dana and Eli and Sue and Ron came over and hung out afterwards, playing cards until about 2AM, which was fun.

Tonight, I went to the Project 311 Christmas party, which was fun. I love good stories, and I heard a few of them last night from a few interesting people. One was a girl who grew up as a missionary over in East Africa. She eventually ended up in an American Boarding school over there, but for much of her childhood, she lived on a Gilligan's Island style island, in mud-huts and tents, 2 1/2 hours from the mainland. To her, it was nothing, but her husband explained how cool her childhood really was. There were a million poisionous snakes on the island, and she raised giraffes. Her back yard was filled with Hippos and Corcodiles. She told me about some of the pet monkey she had as a kid, including one chimpanzee. They ended up having to get rid of the chimpanzee because it kept fighting them (no kidding), coming up to them and punching them in the chest. She looked at me strangely when I asked her if the chimps could be dressed up in army and trained for friendly hand-to-hand combat.

The second guy I talked to used to be in a local group that made it fairly big, called Son of Adam. By fairly big I mean that they had one of their songs played on an episode of Smalleville and opened for other bands at DTE Music Theatre - both of which are much more than my band has ever done. He was telling me about the time they opened for Air Supply, and how he'd never heard of them, until he heard them play and figured out that he knew all of their songs. He explained that the most disturbing part was when he found the lead singer of Air Supply naked and passed out in the shower of the changing room at DTE Music Theatre. Creepy.

We ended up having a white elephant gift exchange. I had a gray golf pullover that I'd gotten from a work training event that seemed to go over alright. I ended up with stuff that I could regift to my kids for Christmas.

Saturday in Detroit

Yesterday morning Brad, Mark Kohne and I headed downtown Detroit with a woman from my church, Linda Bentley and her husband Ron. Linda's been going downtown Detroit for 17 years to feed and clothes the homeless. The five of us went over to a church in Dearborn Heights and spent a couple of hours sorting and loading to 15 passenger vans with clothes, toys, blankets and food for people. Around noon a bunch more people showed up and we all headed downtown for the first stop, right outside the Cass Corridor, over by the Masonic Temple. If you've been here, it's a pretty scary area - although with a fresh coat of snow, it really didn't look too bad. We setup tables to give out food, clothes and then gifts for kids and adults. There were about 50 people at the first stop where Brad handed out the gifts and Mark and I worked with people to hand out clothes and blankets. After everyone had been taken care of, we moved onto the next stop, over by Temple and Brush Streets, another interesting area. We had a lot more people here, over a hundred. One of the guys there who does this on a regular basis explained that this is a pretty transitory group in the winter because of how they rotate through the homeless shelters, which only allow them to stay for three days at a shot before they have to move on. Someone had donated an artificial christmas tree and when I told one of the guys there about it, his response was "What am I going to do with a tree when I don't even have a house. I can't very well set it up in my car, can I?" He had a point. The people were mostly kind and appreciative, but Linda had done a great job explaining where some of them were coming from, many of them not having eaten at all up to that point and maybe a little ornery.

This whole deal really blew me away and hit me at a heart level. I've been trying to figure out exactly what it's been that impacted me since yesterday. Part of it was around how I look at my stuff. As we helped people find clothes and blankets, watching how grateful they were for this stuff, and how they needed this stuff for them and their families to survive. I've got so much crap that I'll buy and forget about on a regular basis. The other thing that struck me was being close to these people - shaking their hands, getting hugs from them and talking to them about their world. I walked around with this smile on my face the whole time as I watched what was going on. I wondered about how tough it must be to humble yourself enough to take a hand-out like this. I saw how the church could get beyond stupid infighting and start to change the world around me. It got me thinking about what I've been reading in the book The Holy Longing, about Charity and Justice - going from giving out pieces of bread to trying to change the system so that people don't go hungry to begin with.

I'm still trying to process all of this. It was a phenomenal exerience, but I'm trying to figure how I can make sure it doesn't stop with just one visit out there. It has a huge potential to affect my heart and I want to figure out how I can keep allowing this stuff to change me. Watching Linda, the woman who coordinates all of this, gives me a feel for what Mother Teresa is like. Linda is such a quiet, unassuming woman, who so deeply loves these people that she interacts with on the streets. She does this every Saturday. I watched one homeless many come up to her and give her a Christmas gift - a chipped precious moments coffee mug wrapped in a paper bag. She treated it like it was gold. She's so thankful for every person that comes and helps. The whole thing really rocked my world - I'm still trying to figure out exactly how and why.

