I'm a big fan of Billy Graham. I so respect the way the guy has lived, the way he communicates his message and how he's stood the test of time. This audio photo album in USA Today is cool. Here's the associated article. When he's asked how he hasn't fallen into the Mark Freier or Jimmy Swaggert trap of infidelity as a pastor, he explains "I told God that if I was ever unfaithful to my wife, I wanted him to strike me dead." Pretty decent motivation if you ask me.

In the article, he talks about his lack of involvement in politics,

"If I took sides in all these different divisive areas, I would cut off a great part of the people that I really want to reach. So I've felt that the Lord would have me just present the Gospel" and stay out of politics, he says.

Televangelist Pat Robertson asserts that God has lifted his "hedge of protection" around the judges, legislators and voters who agree with allowing abortion or gay marriage or physician-assisted suicide. But asked whether God has forsaken America, Graham's answer is fast and firm: "Noooo!" His reply stands on faith.

"The Lord said, 'I will never forsake you.' No matter how sinful we are, how bad we are, God loves us. At least from my point of view, I believe he sent his son Jesus Christ to die on the cross for us because he loves us and he doesn't have any termination to that love."

Actual line from Sunday's Simpsons episode:
Bart: "Look at me, I'm a grad student, I'm 30 years old and I made $600 last year."
Marge: "Bart, don't make fun of Grad students, they just made a horrible life choice."

Nate and I went to see Star Wars yesterday afternoon. My flight got in around 11 and I picked Nate up from school and we went to the 1:30 showing. We loved the movie, and whispered back and forth throughout the whole thing about the stuff we noticed. It was great to get the closure on everything and have the things come back around to an end-point in the story.

On the way home, Nate and I had a couple of great discussion about the movie. A little background on the discussion: Since our kids were little, we've tried to teach the idea from Proverbs 4:23 "Above all things, guard your heart, for it affects everything you do." We've tried to teach the kids to look at what they do, say, watch, read, listen to and hang out with in this context. Nate and I had a great conversation about the gradual decline of Anakin Skywalker in the movie as he slowly gives into one small step across the line at a time. We then talked about how Sidius was like the snake in the garden, tempting Luke with power and the belief that the Jedi Council did not have his best interest in mind. Cool abstract thinking for an 8 year old.

As we talked, Nate through out there, "Dad, Jesus wasn't perfect." I responded quickly with "Sure he was. What makes you say that." Nate replied back, "No he wasn't, he did things that were wrong, like ditching his parents to teach at the temple and throwing the tables around in the temple." We talked about these for a while, and he stuck to his point. We agreed we'd go look the stories up in the bible and try and understand them better. I'd proud that he's such an independent thinker on this stuff, not satisfied with easy answers on his faith and willing to go dig deeper at an 8 year old level. I'd rather have a critical thinker who owns his faith than a puppet who can recite all of the bible verses but doesn't process what he believes to make it his own.

I went on this ride called the Slingshot today. Twice. The towers are 300 feet tall with a giant cable stretched to the bottom of the ride with two seats attached. You sit in them and it launches you straight up at 96 miles per hour to a height of 365 feet. You flip over, face downward and fall 200 feet, bounce and repeat. None of the guys I work would go until I went the first time and then Ross decided to join me. We got the DVD of it.


After the Slingshot, we went over to Disney Town over by Pleasure Island. It's a collection of resturants and other Disney crap. People were in line for Star Wars, dressed the part. They'd walk by and I'd say "I'll bet your going to the new Star Trek movie tonight, right?" They all acted pretty offended that I didn't know what movie they were there to see. It amused me and that's about all that matters. I'm flying out tomorrow morning at 8. Going to see Star Wars with Nate at 1:30.

Anyone out there enough of a css guru to figure out how to set up the bloglines script to output li list tags with each bloglines item? This is about the closest I've found to changing the output, but it doesn't add the li tags in. The best solution I've seen so far is to do a nightly dump of my OPML file and then parse it using perl scripts at night into the appropriate HTML code. Seems like it'd be a lot easier for bloglines to just insert the appropriate list tags in their output. This one has potential, but I don't think I can embed PHP into my blogger hosted blog.

I'm in the process of changing my blog template. Felt like it was time for a change. 10:30 at night after a long day is probably the wrong time to do it.... I feel obligated to stay up and get it right. Not gonna happen.

