My Next Tattoo

I'm considering getting this as my next tattoo. I could become invisible at any time by simply holding my finger up to my lip and speaking in a french accent.

Tags: Mustache Tattoos

Sunday...

I felt bad falling asleep in church today during my friend J's message on Community. I felt even worse that he noticed..... There was a reason, just not a great one:

My friend Joe, who also happens to be our pastor, was at the poker game last night. As he was leaving his last words were, "oh by the way guys, you're on load-up tomorrow morning", which was followed by a collective groan. This seems to happen every time we have a party. Bob, Brad, Eli and I do load-up and take down on the first and fifth Sunday's of the month at church, and we seem to hang out late together at these kind of shin-digs. What this means is that after a late night of playing cards (where I won $60) for my birthday, I had to get up at 6:30AM to move big crates and setup equipment.
We were somehow able to corral another guy into coming Eli, Bob and I - Eli's brother-in-law Jeff. He came all the way from Howell to help us load and take down, which was impressive. Brad made a series of choices that kept him from being at the party and from doing load up this morning.

I'm in town for a while, which is great. We've had a hold on travel at work for the next few months, so I'm going to savor it. I'm going biking with Bill this week and going on a date with my wife as well. No travel means I can get caught up on stuff at work, but get back to spending hours on end on the phone. I have almost 8 hours of conference calls back to back conference calls tomorrow trying to get things moving along.

Zoneedit.com

Since my ISP doesn't give me a static IP address, I've been using the TZO service for the past 7 or 8 years to route to my machine over the internet. TZO ran about $25/year and worked well, but it was expensive. It was time to renew, so I started checking out my options. I came across zoneedit.com, which allows me to do dynamic IP to my machine , and forward other references to my domain to my blog (hosted by blogspot), all for free. The link to the Kurt family photo gallery has now changed to here but my blog can still be accessed via www.davekurt.com.

Tags: zoneedit.com, tzo.com

We will rock you

Nate and his friend Austin put the gloves on again, and we made another boxing movie, as shown below. They helped me edit it and put the special effects, and chose the background music:

Saturday Morning

Nate and I had an early football game this morning at 9am. We lost, but we improved. Our team scored two touchdowns and had a couple of interceptions, but our defense (which I coached) kept letting big plays to the outside break away and score.

The kids and I went garage-sale-ing after football. We loaded up in the van and started in our neighborhood. Somehow along the way we picked up some neighborhood kids so we headed out to all of the other neighborhoods, descending onto garage sale after garage sale. We didn't buy much - a pogo stick and an old fashioned stick bowling game, but we had fun. I started cleaning out my garage for the poker game tonight and figured I'd stick some stuff in front of my house that had been cluttering my garage up, just to see if I could sell the stuff. People came by while we were outside, and it sold right away.

Tonight I've got a bunch of friends coming over to play poker. We've got bud on tap, cigars and cards. Who could ask for more?

I'm a tool

I'm a tool, or maybe a machine - a machine at fixing appliances. Many will attest to how I'm not very handy around the house. The one thing I've had moderate success with for some reason is appliances. Earlier in the week, our dishwasher started making some weird grinding noises. After a quick look at it, I was pretty sure that the motor was shot and it would be more expensive to fix than to buy a new one. Instead of going out and buying a new dishwasher, I went to the good book: The Reader's Digest Book of Home Repair.

My brother-in-law Ed got this for me for Christmas 5 years ago or so, and it's amazing. Using the book, I was able to diagnose the problem in the pump, take the whole pump mechanism apart and find the problem. The pump had a pen cap, 14 cents and 2 marbles rolling around in it - none of which belonged there. I put it all back together, and it works beautifully.

Living Farm

Emily's pre-school class went to a living farm for the day. They got to play with pigs, ride horses, feed the animals and milk a cow. Emily loves animals more than anything, so she was in heaven at the farm.

