Day 3 - Wednesday
Ever figure out too late that you're wearing the same outfit as someone else? Ever hang out with that person for half a day and not notice it until someone points it out to you? Yeah, me neither.

The kids are starting to get into the rythm of camp, understanding what's happening where and when, finding their friends and figuring out what they like to do here. Same schedule today as yesterday, except no Buck Wild. I sat in on Brett Ray's session today and was blown away by his story telling abilities. He ties these stories back to the message so well, leaving you with some huge questions you need to resolve in your brain.

I played paintball today and got lit up. It was middle school and leaders vs. high school and we smoked them. I tried to play pretty agressively, and paid dearly for it. I have scrapes and bruises all over my body, not to mention these quarter size bloody welts from the paintballs.

Tonight in Brett's session, he told us his story, and challanged us to figure out who's God of our world. A group of guys and I just got done hanging out tonight talking about how often we're the center of our universe and how we become less self-centered. We all agreed that serving others was one way to do it, and then asked ourselves the questions around why if we know that, we don't do it. Just stuff to chew on this week as we're out doing the stuff we're doing.

Our prayer team has been praying all week for us and we've seen the results, at least I'm not sure what else to attribute them to. We've had no serious injuries (which we've had in the past, and most of the other groups have had in a big way this week) and I have an energy level that I just shouldn't have at this point, based on past trips. Normally by this time, I'm beat. I've been getting up early on my own, giving me a great chance to have some quiet time of my own. Normally, I'm craving every second of sleep, rolling out of bed right to breakfast.

I've had a great week this week. I've come to remember just how much I love hanging out with middle school guys, something a part of me had forgotten over the past few years. It started a couple weeks back after a conversation I've had with my friend, and it's been bubbling to the surface ever since. I've had a blast hanging out with the middle school guys here this week and just remembered all of the stuff about them that make them my kind of people. When I first started doing youth stuff at Crossroads, it was with the high school kids, because I thought middle schoolers were too much of a pain. Freier encouraged me to give middle school a try and I've never looked back since. We started our first youth group meeting with 4 people and the team grew it into over a hundred at some points. Being a Dad and traveling started taking it's toll, plus I started getting burned out. I started taking over more and more of the high school stuff as my kids left middle school, and the two groups merged into one. Shinn and I started talking about what starting a middle school youth group at Crossroads would look like. I've started to dream (the awake kind) again about it and what it could be like. Anyways, I'm rambling.

If you've got kids at this thing, call them and make sure they spend the $10 to buy a copy of the camp DVD, which has all of the video footage of what's gone on here. Most of them will be too focused on buying midnight pizzas to remember to buy the DVD.

You can see copies of today's pictures here.

One more random thought before I go to bed. Shinn and I were talking tonight about what an amazing representation of the Church this camp is. Not a church, but the Church, with a capital 'C'. Where else can you have this many different denominations get together and do something so great. We believe so many different things about predestination and baptism, but we all agree that God loves kids and so should we. Totally different personalities with all of the leaders here, but everyone connects and values each other in a way that floors me. There's this common theme with the leaders that connect us, because we know how much each other lov e the kids God's given them, and that creates this weird bond amongst us. Over the past couple of years, I've been shown just how nieve I am about this kind of stuff. I assumed this is just the way it was with all youth groups and churches working together. Sadly enough, this is not the way most churches operate. Many like to live in little vacums, staying within their own little cliques. At this camp, kids have the chance to bump up against other christians who different on the small stuff, but agree on the main things: loving god and loving people. I gotta believe that God smiles down on this thing and thinks to himself, "Yes! They get it! This is my bride, this is my church. These kids are the future of my church!"

Now I'm really heading to bed. I had just cleared my room of the poker gang and one of the quieter guys walked in and we started having a great conversation about where he's at with this week, what he's learning and how it relates to some other stuff going on in his family right now. Those are the kind of conversations that make this week what is, so even half asleep, I'll stay awake for that.

What a great group of kids we've got with us this year. My favorite are still the middle schoolers. They're my people, but all of our kids are great. Some a wild, diverse mix of humanity.

Two quick things that impress me, and may impress you:
1. I've been able to do all of the web stuff for the site via my cell phone's internet connection, getting about 12k/sec on downloads, 5k/sec uploading. Just one more reason I love my phone.
2. Jason Shinn brought an air conditioner for his dorm room here. I am in awe of his genius. We sleep in the sweltering heat, he sleeps in airconditioned goodness.

This is breakfast this morning. Yum. Today started out hot - the kind of heat and humidity that makes you sweat just standing still. The kids were up early this morning, like 7AM. This happens just about every year on the second ful day of camp, and I don't really get it. The leaders grabbed breakfast this morning at 7:45 and then had a meeting where we recap what's going on during the day and deal with any issues at hand. We then headed over to the morning session, which started with some great worship and then the speakres. It's fun to watch Jason Raitz do his thing. Any man who can hold a group of 150 Middle School kids mesmerized for an hour has what it takes in my book. After the session, we had our team games. The kids are a part of one of 16 teams, which compete in 30 minute games each morning. They're dumb games for the most part - as fun as the leaders make them.

After lunch, we had our first Buck Wild session, a name that's become legend and a mockery more than anything, after the late, great Ken Buck. We had a 100 yard slip and slide, going down a huge hill. This concept started 9 years ago and has grown and been perfected every year since. We have baby shampoo and sprinklers every few feet, lubricating the thing. You get a running start, and slide down the hill. As you can see from the pictures, sleep and bleed might more appropriate, if you end up sliding off the end into the grass below.