We went to dinner tonight at the Universal Studio's City Walk. It's a huge outdoor collection of resturants in the big theme park style. We ate at Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville. The margarita's stunk, the food stunk, but the atmosphere was cool. Not sure how the two tied together, but there was a woman walking around on 6 foot stilts making balloon animals for the kids.

I don't typically talk to the people I sit next to on airplanes, but I struck up a conversation with the guy next to me and I'm glad I did. He was one of the more interesting people I've met in a while. He works for a conservation organization called Ducks Unlimited which I learned all about, but that wasn't the most interesting part. He grew up in Anchorage, Alaska where he worked Salmon Boats and at Salmon Cannerys. He told me all about those industries, the legalized pot up there, the 3 months of daylight and darkness and the wacked out culture up there. It was fascinating. I wanted to write down some of the stories and put them here, but I'm drawing a blank. I'll post them when I remember them.

I walked off the plane and there was a guy standing there with one giant four fingered mickey mouse hand on, holding a Disney Cruise sign in the other hand. I asked him if he was aware that he only had four fingers. He quickly responded back that he'd had five before he visited Wendy's recently.

I flew from Kansas City down to Orlando with a co-worker and friend of mine, Matt. I went through security first and saw a whole bunch of the security people standing around. I asked two of them to give my buddy the "bonus treatment", not really thinking they would. They did. Two guys searched every inch of him and his stuff for 10 minutes. Funny to me, not so funny to him.

Susan had the baby! Benjamin Kenneth Kurt was born this morning and weighs around 7lbs 2oz and 19 inches wide. More importantly, he doesn't have a really big head like Kevin and the other two kids. Kevin said that it was a pretty easy labor, I guess as easy as having a baby can be, and that's all relative to a guy's perception on labor.

Nate's excited that the boys still rule the numbers in the family!

Tom won Survivor! Am I the only one with a plutonic man-crush on Tom?

I was laughing out loud on the plane ride yesterday while I was reading this book. Most of you probably haven't heard of Kevin Smith, but he's one of my favorite directors out there. I guess he's the only director that I really give a hoot about or would bother to read one of their books. You've probably seen him on Leno doing the Roadside Attraction pieces (damn funny) if you haven't stooped low enough to see the Clerks/Mall Rats/Dogma/Jay and Silent Bob movies.

My sister Susan is on the way to the hospital to have her baby. She'd invited Cathie to come be in the delivery room with her, but since I'm on the road, it's probably not going to work out for her. Nate's rooting for a boy, because if it's a girl, that baby, combined with Beth and Jon's upcoming baby girl will tip the balance of the nieces and nephews to the feminine side. Maddie and Emily are of course hoping for a baby girl. For Kevin's sake, I'm rooting for a boy.

Susan called me a few weeks ago to bounce some names off me - not to see if I like them, but to see how much fun could be made of them. This stems from all of the nieces and nephews getting strange nick names. Heck, everyone in our family has one nick-name or another. It was a big part of our teasing each other growing up as kids and now they've stuck and become endearing. Except for Dan's nickname which he's never really take to. Ask him about it sometime. We've had Matthew - Shabadu. Gabe - Gabriella. Allie - Shiek Ali-bab-wa. If it's a boy, kevin wants to name it Luke so he can say "Luke, I am your father." Seems like a big committment for a one-liner like that, but it'd be worth it to me.

I flew into Kansas City yesterday, had some meetings and I'm flying down to Orlando today through Thursday. I'm taking Nate out of school on Thursday afternoon so he and I can go see Star Wars. We got 1:30PM seats for the Digital Showing at Emagine theatre. I saw the movie Sin City on the Digital Screen and was blown away. The difference between film and digital is the difference between regular TV and HDTV. Both the sound and visual quality are astounding! He and I are both pretty excited about the new Star Wars. We've been playing the game Episode III - Revenge of the Sith which is amazing! The light saber battles are the best part of it. Nate and I have daily "Champion of the World" competitions.... I've only held the title for one day - kinda embaressing.

There's a Corel User's group conference at the hotel I'm in. Who the heck still uses Corel/Wordperfect software? Who still uses it to the degree that thy would travel some distance to meet with other users to talk about Corel software. It's an odd looking group here for this conference. Lots of fellas. Gee, that's suprising. Men at a computer user's group conference?

I'm giddy as a school girl about the new XBOX 360. It's a completely high definition based system, complete with 3 core CPU's. It sounds amazing. Check here for more info.