Jesus Walks

This picture is made from the text of the last 3 chapters of Luke. Click here to zoom in closer. There is another cool one of Bob Marley, made up of his lyrics, and another of Reagan, made from his speeches. Check them out here.

Nice Birth Control

My older brother Dan just got Lasik eye surgery and he now gets to wear these cool glasses for a while. Most people could probably care less about Dan's eyes, but I needed a reason to post this picture. Strangely enough, after the surgery he now refers to himself in third person on his own blog. Go figure.

Spring is here. I love this weather. There's nothing like being able to sit out on the deck and work during the day while the weather is just right. The flowers are in full bloom and beautiful.

Lick a toilet today

According to this study funded by Clorox, keyboards have 265 times more bacteria on them than a toilet seat. Surprisingly, toilet seats had the lowest level of bacteria of the 12 surfaces tested in this study.

No one picked Pickler.

Madeline's favorite American Idol, Kellie Pickler got voted off last night. When she heard this, she got mad at all of America for not recognizing her talent and was so disgusted by their choice that she actually said she wanted to move to South Africa. "Because they don't vote for people on American Idol."

This also throws off who I thought would be in the final four, but hey, Kellie really blew the past two weeks.

Tags: American Idol, Kellie Pickler

How you treat your waiter....

Interesting article from a CEOs perspective on watching how people treat others, in particular waiters, to get a good feel for the person's character.

My brother Jon has always wanted to be able to juggle, and has gotten very good at juggling one thing at a time (which might not even really be called juggling). He had a T-shirt made with this picture to remind him of how much Jesus loves jugglers. (Thanks to Phil for this site)

It's a slippery slope

I just talked to my Mom and she was telling me about going in to the hospital to get fitted up for the gear for her radiation treatment. As a part of the setup, they gave her three tattoos so they can aim the radiation cells in the exact location. After this, I'm sure she's already considering getting a large picture of me tattooed on her arm.

Check out the video of Dan's recommended treatment for my Mom.

Tony Snow was selected as President Bush's new spokesmen. Cathie and I had a chance to have dinner and hang out with him up at the Grand Hotel 9 years ago. My brush with greatness.

Stood Up by a Green Day Look-a-like

I was supposed to meet up with a friend and co-worker in New York today, who just so happens to be the body-double for Mike Dirnt from Green Day. We were supposed to meet up for coffee today and he hosed me. Apparently he was out late at Karoke last night, touring Rochester, doing Green Day songs, dressed up like the Roman guard.

Wegmans

I'm in New York this week for a bunch of meetings with my team. Being virtual, we rarely get a chance to all get together from all over the country like this. As a team building event, we went to Dinner at Wegman's culinary institute. Wegmans is a famous chain of grocery stores that have been profiled in the Harvard Business review and other places.

We received our aprons and broke into teams and each set out to cook our course in the meal. We were graded based on a few criteria, including presentation. Our team created palm trees out of beer bottles and brocolli. The chef judging us felt our presentation was rather 'white trash', but tasted good. Believe it or not, the brussel sprouts won. We came in last.

Laughing Babies

I saw this on Google Video and couldn't help but smile.

Inside Man

Cathie and I went on a date last night to see the movie Inside Man. Great bank robbery movie with a twist at the end. Jodie Foster played a role outside of her normal "super uptight Mom" role, but I'm not sure if it was a good one for her. It was a very non-standard Spike Lee joint, but very well done.

Tags: Inside Man, Jodie Foster, Spike Lee

The kids and I were watching video footage from last week's Easter gathering at my parents house. I'd almost forgotten about my sister's Sooze's ending to the pre-dinner blessing:

"Thank you that our parents stayed together for 40 years even though Dave was so bad all the time."

Lazy Saturday

Our neighbor called us over yesterday to show us this giant gardener snake she'd found in her yard and wanted gone ASAP. It was about 3 feet long and either very full or very pregnant.

This morning, Madeline and I headed over to Kensington Park to ride the eight mile loop. It's full of some huge hills. We got up to a top speed of 20mph heading down them. We stopped every couple of miles to take a break, but Maddie did great, never complaining. It was a beautiful day for a bike ride.