After Buck Wild, a bunch of us decided it'd be nice to go canoing. When you're hot and sweaty, what sounds better? 72 of headed out. As we got the last of the boats in the water, the canoe guy informed us that we probably shouldn't "Dilly Dally" because a storm was heading this way. I'm pretty sure he meant hurricane. Jim Jeffrey and I were canoing up with the Kyaks and most of my kids at the front of pack. About half way in it started with a torrential downpour, and then towards the end it was lightning. We were close enough to the end and far away enough from the lightning that we can kept going. The two groups behind us pulled off to keep from getting electrocuted. Smart move. We were drenched when we got back to the canoe livery and waited for the other groups to get picked up. We had a buss full of soaking wet kids, who had great stories to tell by the time they'd got back:



This afternoon, we had our afternoon "Digging Deeper" sessions, taught by differnt Youth Pastors. The kids can choose sessions covering any number of real world, applicable things like: Friends in Crissis, Connecting with God, Loneliness, Music and one called "Take the Fish off your car!" Good stuff.

Between dinner and our next session, I took the middle school guys on a Walmart run. It's tradition. Middle School gets to go first because they always seemed to get pimped in everything else, and it's cool to make them first in things, plus they're my favorite. Sorry High Schoolers. We headed up there and the guys bought lots of stuff they don't need: Red Bull, Candy, Strobe Lights, Poker Chips - you name it. Before the guys went in, I told them to make sure they were on time. Unfortunately, they weren't. They did two-pushups in the parking lot for each minute they were late. The girls went after the session tonight, but probably bought more more intelligent stuff.

Only one small slip tonight.... I was doing announcements following a clip from Anchorman with Will Farrell's character, Ron Burgandy. After the clip, I announced "I love Ron Jeremy". Ummmm... I didn't mean to say that. I didn't realize it until afterwards when Shinn kindly filled me in.

Speakers in the session again were great. We're hanging out tonight in my room playing poker (chips, no money) and talking.

You can see the rest of the pictures for Day 2 here.

Velocity - Day 1
The kids got here around 3 today. They got their keys and checked into their rooms and then picked up their camp T-Shirts. We had a group meeting today where we issued each kid their Totem, a goofy concept from a retreat we did a few years back. We'd picked up an item for each kid at the dollar store that we felt best represented them - everything from weird porcelin dolls and pretend fried chicken to hand puppets. The kids have to carry these things with them at all times. At any time, we leaders can yell "Totem Check!" and they have five seconds to produce the item or else face a consequence - like singing, etc. At the group meeting we went over all the rules, including the rule about mandatory attendance at sessions and youth group meetings. We encouraged the kids to rat our their friends for skipping sessions, promising great prizes for being a stoolie.

After the team meeting we went to dinner and then to our first session. I get to do a lot of the up-front stuff - announcements, introductions and stuff, which is fun for me. We've got two amazing speakers this year - Brett Ray for High School and Jason Raitz for the Middle School kids. I'd say they are two of the best speakers I've ever heard for their respective age groups. Both know how to speak to their target audience so well in their own language, and to really penetrate with the message they've got in a way that's more than just fluff that doesn't stick beyond the week at camp. The worship band we've got is phenomenal as well - great musicians who actually live what they're talking about. The guys in the band are all a part of Project 311 and are are great to hang out with outside of the sessions.

Post session consisted of Dodge Ball and basketball for most of our kids, some hanging out and talking, followed my a midnight pizza run. The first day of camp is pretty high energy where the kids need to blow off a fair amount of steam. After a couple days of the kids getting into their groove and spending some time with them, they tend to listen pretty well and for the most part, it's pretty smooth at that point.

You can see the pictures for Day 1 here.

Sunday was a long day in the car. The four of us were packed in with a long 13 hour drive ahead of us. We left around 9 and soon after stopped at cracker barrel to gorge ourselves. Minutes later, we were stuck in two hours of traffic at a standstill as an overturned semi was hauled off the road. We drove a long, long ways, and around 9PM, I met up with Ken Buck and he took me the rest of the way to camp. I got to camp around 10PM and got a chance to see a bunch of people that I only see one week a year, but about 18 hours a day for that week, which causes a fair amount of bonding after 9 years. We spent last night and tonight getting the rooms situated and getting the fans mounted in the rooms for optimal cooling power. Any way you cut it, it's hot and humid here. You can't walk down the stairs without breaking a sweat. We went on a Walmart run this morning and picked up the necessities and then headed over to the dollar store to do the real shopping. The Dolla Tree store out here is the best dollar store ever. We picked up an item for each kid in our group, which they in turn have to carry around for the entire week. If they're caught without the item, some kind of dire consequence applies - like singing "I'm a little teapot" in front of a large group of people. The items range from dolls, to pieces of articifical fruit and sock puppets. The kids get here around 3. I'm taking a nap right now to get rested up.

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Sleeping 8 people in an unpacked house was fun. Dan and I shared a twin bed, Nate slept on the dog bed, Kevin on the loveseat, Paul in a chair and Will on the couch. For some reason, Jon slept in the big bed with his pregnant wife. Will's snoring (or death rattle) was so loud, it woke everyone up repeatedly. Kevin, Will, Nate and I left Memphis around 9 this morning heading North.

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Beale Street was great last night. It was packed, smelled like BBQ with fantastic blues music coming out of all the bars for block after block. We ate like kings at one of the barbecue places while listening to the blues band in there. I found out the hard way that you shouldn't yell 'Freebird' in a blues bar. We headed back around 1am.

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We headed out for Memphis at 7am, with 5 of us stuck in my two door Monte Carlo. We bottomed out at the bottom of my driveway. We met with the truck up about 3 hours later. We got into Memphis at Jon's house around 8 and unloaded the truck. Dan had come in Friday and helped Jon pack the 26 foot truck.. Dan worked as a mover one summer and no one packs crap like dan. Dan was styling wearing his bandana and Walmart moving belt. We're on our way to Beal St for beer and BBQ. We're heading back tomorrow AM where I'm getting dropped off at camp for the week.

