Parrottheads

Last night Eli, Bob, Brad and I went to see Jimmy Buffett at DTE Music Theatre, thanks to Bob for hooking us up with fantastic and untouchable seats to a show that sold out in 10 minutes. The place was amazing to see. There were Parrottheads everywhere. This thing is really like a yuppie Grateful Dead Concert. People had giant setups including full tiki huts and bars and decorated their mobile homes and buses with fins, sharks and hula skirts. People were dressed in the most amazing grass skirts, coconut tops, hats and full shark suits.


The forecast had been rain all week and we knew it going in, so we were prepared. We got there early, setup a tent and got the grill fired up. We kicked back and grilled out as the rain started to come down... and come down.. and come down. The tent we'd setup was 20 feet away from the giant bus/motor home above. As the rain came down harder, we kept moving further from the edges of the tent and quarters got tighter and tighter. As we stood there under the tent, the people in the giant motor home waved for us join them inside. We came into their palatial bus, which was huge and decked out with everything you would need. They invited us to join them for drinks and food and we ended up hanging out with them for a while talking. This is the hospitality of the Parrottheads.

DTE is on a giant hill with a big pavilion. The hill was a mudslide and the rain just kept coming down harder and harder. Thankfully we were in the pavilion. The concert was fantastic. Jimmy played for 2 1/2 hours straight and the rain didn't damper the fans spirit.

It took us about 2 1/2+ hours to get home once we got home, with 1 1/2 hours of that coming from getting out of the parking lot.

Here's some video footage from the concert last night:

Tags: Jimmy Buffett, Parrottheads, DTE

Amazon Digital Video

Amazon just released their new digital video download capability called unbox, so I figured I'd give it a try. I went to download a TV show on my mac, which I use for my home audio/video, and found it's not yet supported. The prices are similar to iTunes, but they offer rental for movies at a much cheaper price. The downside is that they don't support iTunes DRM, so there's no taking the video and putting it on your iPod. Yet.

If I've learned nothing (TE) it's that Amazon likes to start small and grow from there if an idea works. I would guess that a huge number of the early adopters of downloadable digital video are iTunes/iPod users and that they'll have to figure it out sooner or later. The one thing I don't get in the pricing for any downloadable video in general is the price point. Shouldn't it be a significant savings if I'm buying something digital instead of the physical disc and box? Even more so with a rental. Paying $4 to rent a movie digitally for 24 hours, when I can go to Blockbuster and rent it cheaper for longer doesn't seem to make sense. Once Amazon supports the mac/iPod I'll give this a try again. I read that Apple is holding out for a $9.99 price point for library movies and $14.99 for new releases.

Tags: unbox, itunes, amazon, osx, mac

Update on Nate

Back in July Nate had a when Nate had his latest endoscopic procedure on his stomach, we thought they'd figured out the problem. It doesn't look like it's gotten better. It seemed to be better for a while, but it's gotten bad again. Yesterday, Nate was curled up on the floor from stomach pains and today I had to come in and bring him medicine at school to help him out. Nate's got another doctor's appointment on Wednesday and we're hoping they've got some good ideas. The specialist we go to (Dr. Belknap) is great when we're at the office (out in Troy), but they suck at communicating in every form: calling you back, letting you know what's going on or talking to you on the phone.

Tags: H. Pylori Ulcer, pediatric Gastroenterology specialist, Belknap

Family Guy Quote

Old Lady (To Peter): "You're a monster."

Peter: "You know what was a monster? Frampton Comes Alive, 1976. Is there anyone you knew who didn't have that record? I don't think so."

Tags: Family Guy, Peter, Frampton

Xerox Spans the Globe with Three New Imaging Services Centers

Very few people I know care what I do for for a living or can describe it very well. In the big scheme of things, it's not all that important or interesting to many, but I love my job, the people I work with with and the company I work for. This recent press release on Xerox Imaging gives some insight into some of the stuff I've been working on over the past 6 months in the new role I'm in:

Xerox Global Services also is now offering imaging services on-site at customer locations, and off-site at existing scanning locations. With on-site services, Xerox installs the necessary scanning equipment and software at a customer location and then manages the scanning process, enabling customers to scan hardcopy documents that can't leave the premises to be scanned directly into their own digital repository or to a secure Xerox repository. Xerox can also send customers' documents to a nearby scanning location, freeing the customer from having to send their critical documents long distances.