Xerox's commander in chief Anne Mulcahy was on NPR's marketplace on Friday. You can read more about it here, and read the transcript here. I've said it before that I think she's a Level 5 leader. Very humble, very decisive, very compelling. I've had the chance to meet her a few times and always been impressed by her.

Tags: Anne Mulcahy, NPR, Xerox

We went to Chuck-E-Cheeses for lunch yesterday to celebrate Em's birthday. Afterwards, Em kept the crown on, put her biking boots on and went for a ride.

5 Year Old Emily

Today is Em's fifth birthday. I got home from the red-eye flight last night around 6:30 and she let me sleep until about 10 before waking me up so she could open her birthday presents. We're heading to Chuck-E-Cheeses for lunch today. Will, as usual, was the first family member to call and wish Emily a happy birthday.

The Barbie Mermaid she's holding was my brother Jon's favorite growing up. When it gets wet, the hair changes colors and the hidden tattoos reveal themselves.

Blue Raspberry

Meet Blue Raspberry. He's Emily's latest fish. From Walmart. Apparently this kind of fish can survive a nuclear disaster, so it can probably survive Emily taking him out to give him a hug. I asked her if she named him that because he was blue, or because he looked like a raspberry. She said it's because he looks like a raspberry.

Seattle

(Seahawks Quest Stadium)
I got up at 4am this morning to fly to Seattle. Around 4:15 I heard a funny noise coming from my pocket. It was my phone. Apparently, I'd bumped Will's speed dial picture (see below) and called Will and woke his Mom up (they are living together). 12 hours after leaving my house this morning, I made it to the customer site in downtown Seattle. We met for 4 hours and then I toured around town and had dinner at a phenomenal Fusion Chinese place called the Wild Ginger, all per my friend Mack's reccomendations. I was blown away by the food and didn't really have a chance to see much of the city. I was suprised at what a young city this is. The average age here must be about 25.

I'm on a 10:30pm flight, which gets me in around 5:30am - 25 hours after I'd left home. I got bumped into first class all the way out here, hopefully I'm in first class for the red-eye home. Tomorrow is Em's 5th birthday, so I'm glad to be home when she wakes up to the traditional (at least in our home) room filled with balloons.

Here's Will's Speed Dial Picture on my phone (cropped down to just show his skull cap, cigarette, girlfriend and su-fi

Tags: Su-Fi, Seattle, Wild Ginger

Chaos

My sister Sooze posted this picture from Easter at my parents that shows the chaos and togetherness of our family gatherings.

Big Table

I'm not sure why I need a conference room table in my hotel room, but I'm glad I have it, just in case I have to call an emergency meeting at 2 in the morning. With eight chairs, it will be a big meeting.

Can't touch this...

I got this link from my friend Ken. It's MC Hammer's blog.

Tags: MC Hammer

Hot Springs, AR

I rolled into Hot Springs, AR today where it topped out at 94 degrees. I should have probably brought some short sleeve shirts. My hotel room has a board room table in it that seats 8. I'm sure there's got to be a good way to use all eight chairs with only me in this room. Forget hangers... I'm using chairs.

I get back in on Wednesday night around 9, and fly out Thursday morning at 7am to Seattle.

Easter Sunday

Wow... I need a vacation from the weekend. I feel like we went non-stop. The kids woke us up at 7am to see if the Easter Bunny had come and I don't think we stopped running until we got home at 9 that night. The girls were very proud of their outfits which they'd picked out with their Grandma Lebbon a few weeks back. Nate, well.. we were just excited to get him dressed up a little with a collared shirt.

After church we went over to Cath's parents house and Emily was in heaven hanging out with Ed and Stacy's dog, Justice. Justice is a puppy and not used really used to kids. He did great with Emily, who didn't leave him alone for 10 seconds the whole afternoon.