Thanks to Erik for this cool site on the Gigapixel camera. These pictures are so taken at such a high resolution that it would take a video wall of 10,000 television screens or 600 prints from a professional digital SLR camera to capture as much information as that contained in a single Gigapxl™ exposure. The Project's near-term goal is to compile a coast-to-coast Portrait of America; photographing her cities, parks and monuments in exquisite detail.

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The car stereo saga contines... I'm back at Circuit City getting my stereo fixed AGAIN. One speaker is out and the car makes an annoying dinging sound for 5 minutes when I start it. It's worked for a total of 3 days in the 9 months I've had it. I figure I've invested over 12 hours of my time to get a car stereo installed and working. All for what? A little better sound quality and an iPOD interface.

Tom Cruise got squirted with water from a joke microphone by an interviewer playing a practical joke. Did cruise laugh? Nope. He threatened to sue, after reaming the guy:

He angrily rounded on the man, saying: "Why would you do that...why would you do that...why would you do that? That's incredibly rude. I'm here giving you an interview and you do that...it's incredibly rude." He added forcibly: "You're a jerk ... you're a jerk."

Here's the article.

I watched the documentary tonight Dogtown and Z-Boys, which the movie Lords of Dogtown is based. Really good documentary, great soundtrack, footage and interviews. It covers the advent of skateboarding, specifically around a group of hardcore outcasts who defined the sport in the 70s. I really want to see the movie, Lords of Dogtown - I've heard great things about it.

A Rabbi talks about why Billy Graham is a giant among preachers in this article.

Ok, this is just as funny. It's Tyra Banks going crazy on the show Next Top Model.

You have to watch this. It's Dane Cook impersonating Tom Cruise on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Wow. Damn Funny.

I submitted a recent blog entry to Relevant Magazine, never thinking they'd really publish it, feeling silly after even sending it in. Looks like they published it, with lots of follow-up comments by people. Luckily for them there were no mean comments, or Will and I would have to go door-to-door Jay and Silent Bob style and kick the crap out of them.

This guy was on Drew and Mike this morning, talking about how Jim Morrison (formerly of the Doors) is alive and now works for and hangs out with him in the rodeo business. You can see the pictures (and buy the video) on his site. The guy's a nut job.

Cool Billy Graham tribute, intro'd by Bono, featuring LeAnn Rimes, James Brown and Kenny Rogers. Ok, the song's not great, but any kind of tribute to Billy Graham is cool in my book. This guy's a hero of mine and reflects Jesus to me in a lot of ways.

I'm not what you'd call a runner. I don't really like to run. I rarely run, except for maybe 10 minutes of warmup each day at the gym. I went running this morning with a guy from work down in Kansas City. He lives near a lake and the 4.5 mile run sounded nice and doable . I was wrong. It wasn't that much fun. We had some good conversations in between me catching my breath, but that's about it.

I just noticed this pattern today. Everytime we get together, my brother's drink wine coolers. My Dad doens't drink wine coolers, but my Mom does. Wonder if there's some dark family secret that I'm not being told about (other than the fact that I'm probably adopted).

I'm flying out to Kansas City tomorrow morning, early. I should be in bed, but I'm in the beginning of the 4th quarter of a close playoff Pistons game. I can sleep on the plane. Cathie's been out cold on the couch next to me since 9 when we started watching the game. Watching the game in HDTV is so amazing, I feel dirty. The color, contrast, detail and clarity are just so good, words can't describe it. I guess I'd need 1,000 words to describe the picture. Hmm.

I did load up this morning at church. One of nameless people who read this blog didn't show, so I did it solo, which blows. Loading up and carting around these 200lb cases with another person is bearable, doing it by myself sucked. My only satisfaction was calling Matt (oops, I slipped) every fifteen minutes, starting at 6:45AM and leaving him voicemails. My goal was for him to turn on his phone and have 20 messages waiting for him.

Not sure if it was because of father's day, school just getting out, or the fact that it was the giving campaign Sunday - but there were a lot of empty seats at 10AM when church started. By a lot, I mean less than 10 seats were full. Now it's amazing how many people show up between 10:00 and 10:05, but even well into the service, it was pretty empty. I sat there pretty pissed off at God, trying to figure out what He was thinking, hosing us like this on a pretty important Sunday, and in general with our church. I've been focusing a lot on Isaiah 40 lately, having it up on my fridge, going back to it pretty frequently:

²⁷ Why do you say, O Jacob,
and complain, O Israel,
"My way is hidden from the LORD;
my cause is disregarded by my God"?

²⁸ Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
and his understanding no one can fathom.

²⁹ He gives strength to the weary
and increases the power of the weak.

³⁰ Even youths grow tired and weary,
and young men stumble and fall;

³¹ but those who hope in the LORD
will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint.

I wasn't really interested in thinking about that this morning though, I was kind of enjoying the self-pity and going at it with God. Both songs in the worship seemed to go back to the Isaiah stuff I'd been thinking about. The first was a song called Unfailing Love by Chris Tomlin:

You have my heart
And I am Yours forever
You are my strength
God of grace and power

And everything You hold in Your hand
Still You make time for me
I can't understand
Praise You God of Earth and sky
How beautiful is Your unfailing love
Unfailing love

And You never change God You remain
The Holy One
My unfailing love
Unfailing love

The song then changed to another one, Shout to the Lord, which has a part that struck me:

Hold me close,
Let Your love surround me
Bring me near,
Draw me to Your side
And as I wait,
I'll rise up like the eagle
And I will soar with You,
Your Spirit leads me on
In the power of Your Love

I sensed a theme here. Jason then did the message on Psalm 37, specifically around this part:

³ Trust in the LORD and do good;
dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture.