Tags: xerox global services, xerox, imaging

Bold CEOs

Interesting article on the changing role of CEOs. As I've said before, I'm a big fan of our CEO, Anne Mulcahy, and being in the strategy role I'm in now, it's interesting to be involved in some of the behind the scenes thinking on how we grow organically and through acquisition. (Note Anne's colorful language below):

Real growth requires placing big bets that probably won't pay off until far into the future - and today's impatient culture offers little incentive. What practically killed Xerox (Charts) was its leaders' resistance to making the technological leap from analog copying to digital, which was almost guaranteed (as most such changes are) to cut margins.

By the time they were finally forced to, their business was in free fall. The company was eventually charged with improperly accelerating revenues and overstating earnings. (It settled without admitting wrongdoing and paid a $10 million fine.)

"You have to change when you're at the top of your game in terms of profit," says Mulcahy, who cleaned up the mess, made the changes to digital and color, and is now trying to jump-start revenue.

"It's hard to do. Your business looks its best. Your margins are at their best. All that makes your job easier. Then you're like, 'Oh, shit, here we go again.' You've got to jump into that risk pool, and once again you're in this mode of 'You know, this could fail.' "

Tags: Anne Mulcahy, Xerox

eBible Site

eBible.com has released a very cool new Web 2.0 interface that is very cool. It's got a million options and you almost wouldn't know you're using it in a browser. You can click on a verse and have it show you on the same screen all of the commentary and x-references associated with it as well as bookmark the verse. You can compare multiple versions side-by-side . I normally use biblegateway.com, but after using this initially, I think I like it more.

Tags: ebible.com, biblegateway.com

The TIre Swing

Emily loves the tire swing we've put in our back yard. She has me push her on it just about every day and she has no fear on the thing. When Kevin and I first installed the swing, the kids were small enough to fit inside the giant tire. They can still kind of fit into it, but they really like riding on top of this. When pushed to the full extent, it puts her about 15+ feet in the air. You gotta dig Emily's boots on the second picture.

PC Pro: News: Xerox reveals transient documents

Interesting article on Xerox's new transient document technology that disappears over time.

Tags: Xerox, Transient Document

mySpace

A ton of the kids in my youth group are on mySpace, so a while back I setup an account to stay connected with them and use the technology enough to be able to intelligently talk to parents about what's going on. At least I've got 38 friends. My wife, siblings and some friends setup profiles a while back and we've all added each other, but haven't done much with it.

This SNL video which pretty much sums up how the majority of mySpace is used by adults:

Tags: myspace, youth group

Saturday

On Saturday we headed to Dewitt to visit family. We went to my parents house where Jon, Beth and Libby were visiting.

Will came over as well for lunch and we hung out. Each of my kids got a chance to spend some time one-on-one with my Mom. I was there in the room with each of them as she sat there and told each of them their story from the time she found out they were born, to being at the hospital when they were born, to how special they are to her right now. They loved the one-on-one time with her.

We went over to Cathie's parents for a while and hung out while the kids swam in the freezing cold air and cold pool, while Cathie's Dad and I hung out and watched the State game.

We headed over to Eli & Dana's for Makenna's one year birthday. Their was a huge food spread (including phenomenal smoked beer-butt chicken) and the kids played with each other as the adults hung out. We played poker later which came down to Dana's sister (not Eli, not Dana's brother-in-law, but her sister) and I and split the pot (for the record, I had her beat 5:1 in chips and split the pot to let the last of the people play again). It was a fun party and a great way to cap off the summer.

The Grand Food Alley

We watched the Niemi kids today after church and the girls decided to create their own restaurant, called "The Grand Food Alley", kinda like "The Grand Finale". Get it? They had their own menu, setup a table, and Cathie "enjoyed" their smoothies and peanut butter sandwiches. She tried to give me the chance to "enjoy" them as well, but I had just brushed my teeth (about 7 hours ago) and figured it just wouldn't taste good.

System Up and Ready

I've got Windows Vista all up and running on my system, including all of my Web services, and the Kurt Family Photo Gallery. Getting Apache, PHP, Perl and mySQL up and going were a little painful with the new extreme security measure that Windows takes. In trying to make windows more immune from Spyware and viruses, they've got the environment locked down tightly, which is nice, but all of the warning messages and approvals

I've got all of my hardware going - all without having to download any custom drivers. I'm continuing to learn some of the nuances of the OS, but so far I like it a lot. On this system, I'm not able to access some of the cooler functionality that goes with Vista. The system ranks your hardware and figures out what you can do and what you can't accordingly. The OS is designed to be very dynamic, letting you upgrade the OS on the fly and buy new add-ons very easily. In terms of compatibility, I haven't found anything that I can't run yet except for anti-virus applications for XP.

