Pursuit of Happyness

Cathie and I went on a date the other night and saw the movie The Pursuit of Happyness with Will Smith. I can't remember the last time I walked out of a movie that drained and down. The movie ends on a high note, but you spend two hours watching Will Smith's character, Charlie Gardner take hit after hit. You spend so much of the movie willing things to go right for the guy and it's exhausting. The movie is great in that it puts life in perspective, things like having a hot water heater and dryer go in the same week for instance. You walk away reminded of the plight of the poor and how the smallest things can help. Good flick, but take a Xanax before you gou.

Rascal

I'm a dog guy and I hope I'm not becoming one of those guys who loves his cat a little more than is healthy, but this cat of ours cracks me up. I was against it from the beginning, but this guy seems to have a pretty decent personality, as my sister and fellow-cat hater Sooze attests to. Rascal loves to wrestle with the dog, toes, the guinea pig and Emily's stuffed animals and when he's not doing that, he's being carried around by Emily. We've had a couple girl cats in the past, both who were annoying. Rascal is a boy and he seems to be pretty tolerable. Riley pretty much just ignores him as the cat tries to launch on her and wrestle with her. The cat will walk up to Riley and just smack her in the fact with her paw, nibble at her ears and try and get the Riley's tale. Riley hasn't retaliated yet. Maybe it happens when we're gone.

Hot Water Heater

On Tuesday Cathie sent me downstairs to check and see if the pilot light was out on the hot water heater only to find that it had died, leaving lots of water in the basement. I cleaned up the water and called Sears to find out what the easiest model would be to replace this with. While I was on the phone with them, I noticed on the web site that the new model ($500) came with a 12 year warranty. It turns out, so does the one i have now. After talking to them for a while, they agreed to replace mine at no cost, except for installation. Meanwhile, we had no hot water, thus no dishwasher and very cold showers.

My brother-in-law Kevin and family came down Thursday to help me remove the original one and install the new one. My sister Susan spent most of the time making flemmy chicken noodle soup and laughing about our kitchen. It wouldn't have been a tough job for people who knew what they were doing, but both Kevin and I were a little lacking in the "copper soldering" department. After 7 hours non-stop and 5 trips to the hardware store, we called it quits at about 11pm and decided to start fresh in the morning.

After another couple of hours, we got it working, short of a couple minor leaks that will hopefully stop soon. Kevin's the kind of guy who knows how to do just about anything around the house and is willing to lend a hand to anyone to get the job done, no matter how nasty. He came down last year and and built a deck for Jon and he's helped me on a bunch of projects around here. He may suffer from male-pattern-baldness even though he's not yet 30, but he's a hand brother-in-law to have around, not to mention he can help Nate and I beat any video game level we get stuck on.

Weird Weather

I can't remember the last time it was 50+ degrees at the end of December. The kids are disappointed because they can't play in the snow on their winter break. As much as I enjoy a white Christmas, I'm okay with taking my Christmas lights down without having to wear a coat. This has got to be the first time I've ever gotten them down this quickly after Christmas.

Fantasy Football Finals 2006

The season is over and the results are in. Here's how it went:
First Place - Mark Niemi
Second Place - The Rays Boys
Third Place - Me

Sadly enough Brad, his brother, his son and Eli and his brother-in-law Jeff and Matt Gielow all finished waaaay behind me.

Susan's Christmas Outfits

My sister Susan went all out this year in wearing beautiful Christmas outfits. The first being her brides maid dress from our wedding, the second outfit being a flannel body-suit pajamas of my Mom's.

Christmas Day

We were able to sleep in until around 8 on Christmas Morning, which is a record. Again, you gotta love the kids getting older. The kids opened presents from my Dad and then we loaded up. Normally we go to Cathie's parents a couple miles away and spend Christmas with them, but this year they're on an extended vacation in Hawaii. Instead, we headed home and cleaned up in order to head over to my Aunt's house for Christmas Day. This is something we haven't been able to attend since we've gotten married, but it's a tradition I grew up with and my Mom had done growing up as well. We would head down to Detroit on Christmas and would spend Christmas Day with all of my relatives.

We had a chance to see a lot of extended family that I hadn't seen in a long time, including my Aunt Elaine, one of my Mom's cousins who has always been super generous and thoughtful with us as kids and our kids for Christmas. We got home around five and were exhausted.