My little sister Susan is having contractions. It's her third. They're about 8 minutes apart. They don't know if they're having a boy or a girl. My bet is it's one or the other.

I'm back from Leesburg, VA. I'm so glad to be home. 3 meals a day of bad cafeteria food (the food at this place has gone severely downhill over the past 10 years), hallways like mazes and not going outside except to hit the gym. The only nice thing was the unlimited starbucks certificates we had for the onsite Starbucks.

My nephew Gabe (Susan and Kevin's son) had to go to the hospital last night after he shoved a lego up his nose. Apparently Kevin heard Gabe screaming at bedtime, figuring he's just throwing a fit. Kevin goes up and Gabe tells him that his nose hurts. Kevin asks why and Gabe replies "Because there's a lego in it!" Kevin responded with the obvious question "Why do you have a lego in it?" His response: "Because it looked like it would fit". Urgent care couldn't get it out. It finally came out with a good nose blowing.

This goes to prove Drew and Mike's theory that "If there's a hole, something's going in it."

As I was laughing, Cathie reminded me that Nate had a similar deal happen. She'd taken him into the doctor because of an ear ache. The doctor looked in and pulled out an eraser from his ear. He couldn't remember how it got there until it suddenly came to him. He'd found it on the bus and thought it was an ear plug. People were being loud, so he put it in his ear. Makes sense.

We had a fun weekend. I met up with Bill Belanger to go mountain biking out at Island Lake. It was a good time to catch up with Bill. We don't do it enough now that we're not on the same team. I got Cathie a mountain bike for Mother's day. I'd gotten her one (in theory) when she was pregnant with Emily, but we never actually got the bike. I sized it and picked it out for her, and brought it home to suprise her. Friday night I had a Project 311 Vision meeting. On Saturday I woke up early and hung out with Emily for a while, until I started jonsing for some sugar cereal. I ran up to the store at 8 and picked up my two favorites - Captain Crunch and Golden Grahams. We had a showing that morning at 11:30, so Cathie and I brought Nate an Madeline over to a neighbor's house while we hooked the bike-buggy up and took Emily on a bike ride. We rode over to a nearby neighborhood where we checked out a model home. We had more showings that afternoon so we took the kids and their friends to 7-11 and then to the park to hang out for a couple of hours. We ended the grilling bonanza with Chicken Fajitas and Cathie and I got caught up on Tivo'd episodes of Alias that night.

On Sunday, I let Cathie sleep in and made her breakfast in bed, except I figured out too late that we no longer had a breakfast-in-bed-tray. Oops. I took the kids to church and let Cathie lounge around the house for a while. I hadn't hung out with the kids in Fusion for a while and it reminded me of how much I love those guys. After church, we headed over to Cath's Mom and Dad's house. They have an awesome in-ground pool and we had beautiful weather, so we hung out in the pool for Mother's Day, grilling out and splashing around. I was messing around with some of the new features on my new digital camera, including the speed-shot mode, which takes three pictures in a second, capturing action shots really well. Cathie's brother Ed was doing front and back flips, so I was getting stop motion shots of the action, which turned out really cool. We headed back around 6 so I could pack and get to the airport. I finished up some homework for this class on the plane and got here safe and sound.

I just got into my hotel.... Not really a hotel so much as a giant maze. I think I complain about this place everytime I come here... so this is really no different, just accentuated by the fact that I arrived at midnight half asleep, which made it a little tougher. The place is the National Conference Center in Virginia. It was built in the 60's as a training facility for Xerox. It was designed to put you in a learning frame of mind and is a giant multi-level pyramiding maze, color coded and numbered to "help" you find your way around. Check out this map... This is how you figure out where you're supposed go. Simple enough, right?

I'm here through Friday for the pilot course of some Principal training that we're going through. The challange with training like this is that it's like a vacation, except you're still expected to perform the same amount of work, e-mail and voice mail as you would during a normal work week. Fun, eh?

Project311.com is up finally up and does a nice job of giving an overview to what we're all about. If you haven't heard of it, Project 311 is a ministry that I'm a part of that focuses on teaching students to love God passionately and love others selflessly by equipping churches and youth pastors with the tools they need to make this happen. Our first big event is coming up in June, Blitzfest, where we'll have 75 bands at a two day festival, complete with skate park, climbing wall and inflatable crap.