Later in the afternoon we went over to my parents, who conveniently live about 5 minutes from Cathie's parents. We were celebrating Easter, my parents 40th anniversary, and Emily and Andrew's birthday.

I asked my Mom what she attributed staying with the same man for 40 years to, and she explained "I found the most wonderful man in the world." I asked my Dad the same question, and his response was, "Compromise." I explained what my Mom's answer was, and he quickly replied that she was right, and then corrected his answer to be, "I married the most wonderful woman in the world."

Dan had brought some toys back from China, including this spy kit. It's not really all that stealthy looking, because you can clearly tell that someone is wearing it. Check out the photo gallery for a picture that shows just how much 007 potential Dan really has.

While the girls hung out and looked cute...

The boys amused themselves jumping off my Dad's retaining wall and doing stroller races down the hill (the girls participated too). They'd fill two strollers, start at the top, give the the person a big push and away they'd go.

All of Dan and Kris's family wore orange (to signify the something-or-other, I guess?), while Will and Kevin coordinated shirts and heads.

We had our first annual Easter Rocket Launch, which symbolized... um... Jesus going to heaven... No, wait, that's ascension... Um. Ok, this was just fun and a chance to get the kids out of the house for a few.


More pictures are available here in the Kurt Family Photo Gallery.

If we had a fire, after I knew that my kids were safe, the next thing I would save would be my digital pictures. I've setup some redundancy in my home network, mirroring one drive to another. My home system has 5 different drives, giving me about 1TB+ of storage, but I still don't feel totally comfortable that my data is safe.

I just read this article on building a redundant terabyte file server for under $500, which is pretty appealing. I'm waiting for someone to come out with a service that interfaces with Amazon's new online storage service to let me throw my 50GBs of critical data on their disk farm for $5/month. Sure beats me trying to stand it up on my own.

He is Risen... He is Risen Indeed

Growing up, our Easter tradition involved waking up, finding our Easter baskets, finding Easter eggs and then heading down to Detroit to go to church with my Grandma Smith and Uncle Bill. Her church was over on Evergreen and Joy, close enough to the hood to be the closest that this group of white, suburban Okemos kids got to the hood. I remember marveling at how well dressed the black families would be in their Easter best. (Small World: This church happens to be the same church that Jason Raitz went to and that his Dad was the Youth Pastor at). All four kids, my Mom, my Dad, my Grandma and my Uncle Bill would pile in the last row, all dressed in our Sunday best (we had some snazzy cordory suits back then). The pastor would always start the service by proclaiming, "He has risen" and we would all respond, "He has risen indeed." We'd sing "Christ the Lord has Risen Today" and a bunch of other songs with trumpet accompaniment, which sounded awesome. My Grandma would placate us with her Beechnut Candys as we would go through the liturgy, anxious to get hooped up on Easter Candy. My Mom's church's Easter service is the standard by which I measure all others, but there's no way to replicate the cool feeling of sitting in the row with my Grandma, my favorite Uncle Bill and my siblings.

Today, my whole family is getting together to celebrate Easter, my parent's 40th anniversary and Emily and Andrew's birthdays. You can be sure that our first greeting to each other will be with the challenge/response of "He has risen" with "He has risen indeed."

The Contortionist

I think this picture encapsulates Emily's personality pretty well. While I was broiling the water to par-broil brats for dinner, Emily and I were making her birthday cupcakes. We'd just added the last ingredient when I reached over for the brats to throw them in the boiling water when Emily explained (she was dead serious), "Dad, don't mix those in. I really don't want Brat flavored cupcakes."

Earlier in the day her and I had been talking about the fact that we're celebrating her birthday tomorrow with some of the family, with her friends on another day, and then another part of the family later on in April. Her next question, "Will I be 5, and then 6, and then 7 after three parties?"

Saturday Ride to McHattie

After I got back from the "D", we decided to ride our bikes up to the Park to hang out. Emily jumped in the buggie and we headed off. Apparently, if you are going fast and make tight turns, the buggie will go up on one wheel, answering the eternal question "Why do kids need to buckle their harnesses and wear helmets when they ride in the buggie?"