Great Quote

Saw this in Shinn's Youth Leader Meeting training today:

The greatest Christian Revolutions come not by the discovery of something that was not known before. They happen when somebody takes radically something that was always there.
--Phillip Yancy

Walk a mile in these shoes

I love my Birkenstock sandals. I've been wearing them for a lotta years. My latest pair I had for five years and I was told that they'd outlived their life expectancy. The arches had flattened out completely and I'd worth through the rubber on the bottom all the way to the cork. I ended up buying a new pair on Amazon (Thanks for expediting the order TE). I got a great deal on them, but I was still a little hesitant to buy shoes online. I'll buy just about anything else, but shoes seem like something you really want to test drive in the stores first. I probably should have gone some where and tried them on first, but I got them, they fit, and I'm happy. Nothing like walking around with a new pair of shoes to make your day. My wife is tired of hearing about how much I like them. It's her opinion that I'm spending way too much time talking about a simple pair of shoes. She just doesn't understand.

PS2 is Busted

Our PS2 is is dead. Anyone want to sell me theirs? I hate to buy another with the PS3 coming out soon, but it sounds like they're going to be scarce, even if they do come out around Christmas time. The Nintendo Wii should be out October 2nd, and looks like a good potential choice as well. Anyone got a used PS2 to sell?

Tags: PS2, PS3, Playstation, Used

Practical Joke

We had a Youth Group leaders meeting after church today and two of our leaders, Matt and Zach, were telling me a story about a joke one played on the other. The two of them work together and these guys have been friends since sixth grade and have been in my youth group since then. Anyways, at work one day, Zach made a sign saying "Allah is Fake" and put it on the back of Matt's car. Matt drove around with this for three days before he realized this. Luckily, Matt was never pummeled. This story came up after we'd watched this video from The Daily Show. Later in the day, Mark shared this homeland security video with me, which seemed appropriate.

My Mom

Thanks so much for all of your prayers for my Mom. They released her from the hospital. My Mom is tough and always an optimist no matter how bad things are in the moment. I got a chance to hang out with her this morning at the hospital and we're heading over there for lunch tomorrow. Please keep praying that God would help her with the pain and give her what she needs to make it through the triple-threat chemo treatment she's doing right now, which is some hardcore stuff. My Dad does an amazing job of taking care of my Mom - loving her and serving her in every way he can. Please pray for him that God continues to give him strength and peace.

And the Jester sang for the King and Queen.....

....in a coat he'd borrowed from James Dean? I went up to our church-wide garage sale today and Jess (suprising, huh) found this outfit, complete with pointy gold shoes. Apparently all the good stuff was gone early in the day - and this outfit wasn't considered "good stuff".

My Mom

Please pray for my Mom. She was admitted to the hospital tonight. Thank you.

Every cloud has a silver lining

I have my file server all up and running. It's been clensed and I've weeded out any software that I didn't own so I could have a clean conscience to go with my clean machine. The good news in all of this is that I caught one of the drives before it completely died and I was able to get everything back where it should be.

I took one of the empty drives and I'm in the process of installing Windows Vista RC1 to see if my machine can handle it. I've heard it's pretty stable and from everything I've seen it looks very slick. The new office 2007 suite won't work on it yet, and I have no idea if my other application services will work in the Vista environment.

So far, I've got it up and going and it seems to run reasonably well with the hardware and software I've got. The interface is great, the new security is great, and it's much more of an OSX based paradigm.

Tags: Windows Vista RC1

Dave Barry Quote

"I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me."
-Dave Barry

I'm not saying I had anything to do with it, but last month while I was at the Greater Seattle Classic I talked to Alan Mulally, President of Boeing. He's now the CEO of Ford. Coincidence? I think not.

Sigh of Relief

It looks like my drive is not in fact wiped. It's dead, but the one that's dead is the one that I'm okay with being dead. I still have to reload my system, but I was able to pull all the useful data off it before I formatted it. I love the feel of a nice, fresh system. It's similar to the way my brother Jon describes that he feels after his colon hydrotherapy.