One of my co-workers, Chris Jones, was traveling on a project and somehow was selected as the guest of the day at the Hampton Inn. They do a random drawing, put your name up, give you a parking place and free breakfast in bed.

Buck sent me this bumper-sticker site. Some of my favorites:

This has been my first whole week at home without traveling in a long time. I had a chance to get out and go mountain biking today, the first time of the year. It was phenomenal! I went out to Maybury State Park's Singletrack, which is about 4.5 miles. It's my new favorite trail. They lengthened it and added some really technical stuff with rock piles and tree-falls. You get a lot of speed without any really nasty uphills. I'd forgotten how much I love mountain-biking. I love the danger, the adventure, the exercise, the challange, the peace and quiet, the smell of the woods, the sweat, the speed and again, the danger of it all.

Today felt great. I think the cardio and circuit training I did for my legs this Winter paid off a little bit. I'm going biking wtih Bill and Noel tomorrow. I'll know just how out of shape I am then.

I was just in awe as I looked around me today biking. It smelled so good, looked so green, it was just beautiful. Made me wonder how heaven can be better. I got to thinking about something I'd read on the can this morning in the book Epic, by John Eldredge. He was talking about the ultimate restoration of things as referenced in Revelations 21:5 (Behold, I make all things new.) He goes on to talk about a great passage from the end of The Chronicles of Narnia, when everything was restored:

It was the Unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling. He stamped his right fore-hoof on the ground and neighed, and then cried: "I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this.

I got to thinking that what I was blown away by out there in the woods was just a glimpse of what the world will be like once it's restored to it's original beauty. Wow.

Emily's pre-school class had their mother's day celebration today. The kids made the mom's these beautiful hats out of wallpaper. Cathie came down into my office wearing these piece of art and I could hardly keep my hands off her. I suggested that she wear it around for the rest of the day, she declined.

We had a second couple come through our house last night and another tonight. The second couple is looking at making us an offer once they confirmed that the lot behind us is zoned residential. That's fair. Apparently this is pretty good traffic for having listed our house mid-week. Our agent told us that we wouldn't normally get anyone until the weekend. It's loads of fun keeping the house spotless. My threat of breaking the kids fingers for messing the house up is losing it's effectiveness.

We're on day 5 of the grill-a-thon. So far we've grilled steaks, bratwurst, hamburgers, hotdogs and a chicken on the grill. Tonight is ribs! This grill is awesome.

Spring is here! Even though we had frost this morning, it warmed up enough so that I can begin one of my favorite Spring and summer time traditions: Sitting on the deck, listening to the birds chirping while reading a good book, smoking a good cigar and having a glass of scotch. I had a chance to smoke one of my Cuban cigars that I brought back from the Bahamas. It was a Cuban Cohiba, first one I've ever smoked, and probably the last. Very rich ciar, great draw, too peppery for my taste, but very smooth.

Our house is finally on the market and we've already had a couple of showings. One couple was ready to make an offer, but haven't sold their home yet. Not sure on the other one. During the showings, I have my mac hooked up to my 52" HDTV showing a slideshow of the home, the yard, the rooms. Digital pictures look amazing on there. The feedback we got was that the people loved the home and were blown away by the TV, saying they stood there for 10 minutes watching the pictures.

We're pricing our home at $269,900, which I think is just right. There's this whole funky balance of wanting to price it to move, but not too quickly. If you sell too quickly, then you know you probably priced it too low. Checking realtor.com, we're the only 4 bedroom in the area in our price range, but we're one of the more expensive houses in our neighborhood, which brings the price down. We'll see what happens.

Something I overheard at the gym today as two guys were working out together:

"Dude, did you see my butt moving?! Whoah, that was wild! Check it out, it's still doing it!"

Simpson's Highlight from Sunday's Episode The Heartbroke Kid: Watching Homer dance around in leiderhosen to entertain german tourists while singing both verses of Ninety Nine Luft Balloons
- in German.

It looks like the Treo 650 is going to be out for Verizon on May 11. I've heard lots of dates, and this one seems the most firm. I'm in.