Christmas Eve

This year's Christmas was different and tinged with sadness. It was always one of my Mom's favorite holidays and she would go all out between her cooking, gifts and joy to make each Christmas more special than the last.

We all met at my Dad's house for our big dinner, trying to replicate the giant meal that my Mom always made each year. We ate an awesome meal and then got ready for church. Taking the family pictures is always quite the ordeal but this year went smoother than most, maybe because the kids are getting older. We each took the standard family picture:

And then the great-grandchildren took a picture with my Grandma, one normal, the other silly:

We took this brand new family picture of everyone (except Will):

We then headed to church at St. Luke's in Haslett. Even though I go to a church that would be considered contemporary, I love the traditional liturgy for Christmas Eve, finished with the candle light service. Somehow I was in a row as the only "responsible" adult with 6 kids, which made the cande light part of the service fun. I was able to blow out Matthew's candle four times, Andrew got yelled at three times by Dan and Emily and Allie each burned themselves. We were surprisingly good with not having my Mom there to keep an eye on all of us. One of the funniest moments occurred when the boys (all sitting in my row) sang the hymn What Child is This and giggled as they heard and saw the line, "Where ox and ass are feeding?". I mouthed to my brothers and Dad what the boys were all giggling about and they too found it pretty darn funny. We got to say "ass" in church. That's funny to me. I think my Mom would have grinned and then rolled her eyes.

We came back to my Dad's house and ate some more and the kids got to open presents from their Aunts and Uncles, which included penguin themed pajamas, which Kris was somehow able to find for all of the kids and herself. Kris loves penguins - their shape, their size and their textures so we weren't suprised when she finally was able to fulfill her dream.

One of the kids got this cool stretchy thing, which at one time or another we all were able to put on our heads.

My sister Sooze loves to try and get into other people's pictures (I'm guessing this is where Nate gets it from) and this picture is no different.

Once the kids were downstairs hanging out, the rest of us did our new stocking exchange thing. We each spent no more than $5 to get the maximum amount of stuff. I had drawn Kris's name and picked a theme that she would appreciate as much as my brother Dan would (hint: it involved dollar store lingerie and a rooster statue). Kris was kind enough to get me gifts that involved this very nice jock strap.

As a new tradition, each of us put some memories of my Mom in a a stocking and we took turns sharing them. There were a lot of laughter and a lot of tears, but it was a cool, focused time to remember Mom.

We got the kids to bed around 11ish and Kevin, Jon, my Dad and I ended up playing the Wii together. My Dad turned out to be a master at Wii bowling and golf and ended up smoking us all. The controls are so intuitive, it makes it a blast. With bowling, you move your arm just like you are bowling, twisting your wrist on release to put spin on the ball.

We had a great Christmas eve and wisely hid the bells before to ensure a peaceful Christmas morning. My Mom had a tradition of getting up super early on Christmas Morning and letting the kids get the rest of us up early as well ringing these demon possessed bells that make you want to hurt someone badly at 6am.

You can find the pictures from Christmas Eve in the Kurt Family Gallery.

Christmas Eve Eve

Because our church is in a school until our building is completed, we have church on Christmas Eve Eve. This fits well into our family Christmas schedule and since we're in town, we invite friends and neighbors to church and then over to our house afterwards.

We had a nice service with a nice mix of music, teaching and drama. The message and drama focused back through the Old Testament Maddie did a reading during the service (thanks to Mark Hamilton for the video footage)


After church we went back and over to our house and hung out. We had lots of food and we hung out talking. The kids had their turn at playing the Nintendo Wii before the Dad's took over. We took turns with the different sports games, bowling, baseball, golf and tennis - finding a way to compete at all of them.

Eli and Mark only dreamed of keeping up with my ninja like wii skills.

You can see the pictures of our Christmas Eve Eve here.

Christmas Eve Eve Morning

Because of all of our extended family Christmas happenings, Santa visits our house on Christmas Eve Eve morning.