Crud

I couldn't get the drive to reload on my server, so I pulled the drive out and did a low-level format on it. I've got this sinking feeling in my stomach right now that I might not have pulled the right drive out. I'm formatting it and loading windows on it right now, but if I'm right (and I hope I'm not) I may have formatted my data drive. I had recently reset my backup and was waiting for a new backup set to be created overnight. I have my work documents backed up and I have most of my digital pictures backed up, but there's a bunch of stuff that'll be lost. Crud. I'll know in about 30 minutes.

Labor Day Hulk Glove Battle

A few years back my brother Jon got some of the kids these big hulk gloves that the kids could use to fight. What Jon meant for evil the kids have turned into something fun. On Labor Day, the kids brought them out and the battle ensued. Will and Monaca even used them to settle some of the pre-martial issues.

File Server is Hosed

My file server at home is hosed. I've had a big 'ol Compaq system that's acted as an application and file server running everything for my household: Photo Albums, Music, Video, Web Galleries, FTP, Torrent, etc and it's not booting. Normally I re-load my systems every year or so to clean them up, but this one is going on two years just because of it's shear complexity.

Today I couldn't boot it. It died last time I started it up, but I booted into the recovery console, rebuild the MBR and boot sector, and it seemed to start up fine. Not this time. I couldn't get it to start up to save it's life, no matter what tricks I tried.

I ended up using Bart's Preinstalled Environment, which uses your XP CD to build out a CD bootable installation of XP that lets you start up your system, mount your drives, map your network drives and recover any data you need. I thought I just had a bunch of bad sectors on the drive, and hopefully after fixing them, I could get this machine up and going. Doesn't look like it'll be that easy.

I really need to re-load it, but it's just too much of a pain and I don't have the time at this point. As my Grandpa used to say, "If you don't have the time to do a job right the first time, when will you have time to do the job right the second time?"

iMovie Blows

People can complain all they want about the Microsoft platform being unstable, but I've been very unimpressed at the quality of some of the Mac apps I've used. Don't get me wrong, I think OSX is a superior operating system, but some of the Mac suite of apps are pretty pitiful. Are there bad applications for the PC? Yep. The difference is that there are far fewer apps out there for the mac so you don't have as many options.

I use iMovie from the included iLife '06 suite to do my simple video editing for home movies. On average, during the creation of a home movie, I will have the app either freeze or die 2 or 3 times over the course of 30 minutes. I've had similar luck with other i* applications like iPhoto. iTunes seems to be better of the suite as it rarely craps out.

I'm no mac guru, but help me out here - is this typical of mac applications?

Tags: iMovie, OSX, iLife, iTunes, Mac, Microsoft, Unstable

Great Amazon Reviews

Check out these reviews on Amazon by a guy who hasn't actually read or used any of the materials he's reviewing, like this one:

I have not actually read this book but the author is a former communist who suddenly changed into a conservative. I think if the McCarthy hearings taught us anything, they taught us that you can't trust former communists even if they were communists a long time ago.

Kinda reminds me of some of SNL's Jack Handy's Deep Thoughts.

Tags: Deep Thoughts, Amazon

First Day of School

It's bittersweet, but it's here: The first day of school. The kids are looking forward to getting back to school, but not completely. Nate's in 4th grade, Madeline in 3rd and Emily starts kindergarten two and a half days a week. Emily seems so much younger than when Nate and Maddie started the same grade. Some of the reality set in last night for Em about school and Maddie and Cath sat down and had some girl talk about it. Cathie's not sure what she's going to do with all the spare time (other than wait on me hand and foot as I work out of our home). Maddie and Em had their outfits all laid out last night on their floor just like you'd put it on while Nate figured it out this morning. Today is a half day for them and I'm looking forward to seeing how their first day went.

Labor Day Party

We went over to Susan and Kevin's today for our annual Kurt Labor Day party. My Dad has been taking grilling advice from me and was really able to turn his pork tenderloin recipe up a notch by taking a few suggestions from me. I've been teaching him about the joys of gas grills and indirect heat and he's been a good student.


Kevin took his traditional mid-day nap, so we outfitted Ben with a bowl of frosting and set him down next to Kevin. First Ben covered himself and then he set off to cover Kevin. Kevin didn't budge and was soon covered in chocolate frosting.