I had a first this weekend. Not necessarily a good one, but a first, none-the-less. A couple Sunday's a month I work with a group of guys, starting around 7AM to load up a semi-trailer full of all of the stuff it takes to do church at a high school. We jave everything packed in 15 of these huge 8'x5'x3' containers that we bring into the school, unload, do church, re-pack and then reload in the trailer. We have breakfast in between unloading and setting up and church, which gives us a chance to hang out and talk. Believe it or not we have fun doing it. This last Sunday Matt Gielow, Brad Jeffrey, Ted Haase and I loaded it up and counted 13 containers. On the way back, we counted 12. Odd. We went back through, checked for a missing container and didn't find it, so we figured we'd miscounted. The High School called today and let us know that it had been left behind. Amazing that in 15 years of doing church in a high school that it's never happened before.

Cathie heard Emily shouting "Mooooooommmmm!" from her room this afternoon while Emily was taking her quiet time. Cathie went up to her room and found Emily tied to her dresser, unable to move. Apparently, she had taken the strings from her dress and tied herself to the handles of her dresser in a giantic knot, eventually discovering she couldn't get free.

I got a chance to play with a Sony PSP the other day and I was blown away. What a piece of technology! The screen quality is amazing, the controls are great, awesome sound quality. Tough to justify for $250. But I wouldn't complain if I got one for a gift.

Good new torrent search engine: Torrent Typhoon.

I was listening to David Sedaris, Live at Carnegie Hall this morning while I was working out this morning, which in hindsight was a bad idea. If you've never heard of David Sedaris, he's on NPR (National Public Radio) quite a bit, especially on the show This American Life. He's one of the funniest story tellers out there. His books are good, but hearing him tell the stories live is hilarious. I was in the middle of lifting and would spontaneously start laughing. Didn't work well. But damn, he's funny.

We sat down with the kids and had a family meeting to talk about moving. We've been talking about it for a while, but the kids are in denial. Nathan and Madeline don't want to move away from their friends, Emily is just saying it because they do, since the friends she plays with aren't in our neighborhood. It's hardest on Nate, who's best friend Austin lives two houses down from us. They're inseperable, and we love the guy kid. I threw some paper up on the wall and we brainstormed on the good and bad things about moving. We talked through them and prayed about it as a family. The only consolation Nate had was that I told him we'd set up a DLP projector in the basement for video games and movies. This whole part of it is making moving hard.

I sold $80 worth of my crap at our neighbor's garage sale! I was going to toss it all. My neighbor did all the work and I collected the money. Nice setup.

I worked some more on the yard yesterday, trimming the shrubs and cleaning all of the leaves and crap out of our back lot line. Not a lot of fun, but it looks nice now. We had our real estate agent over on Saturday to do a walk through of our house and let us know what more we needed to do to get things ready to sell. She said we're good to go. We've got a couple coming over to check the house out on Tuesday before we put it on the market to see if we can work a deal. If that doesn't work out, we're listing it on Tuesday, sign in the yard and all. I'm impressed with our real estate agent so far. She's extremely high energy, talks a million miles a minute, but knows her stuff. We've started looking at houses online also. I think we're looking outside of the City of South Lyon, which is pretty much across the street from where we're at now. The tax differences are huge. We save about $4k/yr by NOT being in the City. The downside is well water and no snow removal. I gave Cathie our budget and I'm good with letting her pick out the house. She's picky and knows what she wants. If it's good enough for her, I'm sure I'll like it. The only restriction I have is making sure that the living room has appropriate acoustics and location for my HDTV. And an office for me. Other than that, I'm good with whatever she likes.

Cathie and I went to see The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on Saturday night. These books were the staple of computer geeks 20 years ago (wow that makes me sound old) when I was in high school. I'm a huge fan of all of the late Douglas Adam's books. They're style is a cross between an intelligent man's Monty Python and Space Balls. I remember playing the text based adventure game of HHGTTG of my TRS-80 Color Computer a long time ago. Anyways, I've been looking forward to the movie and I wasn't disappointed. I thought it was a great representation of the story and the characters. The big themes came through from the book, but I'm not sure how it would come across for people who hadn't read them. Screw 'em. I liked it.

The last of the fish were flushed today. Emily stood above the toilet watching them swirl around telling them, "I love you fishies! Bye! I love you!" We're trying things a little differently this time, letting the water sit for 48 hours first and only putting one fish in at a time. We'll see how many fish deaths we can add to the five we've already got.

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

The new Batman Begins trailer is out.

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

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

Love Maddie

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

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

This is an hilarious mac ad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


My brothers Jon and Will seemed to have fun:


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


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

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

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

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

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

View the Vacation Pictures here.

