Maino's Minutes

Here it is folks.....my latest creation......i call it "Rustic Horseshoe Haven"...

If you are interested in one like this please let me know........thanks....Maino

Nick took his lumps...it's only fair that I take mine.  Post your caption below in the comments section:

.......Ramblings from the compound.....Ok its opening day...great day to not work, but i have to put it in thesame catagory as New Years Eve and St Patricks day, too many people feel like they have to act amazingly crazy to have a good time. It's like they are all working on their own..."Dude do you remember opening day when we got sooo wasted and......."  Oh wait a minute i just told one of those stories about opening day of '97 myself...scratch that. NCAA tourny comes to an end tonight, as much as i loathe them during the season because they are an arch enemy of UWGB how cool is it that a team from the Horizon League is playing for the National Championship...are you kidding???? the Bleeping Horizona league....!!!!! amazing.....Be honest, do i lose my man card becasue io watched New Moon, and sort of liked it???? i mean it's no Goodfellas, but its not bad....Murphys bragging because he went skinny dipping with a buddy. sorry but i don't put that in the "wow i did something crazy" catagory. In fact i think he looses points for that...what do you think????

.........you know what i love best about the NCAA tournament, the fact that all the guys who talk all year about how much they know about sports, get absolutly schooled in their brackets by administrative assistants, you know what i mean?  i'm listening to Wayne Larravee call the game in Milwaukee right now, does he do a "There's the dagger!!!!" on basketball games? Have you ever seen a man backtrack quicker in your life than when Muprhy said he liked oatmeal shots the other day??? so i'm on a new fitness regime; running, biking and push-ups, i'm following a program that says i will build up to 100 in about a month. yesterdays workout was 8-rest 60-sec; 8-rest 60-sec; 10-rest 60-sec;  12-rest 60-sec; and then do as many as you can with a minimum of 12. the next day you feel it in your stomach like you can't beleive.  Episode one of the Pacific; good but not great. episdoe 2 sunday night. Is it just me or is the Office losing something???  back to the bike thing....i'm actually using a stationary bike. i bought it last week, the first person i told asked me how long it would take before it became an expensive clothes rack. I told him it wouldnt happen. I'm dediicated.  when i left for work this mornign i noticed that i had  hung a shirt on it last night...not a good feeling.

.....Ok so its birthday week. Lets be honest, in your mind you don't just think of your birthday being on a certain day...you sort of consider the entire week to belong to you...No? well i do....But i have to be honest, (damn i'm throwing around a lot of honesty here today) I picked a really bad day to be born...St Patricks Day. I know, I know everybody else says, "Are you crazy? that's a fantastic day to celebrate a birthday." well let me give you a few reasons why its not so good.
 
1. By the time you head out after work just about everyone else has been "celebrating" my birthday since early morning which doesn't lead to a great time being the one, lets just say, dry person at the party.
 
2. When i was in college i went out and celebrated my birthday with pitchers full of green beer. the next morning we had football workouts that were as strenous as anything i've ever done and the green beer reappeared, need i say more,. which has led to a lifelong repulsion to tinted brew.
 
 
3.   For three-years in a row, from ages 8-9-10, a St Patricks day storm cancelled my birthday parties. The weathermen all had a great time with it.  those guys were blissfully unaware that while they were chuckling jovially about the "Havoc that Ole' St Patrick"  was causing, a lonley kid was playing clothes pin in the bottle and pin the tail on the donkey by himself. I believe this may be the start of  deep angst which lngers to this day.
 
 
4.  I hate wearing green. At least the St Patrick sort of green. Deep packer green isn't bad. the other stuff makes me look like I should be on a fruit of the loom commercial.
 
5. I hate boiled dinners, corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, ....really???? this is food to celebrate with?????? really? Not lasagna, gnocchi with white sauce or  even an old fashioned pizza smothered with mushrooms and sausage washed down with a nice merlot???  Hey nothing agasint the Irish, i'm proud to share your most sacred of days with you, but come on , can we at least work on the menu???????

........more random thoughts, from a very deep thinker....ok the weight/workout thing.....i've been runing 2 miles at a time, just 11 more to go to hit my goal, today is tuesday, last wednesday i weighted 223 pounds...this morning i weighed in at 218, my goal is 200. i've also been researching the newest "in" thing in workout technology; the "kettlebell" in one of the studies research showed that a vigorous 20-minute workout with kettlebells burned the same amount of calories as a 5-mile run. ok enough about the physical stuff. I love movies, everybody knows that, i love war movies, everybody knows that, which is very ironic that i didn't love the "Hurt Locker." i'm not sure why, they definitly had the look of Iraq towns down-pat, i think the part that bothered me was that the guy just acted a little too "Hollywood." Just in the bits and pieces of the guys i saw work over there, they were totally professional and respectful of rank. some of the things they guy did just wouldn't happen. i'm sure it added to the drama but i have a feeling alot of iraq and afganistan vets rolled their eyes throughout the movie. maybe i'm wrong. it woulndt be the first time. so our wednesday song, alot of angst here from Katie...she is set on Neil Diamonds Cherry Cherry, or Knock Three Times, Muprhy and I are set on Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash...any suggestions?   a reminder, this is a great time of year to look for stuff along side roads, a little too early for serious medal dececting however, the moisture in the ground can throw off the readings....just a little tip for all my metal detecting friends out there....i mean there are some out there....right??????????????????

wowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww...what is goign on with womens sports???? i mean not that there's any real reason why women should be any less aggressive than men, but has anybody else noticed that over the last year or so we've seen more "violence " in womens sports than ever before. remember the soccer player from New Mexico a few months back who spent an entire game dishing out cheap-shots , including pulling an opponent down by her ponytail? Well here's the latest, check out what happened in the game between Baylor and Texas Tech the other night......