⁴ Delight yourself in the LORD
and he will give you the desires of your heart.

⁵ Commit your way to the LORD;
trust in him and he will do this:

It was an awesome message, and Jason was able to work in plenty of clips from Ground Hogs Day and Happy Gilmore. I love hearing J each, and he nailed this message as usual. I sat right behind a couple who had just buried their son the day before after he'd died in a motor-cycle accident, trying to figure out what these word could really mean to them, what these words would mean to me if I were in there shoes. Even they laughed at the Ground Hog's Day clips.
Before the message, they passed a basket out for people to submit their pledges and checks for the property. We ended the service wtih an annoucement on where we're at with the fund drive for the property at that moment. The fund-raising consultants basically told us that in this short window of time, basically 45 days, we'd be able to raise about $60-$90k, but pretty much that we should be prepared to be disappointed. We've got $114k from 27 people, needing another only $26k for the downpayment on our property before the end of July. I'm excited about this property. We've been in a high school for 12 years, at least since I've been going to church here, without ever having a glimmer on the horizon for property. We're close. We're going to make it. I can taste it.

I like the fact that it shows that we're still alive and kicking to all of the people who left because the thought after all of this crap we'd wither up and die. One of the last women who left sent out a mean note chastizing the church for a lack of "vision, leadership and focus" along with wanting her daughter to be a part of a vibrant youth ministry. (Joke's on her, we've got 40 kids going to camp and her daughter decided to continue going to our church.) Everything's not perfect, but at least we're moving forward, not wallowing in our crap (except for me this morning) and healing. As I said before, I'm in it for the long haul at this church.

We got together today at Cathie's parents house for a combination father's day and Madeline's birthday party. The women waited on us hand and foot, bringing all of us dads fresh beers as we floated in the pool. I don't think the kids ever got out of the pool.


As you can see, John revealed a strange new side to himself today. Ok, not really new. Between the winecoolers, the vouging-poses with Dan and the sun-tan lotion application, he seemed to be very in touch with his femine side.

You can view all of the pictures from the event here.


On a sadder note, this is the last time the kids and wives would be seeing their Uncle Jon and Aunt Beth as they get ready to move to Memphis. Beth starts her fellowship at St. Jude's Hospital for pediatric hematology and oncology, I think. Dan, Will, Kevin, Jon and I are heading down to Memphis on Saturday to help Jon move and coming back on Sunday. The guys are going to drop me off on the way back for camp at Kenyon College. I get back the following Saturday.

My brother-in-law Kevin go on regular father and son outings with his 5 year old son Gabe. One of their favorite things to do is go to Starbuck's, get something to drink and then walk through the local sporting goods store called "Dick's Sporting Goods." Nice, right? Only problem is that Gabe goes around telling people, "I like looking at Dick's with my dad."

I feel like a new man. I spent about 6 hours last night reloading my work laptop from scratch. I copied off everything I needed, reformatted, reloaded and it's working great. I think this is one of the first times I've reloaded where I haven't forgotten anything. It had gotten so full of crap that it had been chugging along pretty painfully for a while. Stuff wasn't running right and it took forever to start up and shut down. It's back running smoothly again and I feel like a new man. Odd, I know, but it feels good.

I'm a die-hard firefox fan, and i've slowly moved over to using Yahoo's web based mail client as my primary interface. The downside to using firefox is that you don't get the Rich Text editing capabilities that you get with Internet Explorer. I finally found a plug-in for Firefox that does it for you: eMailWeb. Works great, simple and free.

I went over to Bob last night to watch the Piston's game. Bob has 5 boys, and typically has about 25 kids at his house at any given time. He's one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet, with a huge heart, willing to help anyone out at the drop of a hat. He throws a mean party and just happens to look just like Chauncy Billups. Raitz, Will, Joe and Gielow were there, amongst others.

Bob just built a huge cabana next to his pool. By cabana, I meana a huge 20x20 cedar shingle roof structure, complete with flat-screen tv mounted into the ceiling, bar, and outdoor heating system. We hung out outside, next to the pool last night, and watched the game, which ended up being a complete blow-out, the Pistons winning by 31 points.

Ok, this is a really impressive office prank. Makes me wish I didn't work virtual. Oh wait, no it doesn't.

I just found out that another friend of mine is quitting their job. He's going back to school to study linguistics, so that he can become a bible translator. His goal is to go into remote parts of the world, learn the local language, and translate the bible for them. His family's not too thrilled about the whole thing, which sucks. It's cool to see people wanting to follow their heart to the point that they'd do something that looks so silly to the people around them.

Within the past week, I caught up with to two good friends who I hadn't talked to in a while. They knew pretty much everything going on with me, and I knew next to nothing about what was going on with them. Strange. Except they both read my blog. Makes it an odd conversation. They've already heard the funniest things that have gone on in my life, so I'm pretty much left without anything to say. My thought is that I make sure that every friend of mine that I don't talk to regularly have their own blogs. Mack, Mike - Start blogs.

After a lot of searching, I think I've found a bluetooth headset for my phone. I'd bought one before, and it didn't work well. I borrowed Jon's Motorola HS-820 and didn't like the volume, the way it fit on my ear or the way it paired up with my cell phone. Every headset that I've been happy with has been made by plantronics. In my office, I have the Plantronics CS50, I've had the Plantronics MX150 for a couple of years for my cell, and now I'm trying the Plantronics M3500. Plantronics is known for their noise cancellation technology, and I haven't found a bluetooth headset that has great sound quality yet and fit well. I'll let you know how this one progresses once I get it. Check out a review of it here.