Cathie and I are back from vacation after having a great week. Not sure that anyone cares, but I'll document it here for my own records:

We left bright and early on Friday morning and our friend Marge helped make sure Cathie and I were able to sit together up in first class on the way down. Cathie's suitcase weighed in at a hefty 65lbs. We cabbed it over to our hotel, which was a beautiful resort right on the ocean, the Marriott Harbor Beach Resort and Spa. As nice as the hotel was, they nickel and dime you to death on everything over and above the room. When we got in, we called the kids and Emily told us that no one had shown up to watch her and that her big sister Madeline was babysitting her. We headed out that night to the Las Olas strip in Ft. Lauderdale, which is a great part of town filled with lots of great shops and resturants. We then headed over to the beach and checked out some of the bars and listened to some pheomenal bands.

We hung out on the beach the next morning. They had a million things you could do there, including a 'Weenie Ride', which it turns out is being pulled on a large inflatable thing in the water. We got to the cruise ship port, and there were people literally every 10 feet greeting us and pointing us to the next person 10 feet away, who also greeted us. As soon as we got on board we were greeted with Champange and began wandering around the ship. Our rooms were beautiful. Our room was were Ritz Carlton quality (check it out here), everything was beautiful. The bathroom was huge, the balcony was huge. We were greeted by a number bottle of champange on ice along with two liters of alcohol of our choosing, along with a fully stocked fridge, replinished daily. The funniest part of the day was the lifeboat musteirng, where we all had to put our life jackets on in the lounge and sit there listening to how to jump off the boat, get into life boats, etc. We were greeted that evening by a huge reception, with waiters bringing fresh rum punches every time our glass got half full.

We discovered the next morning how good room service can be. The night before, I'd filled out my room service card and selected anything that sounded remotely good. That morning we were greeted with a knock and a waiter wheeling a cart full of 15 different covered plates. We gorged ourself on the best of everything. We had a business meeting in the morning, which, for tax purposes, is basically a 2 hour recognition event for awards and what not. Cathie and I headed into Key West and did the standard tourist stuff: Frozen Choclate Covered Key Lime Pie, Picture at the southern-most-point, Hit the standard bars: Hog's Breath, Captain Tony's and Sloppy Joe's. After lunch, we took a chartered Catamaran out to go snorkeling in the reef. It was beautiful, just like a Jacque Cousteau episode. We saw millions of beautiful fish, including barracuda and shark. I got talking to the Captain of the boat, who was a 26 year old guy who'd lived down in Key West for four years after graduating from College in Cleveland and never left. His parents have pretty much given up on him doing anything meaningful, but he felt pretty content doing what he did, captaining a boat year round, doing what he loves. We went back, took a nap and got ready for dinner. The only downside for the whole ship was the dress code. My idea of relaxing is not getting dressed up. After 6, you had to have slacks and a collared shirt or sports coat. Sitting at dinner, hanging out with a couple of friends of ours, sipping wine and watching the sunset, I had this great feeling of contentment. We finished the night at the casino, Cathie won $100 at the slot machines and I lost hard at the blackjack and craps tables.

We started the next day off with another huge breakfast in bed and had a great day at sea. We hung out at the pool, I played ping-pong, hung out in the pool and enjoyed a few drinks. We had our big gala event that night where we got all dressed up, took pictures, had a big dinner and called it an early night, I think.

The next day we hit the Bahamas and I had a blast a the Straw Market, a collection of hundreds of native vendors selling crap. I loved the negotiation part of things, getting them down as cheap as possible. I bought a couple of fake rolexes, a necklace and some stuff for the kids. We went over to a bar, Senor Frog's, for drinks where we ran into a bunch of people from the cruise (as if we weren't getting enough booze on the cruise ship). I got roped into a beer drinking content, which turned into a monkey imitation contest, which I proudly won. One of my co-workers was kind enough to take video of the event and show it around at a cocktail reception that night to a number of our Senior VP's. We finished the evening off with another big dinner and after losing again the blackjack table, we called it an early night. We had to have our suitcases packed and ready to go at 11:00 that night, so we packed and went to bed.

The next day, we flew home. Pretty uneventful. We got home about the same that my brother Jon and Emily did. In good uncle fashion, he had taken Emily to the Detroit Zoo and Build-a-Bear.