We ran around for a while and played, headed back, and decorated Easter Eggs.

Tags: McHattie Park, South Lyon

Downtown Outreach

Three weeks ago the kids from our junior high youth group and I filled a bunch of bags full of easter candy in preparation for today. Six of us headed to the "D" (Detroit) into the hood to pass out clothes, food, toys and candy as part of a gig our church participates in every month. The kids (and their parents) were a little apprehensive about going Downtown, but they went. We headed over to the Cass Corrdior, to one of the parks where a big group of people live during the summer. We setup a bunch of tables and after getting in a giant circle and doing a brief message and prayer, we passed out food, drinks, toys for the kids and clothes. After about an hour at the first stop, we packed up and headed a couple miles over to Albert and Brush street to do the same thing, but with more kids.

The kids really had fun with it. The most common feedback I heard from them was "the people we're helping are really polite and seem to appreciate it." The kids helped pass out the food and helped people find clothes that fit them. They also got to pass out the bags of candy to the kids, who appreciated it.



After the final stop, I took the kids on a tour of Downtown, showing them all of the sights. No trip to Detroit is complete without a stop at White Castle for a dozen slyders, which is what we did (and I'm still tasting them at 7 hours later). We ate them as we drove down the express way with the windows wide open, but my car still smells like a giant armpit from the burgers.

The cool part of this for me is how far I've come. One of my goals this year with the kids was to help the kids reach outside of the church to the poor and hurting in the world around them. The problem was, the poor and hurting weren't that important to me. Tough to say, but it's true. I started going downtown to help, reading stuff, and trying to do stuff with my time and money toward helping others more.

After helping people find clothes, the kids saw that people really wanted t-shirts. They came up with the idea of trying to do a t-shirt drive in our community. We're going to take plastic bags and staple a note to them asking people to fill it with t-shirts they don't wear any more and put it on their porch the following week . We'll distribute them around the neighborhoods in town and then go pick them up and bring them down to the "D" in May. I love the fact that the kids started with stuffing bags of candy, took the next step and went downtown, and now came up with a way to help even further.

Tags: White Castle, Slyders, Cass Corridor

Friday

I took Friday off and after being gone all week I gave Cath a break while I took the kids out to Kensington Farm. As you can see from the picture, Nate wasn't to excited about the animals, but Emily was in heaven. Nate got into a "baaahhhing" match with one of the sheep and they went back and forth for about 5 minutes, Nate refusing to let this giant sheep get the last word in.


After checking out the animals and the farm house, we went over to the toboggen hill to run down up and down it. Emily got to the bottom and figured out she was too tired to make it back up. She crawled most of the way up the hill from there.

After Kensington, it was too nice of a day not to get Slurpees. Emily made possibly the grossest Kamikaze slurpee of all time, mixing mango, coke and eight other flavors together.

Friday night we had our Good Friday service at church. Instead of a traditional good Friday service, we did a play about Good Friday. It was written and performed by people from our church and they really put a lot into it. Madeline has a part in the play and did a really great job. The highlight for me was seeing my friend Joe (also our pastor) dressed as Jesus, complete with beard and long hair.

As soon as he came out on stage, lots of flash bulbs went off, everyone having the same idea about keeping these pictures as blackmail for future use.

Uncle Jon hurts another child.. This time their heart

Madeline has a part in the play tonight at church for our Good Friday service. It's a full blown hour+ production that we're doing and it should be fun. When Madeline got the part in the play, her first words were, "Do you think since Uncle Jon is in town he can come to see me in the play?" I called my brother and he explained to me that he couldn't come because 7:30 was his daughter Libby's "Grumpy Time" (first time parent thing). I talked to my sister Sooze and she volunteered to watch Libby so Jon could come town. I shared this with Jon and he then asked for gas money to come down and see Maddie. I explained that I would pay for gas, but I wouldn't pay mileage for the trip here. Jon still declined to come down, so I guess both were smoke-screens. Jon has a reputation for hurting children, but when he hurts their heart like this, it's slow to heal. Anyone have any ideas as to what Jon's true motivation is for not wanting to come down and see his niece in this play while he's in town?