Now upon reflection, this may sound like a lot of talk about headsets, to the point of obsession. In my job, I'm on the phone at least 4 hours a day - between my cell phone and office phone. A good headset makes all the difference in the world, especially when you use your hands to talk (as in gestures, not sign language. that doesn't work on the phone, unless it's a fancy sign-language phone)

I think I had a post yesterday about happy meals? Well, Steve, this headset really will bring me true happiness.

I was listening to a message by Steve @ Riverview on Contentment this morning. In his message, he talks about Happy Meals, and how they never really make kids happy. Very true. I hate Happy Meals, and not just because my parents wouldn't buy them for us as kids (My parents would get one large pop, 4 small glasses and share the large pop with all of us. My wife makes fun of me when I now do the same). My theory on the happy meal toys is to throw them out as soon as my kids leave them laying around, and they're rarely noticed.My kids think Happy Meals are the greatest thing in the world, yet what's in them never brings them much happiness for more than five minutes. Gosh, what kind of fool would pursue something, thinking it will bring them happiness, only to be discontent with it five minutes later? I'm glad I don't do that with stuff in my life. Oh wait. I do.

This is a cool new technology that I'm trying out call Grouper. The idea with this is a Peer-to-Peer file sharing technolgy that lets you setup groups to share files, music, pictures and software. I'm setting up a few groups to see how it works.

This is a very service called Youtube.com that lets you share video, much like Flickr lets you share pictures. The viewing is all done online, so no funky plug-ins or codecs - very nice. I put the video of Nate and Austin dancing at Blitzfest online as an example.You can view it by clicking here.

I had a bunch of work stuff to do tonight so I put on Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and watched it as I worked. I had more to do, so I put the movie back on with the Commentary on and laughed twice as hard listening to Scott Mosier, Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes talk about the flick. Affleck was the bomb in Phantoms.

We had our baptism service yesterday at church, which is my favorigte one of the year. We had 9 kids dedicated and 6 teenagers/adults baptized. I love hearing the stories of people's journey with God. I don't think I've been to one of the baptism services where I haven't gotten teared up at least once. We did the dunking part of the baptism service in the high school pool, which required us to have a life guard. Shinn considered paying off some of the kids in the youth group to throw me in. He claims he reconsidered because of the potential of damaging my precious phone. I like to think that the kids know that they'd face my wrath.

On a side note, we have a big group going to camp this summer, the last week of the month, around 40 of us! I look so forward to the week of camp - hanging out with the group of leaders who I've gotten to know over the past 9 years we've done this, hanging with the kids, the teaching and the worship.

Wow. T-Mobile has moven to the top of J.D. Power's cellular customer service rankings, which Verizon has held for a long time.

This is cool. Riverview has setup a Podcast for their Sunday messages.

The girls decided it would be a good day to give Cathie a makeover after Cathie gave the dog a makeover with a blue highlighter.

Cathie had a baby shower for my sister-in-law Beth today and we had an open house, so I took Nate, Emily and Nate's buddy Austin to see the movie Shark Boy and Lava Girl. For what it's worth, I liked Robert Rodriguez's other flicks, but Spy Kids 3-D was a bit much. Apparently, all of these movies are based on stories from his 8 year old son. Well, his kid's finally lost it. My kids loved the movie, but I thought it blew. The 3-D was horrible and the story line was wacked out. Again, my kids enjoyed it and I guess that's what counted.

Nate's recovered from yesterday, so we broke out the boxing gloves and went a few rounds. It was great until Emily needed something in the other room. I turned around for a second to see what she wanted and was greeted by a nice roundhouse to the side of my head by Nate whil I was distracted. I saw stars.

I've placed the Blitzfest photos online. There are a bunch of them out there, edited down from the 2GB worth of pictures I received. A lot of the skating ones from Day 2 were taken with a very cool fish eye lense, which created a great effect.

Blitzfest 2005 Day 1
Blitzfest 2005 Day 2

Last night we had about 30 people over from the core Blitzfest team over to connect, hang out and celebrate all of the good stuff that went on at Blitzfest. Kinda like camping, it's amazing how an event like that can connect a group of people. We grilled out, looked at the pictures from Blitzfest via my HDTV/Mac setup (there were hundreds of these things. I'll post them online shortly). We ended the evening with celebratory cigars and some reminiscing about the event. It's a great group of people, younger (mean age is around 25) for the most part, with some of the team's parents thrown in the mix. I'd forgotten how much I'd missed this kind of community. Cathie and I's friends at Crossroads have been such a dysfunctional mess with people coming and going from the church and sleeping around with each other that it helped me appreciate the moment that much more. I hadn't hung out with a group of people like this in a while and enjoyed myself this much.

The picture above is James Raitz, showing off his pink cast, autographed by Tait. I'd met James last year when he played in the worship band at camp. He's the Jon Kurt equivalent. Sames sense of humor, same movie knowledge, works in a video store. He actually kinda looks up to Jon as a hero, since Jon no longr lives with his parents and has gotten married to a woman.

Nate's esophagogastroduodenscopy went great yesterday. He was a little nervous, but the doctor's were great. He was only out cold for about 40 minutes total. The doctor met with us right away and showed us the pictures of what they'd found that turned out to be the problem. he had a few small uclers right at the the connecting point of his esophogus and stomach which had been causing him all of the pain. They've got him on some new medication that should heal these and hopefully prevent them in the future.

Nate wants an airsoft gun like mine. Last year when him and I tried to have a battle with them, he got hit pretty hard and cried. He was pretty much done with them. This year, he decided he wanted to give it another go. I told him that if he could take 3 shots at ten feet without crying, I'd get him one so we could have a battle with them. He took the shots, and only mildly flinched. I was sharing this story tonight with some guys from work who live down in Alabama. They agreed that this was what they would have done with their sons in the same situation. They also agreed that their wives probably wouldn't understand this logic any more than Cathie would if I actually shared this story with her. Women. Go figure.