Special thanks to Diana Kohne, Kathy Hannigan, Kasey Harmon, Mom and Dad Lebbon, Susan Mayes and Jon Kurt for all of their help with the kids while we were out of town! The kids had a blast with all of you and we couldn't have gone without you!

Any article that ends with the line "Court documents said the suspect allegedly talked of using the man's head as a bong or a pipe for smoking marijuana."

Good news - looks like Verizon is going to be carrying the Treo 650 at the end of the month. Article.

I'm teaching in church a week from this Sunday. The message is on Stuff and how attached we get to it. The basic premise is that God doesn't want your stuff, he wants your freedom. I'm teaching around the story of Zaccheus, you know, the wee-little man. I really love all the aspects of teaching, from the research, to writing it and delivering it. Being a rookie, for a 30 - 40 minute message, it takes me about 30 - 40 hours of time to pull it all together - about a minute per hour. I'm using a televangelist video that Noel put together a few years ago of his alter ego, Jimmy Lee.

Cathie and I are heading out tomorrow for our President's Club cruise that I received as an award from work. We're staying tomorrow night in Fort Lauderdale at the Harbor Beach Resort & Spa with the cruise ship departing on Saturday. We'll be gone for 5 days, hitting Key West and the Bahamas as Ports of Call. We've got eight different people watching our kids at different times. A friend pointed out to me what an amazing thing it is to have that many friends and family that are willing to help out to make something like this happen for us. What an awesome thing. I probably won't be touching my blog for a week, but check back then for pictures.

Good article on Pope John Paul II and his love of Pop Culture, who Bob dubbed "The first Funky Pontiff".
mtv.com - News - Pope John Paul II: Friend Of Bono, Fan Of Pop Culture

I have a tough time believing that prayer works. Before you brand me a heathen, hear me out. At a heart level, I know prayer works. I've seen it work. The logical party of me just doesn't get it. There's a part of me that wonders if I can really impact the infinite God of the universe. I always wonder if God's just doing what he was going to do anyways. Would everything happen exactly as it does regardless of whether I pray or not? This makes prayer tough for me.

I was reading the book The Divine Conspiracy this morning about prayer, which goes through prayer from every angle imaginable. The book gave some examples of how God changed his mind in examples with Hezekiah and Moses. Ok. The idea was that God is a God that can be prevailed upon by those who faithfully stand before him. Ok. Heard that before. And then I started thinking about my three year old Emily. Emily can ask me for something, even if my first inkling is to say no or do it a different way, I'm amazed at how often I end up saying yes. It's not because she presents me with the most logical or convincing argument, not because she phrases it a certain way. It's because I love her. Sometimes, I change my mind, just because I love her. I'm not saying I let her play with knives (most of the time) or let her do really short-sited stuff, but a lot of times when I do what she asks, it's simply out of love. I guess this is the best example that my brain can fathom as to why God answers my prayers, when I know he's infinite, all-knowing and way more logical and understanding of what's going on than I am. Not a deep philisophic reason, but I think I finally get it.

Project 311's Blitzfest site has been updated with more detail about the skate teams, bands and other events going on at the festival. This is going to be huge. Again, let me know if you want to volunteer. Jon and Dan are going to.

After my Cannon SD-50 Camera was dropped by one of my kids, I ended up having to buy a new camera, the Sony DSC-T1. I'd been looking at this camera for a long time, but couldn't justify getting it when I had a perfectly good one already (I must be slipping in my old age, because in the past I'd of figured out a way to justify it). This camera's phenomenal. It's got a huge screen, tiny profile, great optics, a USB 2.0 interface for fast tran sfer and best of all, it does 640x480 video, so it can double as a light-use video camera. The downside is that it uses Sony's funky memory sticks, which are expensive and proprietary. By far the best camera for the money.

I finally got caught up this weekend on about two months of Tivo'd episodes of Arrested Development. This isone of the funniest shows on Television, in an odd way. It's got cameos by everyone out there, and the strange, twisting plot lines that tie back together in the end. Just bizzarre stuff

Mr. Burn's line from last night's Simpsons, after Homer's drug test was switched with Otto's:

I haven't seen this many drugs in a Wang since I ran a Chinese Opium den.

I said in my earlier post that I wouldn't name names on this, but this picture should say it all:

The namless individual on the left has volunteered to help Brad as he rehabs his shoulder in any way he can. His only stipulation: he won't help Brad wipe, but apparently spongebaths haven't been ruled out.