We had a few different competitions, including a closest to the pin using Steve-o's new golf clubs (Dan won) and then Dan, Kevin, Will and I played horseshoes. The picture above is me posing with my double-ringer, which almost never happens in horse-shoes. It's the equivalent of a Royal Flush in poker and the odds of someone getting it are 50,000,000:1 against. This is probably God's way of telling me i should go pro. My Mom was feeling up to making it, so we all stopped by afterwards and visited for a few.

You can see the rest of the pictures here at the Kurt Family Photo Gallery.

High School Musical Trip

On the drive down to the Labor Day party today, I sat in the back of the van and Maddie and I watched High School Musical. We've been listening to this soundtrack non-stop in the car, and I'm embarrassed to admit I've gotten kind of attached to it. We turned on the sing-along version so that Maddie and I could entertain the rest of the car with our beautiful voices.

On the way back, Em took a juice box with a straw sticking out of it and pretended it was a cell phone (it does actually kind of look like one). She had pretend conversations, talking to her friends, including other calls coming in via call waiting.

Chicken Fight

We took it easy and hung out as a family yesterday. We picked up some pizza and headed out to the park in Northville. It has a giant playscape set with a million hiding places, perfect for a good game of hide-and-seek.

I'm constantly amazed at how strong Maddie has gotten from gymnastics. She was doing some crazy stuff on the bars there, and Nate didn't stand a chance against her in this chicken-fight.

Beauty in a Tree

I don't get it.

Invincible

Nate and I went to see the movie Invincible yesterday after church - the Football movie about Vince Papale, the Philadelphia Eagle who walked on the team. Great story - Nate and I both enjoyed it.

Song for a Quarter, Part 2

Here's a video outtake from Emily's Song-for-a-Quarter debut at the first time Nate paid to listen.

Cathie's Birthday

Cathie's friends took her out for her birthday last night, which I'm sure was not nearly as much fun as having all the guys at my poker party sing happy birthday to Cathie. They took her to The Melting Pot, a fondue restaurant in Novi. Cathie has a great group of friends: Dana, Jen, Lori and Joanne who Cathie is able to have a great time with.

This picture is dying for a caption, something along the lines of... "That's not chocolate fondue!!!" I can't help laughing when I look at this picture... Even after the fifth time seeing it.

Tags: Melting Pot, Fondue, Novi

I sat on the couch today watched the Michigan State v. Idaho game this afternoon. After last year's disappointing season, I've had pretty low expectations this year. They looked pretty decent. Stanton came back looking great and conducting the offense like a Senior. Their defense made some big stops and their kicking didn't suck like last year (5 for 14?). I felt pretty unproductive, but it was a nice way to spend Saturday.

Tags: Michigan State University, Idaho, Drew Stanton

Poker Party

I had a bunch of guys over last night to play poker. Mark Kohne, Bruce Green, my brother Dan, Brad, Bob, Eli, Niemi and my neighbor Terry were all there. We play in my garage in order to smoke cigars and be close to the fridge.

I took a lot of heat for having a poker game on my wife's birthday. It's a long story, but it's not like it seems. The bottom line is that Cathie was okay with it and to top it off, she got to have 8 hour of tune guys sing 'Happy Birthday' to her. Cathie's friend Dana came over with her girls and hung with Cathie and the kids ended up getting to bed around 12:30am when the game was done. We played one long round of tournament style Texas No-Limit Hold 'em, which surprisingly, neither Eli or I won. Normally it's either Eli, Bob or I winning and this time Brad, Eli and Bob ended up in the final three before we called it to move on to the next game. We played dealer's choice for a while and I ended up taking in about $30 in a game of blind-baseball. We always have a great time when we play. Wasn't quite the same without Ted and Will there.

Song for a Quarter?

Emily is out sitting in front of our house, singing for money. As people walk by, she's asking them if they want her to sing a song for a quarter. She came up with this idea all on her own. I think I was her first paying customer.

She later decided to enhance her offering by adding a bowl of pretzels and a half-dead dandelion in a cup. I gave Nate a quarter to go and listen to a song. She did the same song for Nate as she'd done for me, Listen to Your Heart. She knows the chorus - for the most part at least. Here's how it went with Nate:

Tags: Listen to Your Heart

Brilliant Idea

I just talked with a co-worker who's having a baby and asked her if she was going to find out the sex of the child. She's not, but has it in a sealed envelope and is auctioning it off to the family via eBay. A group of co-workers and I are going to bid on the envelope and then dangle the knowledge in front of her for the rest of the pregnancy.