Nasty tornado weather down here in Kansas City. Makes Michigan tornado weather look like a light breeze. Big clouds, big winds (90mph) and hail. The project team got together at Matt's house in Parkville, MO and played poker.

Interesting article on What Drives Your Church, walking through different paradigms of knowledge driven or personality driven churches, the pastoral's role and the congregations perception of success.

Thanks to Erik for this interesting article on Electronic Paper.

We used to play this game called Chubby Bunnies in our youth group all the time. Looks like someone died and is now paying $2M.

Good summary of Tivo Tweaks.

This quote really hit me, so I pimped it from Noel's blog:
From an article in The Christian Examiner, here are some thoughts on and about Erwin McManus from Mosaic in Los Angeles:

Erwin McManus marvels at the majestic creatures he's found at animal parks around the world. Despite efforts to recreate their homes in the wild, the animals no longer instinctively hide and hunt. So pampered they've become, he said, that they couldn't possibly survive out of captivity.

His own instincts tingled with the monotonous sense of familiarity.

"This is so much like what I hear in churches," the pastor and national speaker said. "People are just sitting there waiting to get fed. How many years do you have to be fed until you come to live (the way God intended)?...

"It is true that the enemy will essentially leave you alone if you are domesticated. He will not waste his energy destroying a civilized religion. If anything, he uses his energy to promote such activity. Religion can be one of the surest places to keep us from God. When our faith becomes refined, it is no longer dangerous to the dark kingdom."

The Detroit Pistons are going to the finals! Here's another copy of the picture of Chauncy Billups and I:

Cool new calendar site out there called Trumba. It lets you set up a calendar for sharing. Normally, not a big deal. What makes it cool is the abliity to automatically sync it up with your desktop outlook calendar and merge the two together. I set up and account for both Cathie and I so that she can access my calendar and I can see hers/our family calendar overlaid as I schedule stuff at work. It also lets her schedule things onto my calendar at work, which I live and die by.

Update: The outlook calendar sync is temporarily down while they fix some bugs. That's why the site is in beta.

After doing Blitzfest, the last thing I felt like doing was going to an "Advanced Committment" dinner last night for our church's building project. You may have read my earlier post on where we're at as a church, but if not, things ain't always pretty at Crossroads. I went to this meeting thinking, "Is this the right time to do something like this when we're still reeling from all this crap?" I'd just lost a significant amount of money in another investment and wasn't too thrilled to start to think about what I was going to do with this whole thing. So I went to the meeting. This was the second meeting (the first was last Wednesday), and there were about 30+ people there. We had dinner and then had some dessert before the spiel began. Joe began sharing the story of Crossroads and how it ties into the larger picture, comparing it in places with the isrealites. Steve then went through and shared some of the church's financials and Bob talked about the property and the building plan and financing. The property we've put an offer on is fantastic. It's an old arabian horse farm on Pontiac Trail, across from Irwin's Orchard. It's centrally located, has 5 acres, a house and barn already included, which work great for initial church offices and youth group stuff. We're going through some of our due diligence on the property, but it's awesome. As we went through this, I started to get very excited. I saw a big group of people that were also very excited about this, and suddenly, our goal of $140k for the down payment on the property seemed very doable, with lots of help from God. As a part of this, Joe used the metaphor of how a patient heals. One of the women who was there, Linda, had just come from the hospital. She shared how one of the first things she had to do after a major surgery was to start walking. She thought they were nuts, since she was all hooked to tubes and monitors, but they wanted her to walk, and explained how key it was to the healing process. I think that's where we're at as a church. We need to start walking. I need to move forward, to start walking and assuming that we are going to heal some day. I'm interested in seeing what God does in all of this. Should be interesting.

My Treo 650 went nuts this weekend. The keys would only work sporadically, and touchscreen navigation was painful. I couldn't reset it, because you need to use the directional pad to do a hard-reset on the device. I took it into the Verizon store to swap it out and they had none - none to order and none in stock. They sent me out to Troy (long ways away) to get a new one. Verizon customer support, as usual, was excellent. The guy worked hard to track the phone down and make sure I was taken care of. He spent 15 minutes on the phone calling stores to track one down for me. That's why Verizon is worth the extra money. I never hear any Sprint or Cingular customers raving about their customer service.

Sunday was hot. First time we'd had to turn our air conditioning on. We broke out the slip and slide and enjoyed the heat. For now. Emily didn't want to slide down it, but instead sit at the end in the puddle, which her brother and sister didn't like, and Emily didn't appreciate their crashing into her.

Ok, I mentioned in my last post about finding joy in the moment. Here are two things that made my day. The first is this guy who was walking around the festival. Between the open shirt, the knuckle rings and the hair piece, I dug his look.

The second is one of the funniest things I've seen in a while. This is a video of my son and his buddy dancing on the hill during the concert, unaware that I was filming them. I showed this to a bunch of the team that night and some of the bands and it made their day, as well as mine. It's about 11Mb, so it may take a few to download. You can get it here. You won't make any comments about my son's dancing ability coming from me that I haven't already heard from my wife. It's part of the Kurt gene pool. My dad, my brothers, and my sister all have it.

I'm still decompressing and recuperating mentally and physically from a long weekend. Thursday and Friday during the day we setup for Blitzfest, getting ready for thing to kick-off at 4:30. I'm blown away at how smoothly things came together. This was huge. When you design something to handle between 3 and 5,000 people and 75 bands, you have to do things on such a huge scale in terms of things I'd never thought of: Police, Medical, Water, Food, Bathrooms, Volunteers, Security, Band Hospitality, Transporation, Contracts, Dealing with Credit Card Transactions in a remote area... and the list goes on. The whole things was run across a large team, and masterfully done. The common theme as I talked to people from the volunteers, sheriff's office and bands was that they couldn't believe how excellently this was pulled off. Apparently, that's not the standard for these kind of things. I helped out with random stuff on Thursday and Friday - everything from running errands, setting up tables and signs, and setting up garbage cans. This is a picture of the main stage. It was huge. It backed up to a nice hillside where people could hang out and listen to the music. In the background, you see lots of other tents setup for merchandise, concessions and other bands.