GPS rocks... Most of the time

When I travel I no longer bring maps. As long as I have the name or address of the hotel or business I'm visiting, I'm good. I can plug it into my Treo based GPS system and be completely oblivious to where I'm at, aside from where my Treo tells me to go. The technology consists of a small GPS receiver and my phone and it's flawless unless the rechargable battery loses it's charge and you don't have a charger with you....like happened to me today in Phili. Note to self... Don't depend so heavily on technology... Yeah right.

High Falls in Rochester

I'm flying out of Rochester into Philidelphia this evening. Last night I got a chance to check out the scenery in Rochester with Glenn and Sam (which I didn't know Rochester had).

Spring is in the air

Spring is here. The kids are loving being able to play outside. Nate's out from the video games playing hockey, football and basketball. We went for a bike ride this evening which was great. Maddie rode her bike while Emily rode in the boogie (what Emily calls the buggy. It's cute, and she's our youngest, so I'm holding on to these kind of things as long as I can). It's warm enough now that we can start riding our bikes to church.

You gotta love Emily's outfit. I came into her room last night and she had 5 separate outfits laid out to choose from for school this morning. 5 pair of shoes (why does she have 5 pair???), 5 pair of socks and tights and five dresses. She picked this dress and the crazy pair of tights she's wearing (that's why we call her "little Jess").

I had my board meeting for Project 311 tonight. Tomorrow I fly to New York and then to Philidelphia on Wednesday, back on Thursday, off for Good Friday. Friday night we've got a very cool Good Friday service happening at church. Saturday I'm taking the kids in the youth group down to the "D" (as in "D"etroit) to pass out food and clothes to the homeless. Sunday
we're going down to Lansing to spend Easter with the family. I think my brother Jon and Libby will be in town. My sister-in-law Bethie has to stay in Memphis and work. Busy week. Next Monday I fly out to Arkansas for a few days and the following week I'm back in New York. It's making me tired thinking about it. I'm heading to bed.

Sunday

After church, we had the first annual Crossroads Easter Egg hunt at our church's property. It was a blast! The weather was perfect, we had a huge group of people there, both old and new from church, and tons of people from the community stopped by to take part. We had a couple bounce-houses (which the jr higher's and I were able to commendere for some big time wrestling), sack races, face painting, cookie decorating and live easter egg decorating.

Along with Joe and Craig, Brad and I were selected to be decorated by kids as human easter eggs. Each group of kids got a bag of stuff, including silly string, stickers, toilet paper, streamers and other miscellaneous crap to cover us in. They had five minutes to decorate us. My favorite part was when one of the kids shoved the can of silly string in my ear and let 'er rip.

There was a Dad's sack race, which I was clearly winning until Brad decided to deliver a hard check (alright, hard for Brad... Comon - he's almost 60) which sent me flying and took me out of contention.

In a stroke of genius the week before during one of our pastoral Q&As, one of the kids in our church had the bright idea to ask Joe, "If you become pastor, can I hit you in the face with a pie?" Everyone else is asking his take on hermanutics, this kid's the only smart one in the group that understands the kind of leverage she has. Today, Joe delivered on that promise, now that he's our official new pastor:


The event was a huge success. It connected us in the church to each other as we got to hang out and help out, it connected us with new people in our community and it gave me a chance to establish the fact that I'm the alpha male in the bounce-house big-time-wrestling.

After Saturday's game, Nate and I wanted to work on some of the plays. I wanted to simulate the pressure a quarterback gets in a real game, so we got Emily and Cathie to try playing defense for us. It took about 5 minutes for Emily to understand that when Nate says "Hike", she should try and rush the line and try and get Nate. I had to tackle Cathie a couple of times even though she didn't have the ball.