Happy 36th Birthday Cathie

My beautiful wife turns 36 today and the kids and I started her morning off with breakfast in bed, made with lots of little, loving hands. Em helped me with the pancakes, Maddie cut up the Melon and picked the flower. With the large gap in age between my wife and I (9 months) many consider me a "child groom", but my excessive maturity makes up for my lack of years relative to Cathie.

Update: My wife is actually 36, not 35 as this had previously stated. I am 35. Much, much younger than 36.

The Church

From marko's blog, on the church:

reading nathaniel west’s the day of the locust, i stumbled through this paragraph, where the protagonist is trying to hold the drunken woman of his affections, who has recently turned to prostitution:

raging at him, she was still beautiful. that was because her beauty was structural, like a tree’s, not a quality of her mind or heart. perhaps even whoring couldn’t damage it for that reason, only age or accident or disease.

i love the church. my life’s work is to serve christ by serving the church (specifically, youth workers in the church). but i can still be cranky about the bride occasionally, right? when i read these few sentences, i instantly thought of the church; more specifically, of the american church; more specifically, of that segment of the american church that continues to be passionate about slick models and approaches, rather than by being passionate about loving people, or even passionate about loving jesus. sure, they’re not all mutually exclusive — i’ll be the first to admit that. but the idea of a church who is beautiful only for structural reasons, not because of her mind or heart; well, that just caught my attention, because i think there are a wad of ‘em out there.

I need a hero... Or not

Em on a Swing

Memphis Trip

I created this video montage of our trip to Memphis using the tools from One True Media. It's a web based video montage creator that lets you take pictures, video and music and easily compile them to get a nice output, like the one below. If I don't factor in the amount of time to upload all of the pictures, audio and video, the process was a little faster than doing it on my macMini. It's a nice interface, very simple to use, very powerful. There is a premium version for $4/month that lets you use some of their content and store more on their site, which is pretty fair for all that you get. Here's the video from our trip:

Billy Graham Interview

Billy Graham is one of my heroes. His life is such a life of integrity, focus and humility that I'm in awe of his journey. I was reading the Newsweek Cover Story on Billy Graham and thought it was phenomenal. It does a great job telling the story of where he's at in the twilight of his life and the overwhelming message that comes through is one of humility on what he's learned in life and about God.

The author describes him in this way:

He is a man of unwavering faith who refuses to be judgmental; a steady social conservative in private who actually does hate the sin but loves the sinner; a resolute Christian who declines to render absolute verdicts about who will get into heaven and who will not; a man concerned about traditional morality...who will not be dragged into what he calls the "hot-button issues" of the hour. Graham's tranquil voice, though growing fainter, has rarely been more relevant.

The interview talks so much about his humility around how he has come to understand the bible over time - how his journey has affected his understanding of the scriptures and his view of God:

Belief in mystery is crucial to the Gospel Graham has preached for so long—a Gospel centered on the story that, for reasons unknown to the human mind, God chose to effect salvation through the execution and resurrection of his son. "As time went on, I began to realize the love of God for everybody, all over the world," he says. "And in his death on the cross, some mysterious thing happened between God and the Son that we don't understand. But there he was, alone, taking on the sins of the world."

He talks about how politics play into his message and how he has softened his injection of politics into his evangelism, even as his son is now criticized for speaking out in the way Graham did when he was younger:

"You know, I think in a way that has to be up to the individual as he feels led of the Lord. A lot of things that I commented on years ago would not have been of the Lord, I'm sure, but I think you have some—like communism, or segregation, on which I think you have a responsibility to speak out." Such proclamations, however, should not be "the main thing," and he admits he has no perfect formula: "I don't know the total answer to that."

I heard a story a while back on how George Bush senior had called Graham and asked him his take on salvation. I read that same perspective here, which probably really cheeses some people, but I believe is a very humble way to interpret the scriptures on this:

A unifying theme of Graham's new thinking is humility. He is sure and certain of his faith in Jesus as the way to salvation. When asked whether he believes heaven will be closed to good Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus or secular people, though, Graham says: "Those are decisions only the Lord will make. It would be foolish for me to speculate on who will be there and who won't ... I don't want to speculate about all that. I believe the love of God is absolute. He said he gave his son for the whole world, and I think he loves everybody regardless of what label they have." Such an ecumenical spirit may upset some Christian hard-liners, but in Graham's view, only God knows who is going to be saved: "As an evangelist for more than six decades, Mr. Graham has faithfully proclaimed the Bible's Gospel message that Jesus is the only way to Heaven," says Graham spokesman A. Larry Ross. "However, salvation is the work of Almighty God, and only he knows what is in each human heart."