The highlight for my kids was not the bands, going back stage or the inflatable stuff. Their favorite parts were riding in the golf carts and 4-wheelers around the park. This park was huge with giant hills and divits based on being built on a landfill, lots of big craters as the park has settled.


On Friday night after setup, I had to take off and go to the Bartlett-fun-night going on at the kids school. They had games, a teacher dunk tank, and a campfire. We hung out with a bunch of our friends as the kids played. They had a bunch of inflatable stuff to play in. They also tried to use me as a fund-raiser, as you can see below:


On Saturday, I headed over to Blitzfest to help out with security. I wandered around trying to nail people who were sneaking in without wristbands, directing band and vendor traffic, MCing a couple of the stages and helping with odd jobs where needed. The show was running great except for one small factor, we weren't getting the numbers of people that we were looking for. Our projections were based on previous years of doing the festival, needing roughly 3,000 people to break even. We got around 1,300. We realized this was the case mid-day and you could visibly see the spirit of the core team sag. We started to do damage control at this point, trying to figure out where we were at and how we needed to move forward. Our prayer for the festival was not "God, make this super successful." It was, "God, we want you to be honored in everything we do here - success or failure, rain or shine." In order for that to happen, we needed to deal with the finances from a position of integrity. That meant sitting down with each of the main bands and sharing with them where they were at and what we could do. Each conversation was painful and humbling. One of the other board members, Bruce Greene, myself and Jason Raitz had these conversations over and over, and they never got easier. We worked hard to encourage each other and find joy in the moments that we could. We were exhausted emotionally, physically and spirtiually by the end of the night. Cathie and the kids showed up at the end of the night to hear the last couple closing bands. They got a chance to hang back stage and watch some of the show and meet some of the artists. Nate and his buddy Austin got to meet the bands, including this guy, Michael Tait, part of the band dcTalk.


Sunday involved taking the bands to the airport and cleaning up. Shinn and I drove Tait and his band to the airport. Tait drove shotgun with me and we had a great time talking about everything from Walmart to music. He's a good guy. It was fun hanging out with someone for a while who's music I'd been listening to for 17 years and talking him about common bands we listened to.

Here's a quick tanget on the Christian Music scene. It's not something I'm big on. There was a time when it was new and cool crossover music was happening that I listened to a lot of it. There's some good stuff out there in this genre, some of which I still listen to: Jars of Clay, Rich Mullins, Michael Card, Third Day and a few others. What happened over time was that it became a big sub-culture that became totally focused inward and people seemed to see it as a substitute for the real world of music. Millions of bands came out, nothing new, all sounding the same and it got old quick. The music at the festival wasn't just "Christian" bands. It was local bands, with the rider that they couldn't swear. Not too tough. The local bands were some of the best ones there in my opinion. Anyways... back to dcTalk. I first saw these guys 17 years ago at a Youth Group event in Washington D.C. called "DC 88". Christian music at that time was pretty tame, and rap music was starting to hit mainstream. These guys have continued to release cutting edge stuff that's been on the forefront of the christian music scene, so I have a lot of respect for them. After dealing with 20 different band managers and some of the bands themselves on Saturday, I came to the conclusion that there are a lot of tools out there, and a lot of great guys, just like the rest of the world. After telling the bands were we were at with things, some of them were understanding and helped us out, some became bigger wankers, demanding cash up front or they wouldn't even go on stage. In the end, I think God was honored by the way we dealt with everyone in terms of integrity and love.

In summary, we prayed like crazy and had done everything possible to make this successful, lots of people pouring their prayer, hearts and souls into this thing, and it still tanked financially. We're probably about $80k in the red right now and are dealing with how to resovle the defecit while living up to all of our contractual obligations, not screwing anyone over. We're working hard as a team to focus on the positive moments that took place. There are a lot of them. Here's a cool thing that happened: The generators for this event cost us about $20k. The owner of the company discounted it originally down to about $10k for us. At the end of the event, not only did he give us the generators for free, he also cut us a $3,500 check to help us defray the costs. Amazing. Another great story: I worked security with a guy named Demetrius or Meech, as he likes to go by. He's a huge dude, invited to help at this thing by his buddy, Tim. Tim had invited Meech to church a bunch of times and Meech told him in pretty uncertain terms to take the God stuff and stick it. After this event, Meech called Tim up and told him that if this was what Church was like, he'd be interested in checking it out. I'm sure that there are a million more stories that we have no clue about. We're trying to keep those in mind as we pick through some of the wreckage. Pray for this thing and for Project311 in general.

Cathie and I went to see The Longest Yard last night.... Good version, true to the original. Rob Schenider had his regular Adam Sandler film cameo in it. There were a couple guys I recognized, but just couldn't put a name to them.... Finally figured them out: Michael Irvin played Deacon was one of the prison football players, Bill Romanowski and Brian Bosworth were both guards.

We had a huge storm come through here last night that included a tornado that touched down a couple miles from here, right across the street from where Blitzfest was. Cathie and I were on our way back from seeing the movie The Longest Yard. We got into town and couldn't believe how many trees were down and how big the trees were. We turned on the news and South Lyon had finally made it. The TV cameras were right down the street from us, showing some of the downed trees and power lines along with Lowes, interviewing some goof who watched the tornado come through the parking lot in Lowe's. The schools lost power, so no school today.