.........Random thoughts from a random guy......Ok so here's my movie review....Shutter Island..have you seen it? Lernardo Di Capra is awesome but i still feel like he's a young kid playin gthe part of a grown-up. i don't want to give anything away, but i will say that i'm going to see it again becasue there are so many twists and turns that i can't keep them all straight. I liked it...i thought it could have been about 15 minutes shorter, it was actually one of those times when you said to yourself, wow, this is a long movie...but still very very interesting, disturbing, compelling, tragic, great acting, suspensfull, all those things rolled into one, again this is a pretty lousey review but i just don't want to give anything away becasue that would totally spoil it for anybody who hasn't seen it.  Random thought number 2...I was the first one who said he hated the idea of pro's playing in the hockey compeition, but i didn't miss a single minute of the gold medal game. You know what i loved the most? the fact that the United States guys looked so down and disapointed when they lost. there is nothing that drives me crazier than after an NFL game when the guys are laughing and hugging each other. its hard to tell who won and who lost. that drives me insane, if you're playing at that level it should hurt to loooooose!!! Random throught 3. Happy birthday John Bon Jovi...48 and still rocking strong...Random thought number 4. Do i loose my man card becasue i expressed my fondness for antique malls and flea markets today?? I don't loose it for that do i???????

like i was saying......I'm going to take a few days off here to work on my book; "Frontlines" the stories of Wisconsin Vets during world war two; coming soon to a bookstore near you.......(hows that for a shamless plug?) any way....i've got some random thoughts that i want to toss out.....first of all we did the poll today on people who absolutly love their jobs, i mean have jobs that they can't wait to get too. 99% of the people who responded were women, whats up with that??? come on guys, how can you not love some of the jobs you have....Carpenters???  Classic Car restorers??? Detectives??  Bar owners??? Fishing/hunting guides??? Taxidermists???? how could you not love those jobs?????
 
Olympics....the US is absolutly kicking butt...Is it just me or does Lindsey Vonn look like Jan from the Office?   Is it just me or would it be a lot more fun if we sent a group of college all star hockey players to take on the Pros from other countries? does anybody know where you can buy one of the ski-caps that the U.S. athletes wore in the opening ceromony? Is there anything less excitting than the NBA this time of year??? Can you tell i've lost weight??? So many questions....so little time...........cccccccccccccccccyaaaaaaa

you know......i very seldom feel sorry for professional athletes. Oh sure there were some pangs of sympathy for the Packers when the Cardinals were celebrating the playoff win...you sort of had to feel for Payton Manning after the super bowl losing int, but overall you have to think they have a pretty good life, i mean have you seen MTV Cribs???? But there is one athlete out there that i absolutly feel horrible for today and that is Olympic snowboarder Lindsey Jacobellis. I know what you're thinking, "An olympian? How dare you call them professionals...let me tell you the days of pure amatuers in the olympics are long long gone. If you haven't followed her story, she's the one who did a bit of a "hotdog" move in Torino four years ago and lost the Gold Medal. the ironic thing here is that she's not a "showboat" never has been. she was just trying to pay homage to the snowboarders who came before here and wren't given the respect they deserved becasue so many "pure" olympic followers considered it an inferior sport.   The thing is she is evidently a great young athelte, a role model type who spends time visiting kids in hospitals, gets her hair cut everyyear and donates it the Locks of Love program, believee me she will never pull a Bodie Miller and admit that she didn't win becasue she partied too hard at the olympic village. over the past four years she has dominated the sport. But one slip-up and  its four more years of answering the same questions of why the absolute top person in the sport can't win a gold medal. Maybe thats what's so compelling about the olympics, the agopny of defeat can't be erased in a a few days or a week. this one lasts a lot longer, just ask Dan Jansen.

Happy birthday to you,,,happy birthday to you...happyyyy birthdddddayyyyy dear gingerrrrrrrrrrrr......haaaapyyy birthdayyyyyyyy to youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu...Thats right, the dream girl/lady/woman of my youth is celebrating a birthday. ok she's in her mid 70's...and , well, lets just say she might not look exactly the same as she looked back there on the island....in fact i sort of wish the dream girls from back in the day had stopped having their pictures taken in about 1981. i don't want to think of them as somebodys gramma..i want to think of them as the hottest of the hotties from back in my youth...since Ginger is pretty much out of the picture, i did a little exploring to see how some of the other ladies i had crushes on back in the day are looking right now....Joey Heatherton, Nancy Sinatra, Lori Partridge, Marcia Brady......you know what, it sort of made me feel good...i mean i never would have had a shot at these vixens, (I always wanted to use that word) paying any attention to me back in the day, but now, who knows....and really if you check out my picture from back in "My Day"   there's no logical explanation for them to not have paid attention to that hunky guy back then.....right????