Friday Night

Cathie and Madeline went out to dinner together last night and then they came home and we just hung out as a family. Cathie and Emily were coloring together last night, I was bored and I grabbed a marker and ended up drawing on Emily. Big sister Madeline thought she'd get revenge for her sister and drew a few lines on my face while I wasn't looking. Not to be outdone, I held maddie down and drew a few things on her face.

This escalated from there and I gave Maddie the chance to draw on me, which she did gladly. I'd made the mistake of telling Madeline about a guy in college who after he'd "fallen asleep" we wrote all sorts of stuff on his face and the word "Stupid" on his forehead, which he went to class without checking the next morning. (Yes, that's the word "Dummy" on my forehead")


As you've seen over the past few weeks, the kids and I have been building a snow fort outside. At the time, sleeping over night in the snow fort sounded like a great idea. We went out Friday afternoon and got a few bales of hay to finish it up and pad the ground. It was about 20 degrees last night as Nate and I headed out to the fort to sleep. We sealed ourselves in, and hung out the rest of the night playing cards and playing 20 questions until we fell asleep. We stayed really warm out there, considering. The only thing I'd of done differently would of been to fill in all the cracks in the log framework with snow to keep more of the wind out.

New Google Firefox Extensions

Google has released two cool new extensions for FireFox:
One is a tool that allows you to spot phishing sites that try and steal info from you, the other pops up comments based on which web site you're on.

Man Mom Guide

Apparently my brother Jon has been having a tough time with the Stay at Home Dad thing. His wife Beth has kindly laid out this set of guidelines that's she's asked him to follow in order to be the best Man-Mom ever.

Freakin flight was just delayed again... At this rate I should be home about 1AM. What kind of fool chooses a connecting flight when he could have flown direct and been home 3 hours ago? A greedy one who wants to get his platinum upgrade status for 2006.

Connecting Flights

The good news is I was able to get on an earlier flight out of Boston, the bad news is that I'm now sitting in the airport no further ahead, as the 7:35 connecting flight to Flint was pushed back to 10:00PM. I swear I'll never take a connecting flight from Lansing or Flint just to get the extra miles to push me to the next level of my Worldperks status. I get hosed almost every time I do it.

Interesting thing: I was connecting to the internet at the airport and noticed that someone had set a connecting point called "Free Internet Access". It was an evil twin site, setup to lure people to connect to it and then grab your credit card information from you.

One piece of good news. I am no longer the worst Dad in the world, well, kinda. Because of all of the snow, Nate and Maddie's Christmas concert was moved from being tonight (which I would of missed) to Monday. I'm supposed to have a work Christmas party on Monday, which I'll gladly miss or try and move in order to get back in the good graces of my children.

I've never been to Boston in the Fall.....

I'm in Boston tonight, flying back tomorrow. I flew out of Flint (yes, I'm close to my Northwest Platinum status, trying to get miles) and just barely made my flight. My laptop died yesterday, and my new one did not come until 10AM. My flight was at 11:40 and the Flint airport is under an hour away. In theory, it all should of worked out IF I'd of allotted time to reassemble my laptop and resync my files. I made it - barely. I'm driving out here, something I hate doing in Boston. Downtown sucks for driving and the Cambridge area, where I'm at, is equally confusing. All that being said, it's by far my favorite city. This should be my last work-related travel for the year.

I was messing around this evening with MyHeritage.com online facial recognition software. Here's the picture I plugged in:


Here are the two hits I got back. Mel Gibson is VERY understandable, but Ravi Shankar????

Other hits included Gerald Ford, Harry Belafonte and Jeff Goldblum.

This is an interesting new service. It's called GotVoice.com and it will communicate with your cell, home and office voice mail system, pull down your voice mail and send it to you via e-mail as an mp3.

Pre-School Christmas PArty

We had Emily's pre-school Christmas party tonight. All three kids have gone to the same pre-school and had the same two teachers, both of whom are awesome. This is Em's last year at this school, and our last event with the co-op preschool. Maddie and Nate are getting to that age where they've just about figured out what's going on with Santa, but we're letting them get through this one more Christmas before letting them know what's going on. Emily asked for a goldfish and Maddie asked for a guinea pig.