When I'm Billy Graham's age, I'd like to be able to look back on my life and have had a fraction of the impact that he has. The stuff I do in my job doesn't change the world. What Billy Graham has done in his life has helped stop injustice, helped feed the hungry, care for prisoners and bring truth, joy and good news to a world in desperate need for it.

Tags: Billy Graham, Newsweek

My Mom

My Mom is doing her third round of chemotherapy and this time she's got the triple threat going on: three different chemo-treatment simultaneously - two via transfusion and one pill and these are toughest treatments yet. My Mom amazes me how tough she is. She doesn't complain and she always looks on the bright side. If she's not feeling good her attitude is that she'll be feeling better soon and that it could always be worse. Please take a sec and pray for her, that she'll have the strength she needs and that her nausea will subside.

Erika, Maddie and Olivia

Maddie is spending the night over at Dana and Eli's house tonight to help Dana babysit tomorrow. Maddie loves babies and loves being the big girl in the group, and the girls love her. She spent the night at her friend's house last night, came home and crashed for an hour and then headed over to Dana's tonight for round two.

Em Skating in full gear

Knee pads, elbow pads, hand guards and a helmet. She's taking no chances.

Jackpot!

My brother Dan and I have planned the trip around finding good deals on gas throughout the Memphis trip. Today, we found the Holy Grail on our last leg in Ohio. We stopped to see my brother/sister-in-law Ed & Stacy in Dayton and they showed us the way. We made it home around 8pm after 13 hours of travel and about $250 worth of gas and 1,600 miles.

We had a fantastic trip, the kids had a blast seeing Libby, their Aunt and Uncle and understanding where they live and just how far they travel when they come to Michigan. We miss Jon, Beth, Libby, Stretch and Zoe a ton, but we're so proud of Beth for what she's doing at St. Jude's and we're proud of Jon for the choice he's made to stay at home with Libby and be a full-time Dad.

You can see all of the pictures from the trip here at the Kurt Family Photo Album.

Matthew and his toys

My 10 year old Nephew Matthew loves playing with Libby's toys. He was very good at them by the end of the trip and had even mastered some of the basic colors, except blue, which he's always had a tough time with. As a baby, Matthew used to be deathly afraid of a tickle-me-cookie-monster toy and wouldn't go near our toy box until we would remove it. I have video footage of this very fact. I plan on pulling out that video footage and some combination of these pictures for his wedding reception someday.

(In reality, my nephew Matthew is a great kid, very smart, can quote Napoleon Dynamite verbatim and can hold his own against any of his uncles in verbal battle, and as a Black Belt, can whoop up on most of us as well).

Libby's First Birthday

Yesterday was my niece Libby's first birthday and one of the big reasons for our trip down to Memphis (the other was to see Beth... oh yeah, and Jon too). Libby shared her birthday with her friend Isabelle, whose birthday was today. We went over to Damon and Jen's house nearby... actually it was more of an invasion. Jon had thought he'd warned Damon and Jen of what to expect, but after spending 24 hours with us, Jon was reminded of reality and was afraid. Showing up with our 6 kids to their house and pool reminded me of the scene in Caddyshack where the Caddies get one hour each year to use the country club pool. We had a blast and Jen and Damon and their parents were very hospitable.

Being a first birthday, I thought this scene was funny, watching all of the parents and grandparents trying to capture the moment forever.

The kids swam non-stop and afterwards we headed over to the hotel... to swim... again. We ordered pizza and hung out talking about what a cool thing we're passing on to our kids by valuing each other as siblings and giving them the chance to spend all this time together. We went back to Jon and Beth's where I wrapped up some of the computer projects I was working on and we called it a night, ready to wake up early for our drive today.

Sun Rise in Memphis

We got on the road about 6am this morning and have about 12 hours left on our drive home. Jon and Beth were kind enough to wake up to see us off and help us load up. We're caravaning back with Dan and Kris, stopping in a couple of hours for breakfast. Cathie and the kids are out cold and will hopefully sleep for a while.

It's Hot at Night in Memphis