Nate was thrilled with his Nintendo Wii. He student there screaming, "I got a wii!", which begged the response, "then use the bathroom". (I thought that my response was so funny I repeated it a couple of times). Emily got a gigantic doll-house which I'm pretty sure Santa spent about 3 hours putting together very late one night. Maddie got a no-assembly required keyboard for her piano lessons. The kids spent the rest of the day hanging out and playing with their new toys while Cathie and I got the house ready for the party that evening.
You can see the pictures in the Kurt Family Photo Album

Bob Seger Concert

On Friday night, Brad, Eli, Bob and I went to see Bob Seger at the Palace. The show was amazing. We thought the concert started at 7:30 with no opening act - and we were wrong on both counts as Bob didn't come on until 9.

The show was amazing - about 2 1/2 hours of Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band rocking out and the audience singing every word to every song. Bob danced like the 61 year old white rocker that he is, but somehow he made it seem cool.

Even Brad felt old at this concert, as the average age was around 45. It was funny seeing 20 people in my section watching the show through binoculars. I was a little disappointed that Kid Rock didn't show for a third encore, as he had earlier in the week, but it was still an amazing show. I put together this montage of video from the show that I took with my digital camera (and yes, I do realize that Bob, Brad, Eli and I are probably the only people in the world that will want to watch this video). What makes the video especially nice is that you can hear Bob, Brad, Eli and I singing in the background, way off key:


Here's Turn the Page:

Rock and Roll Never Forgets

Line Rider Video

Thanks Eric for this amazing Line Rider video:

Tags: Line Rider

Bono

Bono on the where songs come from:

We've all heard singers and musicians say 'I'm just a force for God and God uses me and it comes from Him.' I'm thinking to myself, 'Could God have written all of these crap songs?' And yet anything where you bump into something that's bigger than you I do believe it's a gift from God and God is the creator and creativity comes form him.
--Bono and the Edge: Off the Record interview with Dave Stewart on HBO

Tags: Bono, Edge, U2, Dave Stewart, Off the Record

Memories

I came across these two great pictures the other day.

This first one is a few years ago when my adopted brother Will showed us all up by getting my parents a nicer gift than any of their birth children. Will is not smiling from joy, but in deviant delight for making us all look like suckers.

I received this picture from Jason and Jess as a gift for singing (I think) in their wedding and I re-gifted it to my mother. As you can see, she was thrilled and in awe of the picture.

Seger Tonight

Bob, Eli, Brad and I are going to see Bob Seger tonight at the Palace. As I'd mentioned earlier, this is a show I've been wanting to see for a long time. Dana went to see the opening show a couple of nights ago and said it was a fantastic show.

SI

These pictures are amazing. Check out the Sports Illustrated 2006 Most Interesting Pictures. Number 9 is rather cool. I have no idea what game they're playing in #14 (but I'll bet Dan does).

Joe's Show

Cathie and I went with Eli and Dana to see Cathie's Uncle Joe perform at Connxtions Comedy Club in Lansing. Joe has been a professional comedian for 29 years and he was hilarious. I'd seen Joe perform once before about 10 years ago and the act was great. There were large parts of it based on Cathie's Mom, Grandpa and other families, so knowing them made it even funnier. A big part of his act is interacting with the audience, and Joe's been doing this so long that the rhythm of the show just goes naturally from the audience, to stories, to jokes and back to the audience. Take a look at the picture here from his site. That's Cathie's Mom on the right.

Tags: Joe Dunckel, Connxtions Comedy Club, Lansing

Worst Lyrics Ever

Great list of 20 worst lyrics of all time. My personal favorite:

4. America, “A Horse With No Name”
On the first part of the journey
I was looking at all the life
There were plants and birds and rocks and things

Perfect Questions

Great set of interview questions from Microsoft.

Memories of my Mom

I've been going through a lot of old pictures of my Mom today as part of something we're doing for Christmas. My Dad came up with the cool idea each of the grandkids are making ornaments in memory of Mom and we're filling her stocking with notes of memories about my Mom we're going to share together on Christmas Eve.

I came across this picture of when Dan and I had visited my Mom in the hospital during her first biopsy. This picture ended up starting a a whole chain of events of people clamoring for my Mom's love. The whole thing made me smile thinking about it and seeing my Mom's smile in this picture.

Double Wires

I'm hooked on this game.

U2 Video

This is an amazing U2 video to the song Window in the Skies. The entire video is done using clips from footage of vintage rockers, timed so that they're singing and performing parts of the song:

Huh?

Emily: "If I can't play outside I'm going hit my head into my hands really hard and I'll get hurt and you'll feel bad."