Great article entitled How to Lose Friends and Alienate People via E-mail.

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The stage is set. The sun is out. Almost ready to go.

We had a showing tonight so we picked up a pizza and headed over to the New Hudson Park for the kids to play and check out how the setup was going. The stages were good to and the main stage in particular was looking amazing. The good news was that all of the golf carts had been delivered. I was able to get a set of keys and we load up the familiy and take them for a spin. Nate jumped in the back of one of the work carts with some of the other guys and went flying down the hills and playing golf-cart-tag. Madeline got a chance to drive the cart while Cathie and Emily hung on for dear life. I only hurt Cathie and Emily once. I'm heading back over tomorrow to help finish getting things setup.

If you read this, and you're planning on helping on Friday or Saturday, we could really use you! There will be lots of stuff to do - and you too can be a roadie with an all access pass. What better thing could you do on Saturday?

This is a cool piece of freeware called Synergy for those of you that have both macs and pc's in your house. It allows you to access your mac from your pc, better then VNC. Good lifehacker article describing how to set it all up.

If you have a Treo and travel, here's a good post on the essential items you need.

Main stage setup at Blitzfest, 1 of 7. I'm going to try and upload photos from my phone throughout the event. The bands must be really tiny to fit under the roof.

I burnt the midnight oil last night so I could take the morningd off and help get things set at the Blitzfest site. The tent's are up, the generator's are set and we're starting to get the lights and seven different stages in place. This is a huge undertaking. I'm amazed by just what's being put on. It starts tomorrow night at 4:30PM and ends Saturday night around midnight. I found out I'm MCing the main stage and the local band stages on Saturday, which should be fun. I look back at concerts like this and how I sat in the crowd, wondering what the old dude was doing up on stage introducing the bands. Guess that's me now.

How addicted are you to your e-mail? Interesting aritcle about our unhealthy tether to our e-mail. Good read:

The average e-mail user in the U.S. has two or three e-mail accounts and spends about an hour every day reading, sending and replying to messages, according to the survey, conducted by Opinion Research Corp. E-mail dependency is so strong for 41% of survey respondents that they check their e-mail in-boxes right after getting out of bed in the morning. The average user checks his in-box five times a day, according to the survey, which polled 4,012 respondents at least 18 years old in the 20 largest U.S. cities.

Nate and I were working tonight on a video for his class. He did a report on construction and he and I decided we'd do a video as a visual aid to go along with his presentation. We went into a neighborhood with houses in different states of being built and video taped him talking in front of each. It went pretty well until we got to the brick layers and decided it'd be good to do an interview. None of the guys spoke english. We finally found a guy and Nate did a great job interviewing him, but you can barely hear him over the salsa music playing in the background.

Here's the cool part. I came back, hooked the camera up to the mac and it automatically went through, pulled in all of the clips, separated them out and made it very easy to edit them. All of this being done on a 256MB 1.2GHz Mac Mini. A PC with the same requirements would have been brought to it's knees doing video. Not this. It cranked through the video and Nate was able to create the flow of the video, add transitions and effects. Beautiful. If only I'd bought the Superdrive for the Mac, to burn the DVD's out. Oh well, I can do that on my PC. The Mac may not have a lot of good software, but some of what it has is good, especially the OS.

This story goes in the "Gross but funny" category - you may not want to proceed with reading this. I warned you. Prior to Nate's procedure next week, we have to get 3 poop samples. They provide you with a whole bio-hazard kit for doing this. It contains a toilet insert for you to poop in and a bunch of specimen strips and jars. Cathie's grossed out enough as it is by this, definately not looking forward to any of it. So tonight Nate poops in this thing and carries it down to Cathie to do the specimen stuff. As he's carrying it, he drops it, and the poop spills on the floor. Not only is Cathie having to the poop specimen, but she's stuck cleaning poop up off the floor, trying to get the poop back into the toilet thing. Nice thing is, you can't use bleach or any major cleaning solvents in this toilet insert. You have to wash it out with soap and water and hope for the best. So we have poop all over the place - on the floor (okay, not on the floor, it's been cleaned up), but the remnants of this poo container, which Cathie kindly set in my bathroom for the duration of the three days. Ain't life grand! If it's gonna be funny later, it's funny now.

Erik, a friend of mine from work, turned me on to this site. It's a collection of bad web sites, specifically real sites -- not personal, band, music, art, movie, experimental, fashion, and (some) sports sites. Some mistakes aren't actually design mistakes in the classical sense -- ugly graphics, bad navigation, etc.

We haven't sold our house yet. We haven't had any walkthroughs in a week. I'm beginning to feel like my parents, who've had their house up for sale for 8 months. We had a verbal offer for $255 last week, but we haven't seen anything in writing. We dropped our price today to $264,999. I don't see it making a huge difference, because if someone wouldn't make an offer at $269,999 then why would they make an offer when we drop it to $265k? Not sure.

I was sitting on my deck this morning listening to the birds chirp, thinking about how much I like the house and a few of my neighbors, wondering if I'm crazy to want to sell.

For the past few month's, Nate's been having stomach pains. It's gradually gotten worse to the point that he will hold his stomach, crying in pain because of the severity. We'd taken him to the doctor about a month ago and they tried to put him on some medicine, thinking it might be acid reflux. The medicine didn't help so they sent us to a specialist. Three weeks later, we got in (the other specialists were looking at 3 months out). Nate had a two hour appointment there yesterday where they poked and prodded and drew some blood. The Doctor threw out things from an ulcer all the way to stomach cancer. The end result is they've scheduled him for an esophagogastroduodenscopy (upper endoscopy) a week from Friday. They knock him out, run a camera down his throat and take some tissue biopsys.