Amazing

I was able to use the word existential and extension in the same sentence recently and in the appropriate context. Amazing.

True Happiness

There are things that I want and things that I need. This is the latter.

No Christmas Cards this Year

For the first time ever, we're not sending out Christmas Cards. We've received a million of them so far and in doing this I'm aware that I risk getting taken off people's Christmas Card list. My Mom used to give people three chances of not sending them cards before they got axed from her list. She kept a spreadsheet and everything to track who she sent and who she received them from.

If you read my blog, there's nothing more I can tell you anyways. Am I the only person that isn't doing Christmas Cards this year?

Oh Holy Night

Long lay the world
In sin and error pining
'Til He appeared and the soul felt His worth

The thrill of hope,
The weary world rejoices
For yonder brings a new and glorious morn

Fall on your knees
Oh, hear the angel's voices
O' night divine
O' night when Christ was born

Online Backup

After having some near-misses with losing data, I've given up on local backups of data as my sole source of backing things up. There's just too much human error involved and it's not worth losing everything over something like that. I had tried to use Amazon's S3 service in the past. The price was right but the client applications just weren't stable enough. Between all of my photos, music and personal and work documents, I've got around 100GB of data to backup across my800GB of storage on my desktop. After reading Mossberg's recent review of online backup systems, I'm trying Mozy. Mozy runs $4.95/month and gives you unlimited backup capabilities for one system. They've even got a free version that gives you 2GB of storage, which is pretty reasonable for most people. It seems to support Vista pretty well and the interface to the application is pretty intuitive. I'll let you know how it works for me.

Tags: Mozy, Online Backup

Malltease Manhunt

We had our first annual Malltease Manhunt for our church's youth group (idea borrowed from Calvary Baptist). Fifteen of us dressed up in various outfits and went to the Twelve Oaks mall in Novi. The goal was to not be recognizable to the kids in youth group. They were given a mug-shot book for each of us that showed our pictures and a hilarious background story that Shinn made up for each of us. On a side note, Shinn shaved his head for the event (check him out in the lower left hand corner).

Matt went as a white-rapper, Zach as Matt's body-guard and I went as Dan. Seriously, four people independently told me that I looked like my brother Dan (Nate, Anne, Tiffany and Jess)

The Rays boys and Jim decided to stay classy, with each of the Rays boys dressing like their Dad in different phases of his life, while Jim dressed like his Dad.


We wandered around the mall as did the kids, and they had to try and spot us. When they did, they had to join hands and sing "Twinkle, Twinkle little star, we think we know who you are." The kids then had to state who the thought the person was. One group was wrong three times. Awkward.

We had a great turn out for a first time event. Shinn did a fantastic job pulling this off and getting all of the leaders and parents coordinated and pulled together, which was a huge task.

Rascal the Kitten

We've been letting our guinea pig Baily play with our kitten. They're getting used to each other, but it seems like the guinea pig just barely tolerates the kitten.

click here to

Kid's Christmas Concert

Downtown in the 'D'

Nate and I went into downtown Detroit with Brad, Jim, Bob, Mark and Josh to help out with the outreach event. Linda Bently from my church (pictured above) goes downtown every Saturday and sets up in two different areas to give out food, clothes and other things. On the third Saturday of the month she takes a group with her. During Christmas we not only bring the clothes and food and gifts to hand out to the kids and the adults. Being in the suburbs it's so easy to never see this degree of poverty and this gives people a great chance to interact with people who are pretty destitute.

Nate went with me for the first time and I was so proud of him. He handed out stuffed animals to the adults and the kids that came through the food line. It was so cool to watch him interact with all of the different people that came through, helping them out. Even for adults, it can be a little weird interacting with the people that come to the park, but Nate seemed really comfortable and was a huge help. Most of these people live at the parks that we do this at during the summer and during the winter, they're only allowed to stay at the shelters for three days so they rotate among the different shelters downtown.

After the food is handed out, people have a chance to get clothes, coats and blankets. It's amazing how grateful the people are for what they're given.

Sad iPod

My iPod died for the third time. It's an old 4G 40GB iPod and after it breaks four times, they have to replace it. I have 10 months for it to break before I get a brand spanking new one from Best Buy. The disk sounds like it's shot in the thing as it's making a nice little clicking noise.