9:23 pm Missoula, Montana. Sitting at Finnegans. For those of you who don’t know what Finnegans is; Finnegans is a family restaurant that is open 24 hours a day and attracts an immense amount of college kids. The crowd here changes about 5 times a day, and if you wouldn’t constantly be here (call me loser), you would never think that a restaurant could attract so many different kinds of people.

Morning - not sure who is here in the morning 

Lunch - families on the weekend, old people throughout the week;

Afternoon - old people and high schoolers.

Dinner - Families. This place is like the YMCA around 6pm.

Early night (8pm -12am) - high schoolers, college kids and people that met each other in some online chat room.                                 

Late night (12 am- 2am) - college kids that are cramming for their 8am math test, college graduates who are trying to meet college girls.

Late night, early morning (2am-4am) - college kids that come back from the bars. The ones that end up talking to the girls others have been looking at all night long.

Anyway, I spent most of my studious times here at Finnegans (2,3 times a month). I still come here as a college graduate and I have never met a girl here. I did have some pretty deep conversations with Megan at Finnegans, so there definitely is a romantic association. All I ever eat at Finnegans is Corn Bread. I am a health nut and I associate the word bread with a healthy meal. I am sure that Corn Bread is not that healthy, but just the bread connection does wonders for me. I will be in big troubles once Finnegans decides to name their apple pie = apple bread.   

So much about Finnegans, corn bread and apple pie. Finnegans is a special place for me, as it is for thousands other college students. Hopefully I will be able to take some pictures of it and post them to my site. Until then.                                             

8 am Monday morning. Max is in the process of licking my face, demanding me to let him out for his potty walk. After a couple of minutes trying to convince the dog to hold it and to fall back asleep, I open up the back door and let him do his thing. This is the usual routine, so I expect nothing bad to happen. I go turn on the fireplace and the computer, put food into Max’s bowl and then open my eyes. Normally by now, Max is standing in front of the door, requesting his reentry into the house and the opening of his favorite breakfast buffet. Well not this morning. Max has decided to take a little walk by himself. The dog is gone.  Well after a quite extensive search campaign Max decided to return to the house.  Tommorrow morning, I will be standing right next to him when he takes his morning pee. Change of procedure. If he likes it or not.

I worked some more on my various consulting projects, even though I was rather distracted by the possibilty of making a few casts with my fly rod on this beautifully sunny winter day. Tonight, I hung out with good ol Megan. We had dinner, played boardgames and then watched Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock in "Two Weeks Notice". The perfect date…for a girl. I am starting to learn that taking a girl fly fishing, camping and volunteering might not always be the date of choice for her. Oh well, I had fun tonight.

For future references, I am planning to revamp www.themariogroup.com in the near future. Currently it is used to market my consulting services. As I am moving to Seattle, I am going to give it a bit more of a personal touch. Expect pictures, stories and all kinds of groovy stuff.

Well, Joe and I did not end up watching movies with Megan and her friend on Friday. Joe brought over a growler of beer, which probably was a big factor in the decision of going downtown instead of watching movies. By the way, Kettlehouse’s - Hellgate Honey Hefeweizen-  might be the best Hefeweizen in the world. I can’t be 100% sure, but I will make the guess.

Saturday night I went to the girls basketball game. We lost. Years ago, I would have never thought that I would be interested in girls basketball. Oh, well now we got the Sugar Bear dance team. People say that our  dancers are recruited based on looks and not their dancing skills. If it is true, that would be a terrible thing. Yet, I will make the decision to protest in silence, as there might be people that think different than me.

Sunday morning was spent waiting for Joe. Well, we were supposed to go skiing at 8am. At 10am Joe was still nowhere to be seen. The kid is 29 years old. By now he should know that you don’t make plans the night before you go skiing.

We ended up going cross country skiing. It was my first time, so everyone else had a great time. I improved my technique continously, and by the end of the day I was able to enjoy it. At that time, everybody else decided that it was time to leave. Thats life. Hopefully I will be going again next weekend.

Oh, one more big plus of not having a girlfriend. I have been able to watch all the national lampoon’s vacation videos. Greatest movies of all times, and for some reason past girlfriends have not been able to appreciate it.

Today was one of those days. I spent most of the morning staring at my laptop. Then I walked our office dog Max, thinking that I will be more productive this afternoon.Well, I was wrong. I spent the afternoon staring at my labtop as well. I figured that I would take a day off running (training for the Vancouver Marathon in May), and that I could fully concentrate on my work today. Well, thats how things go sometimes. Without pressure, Mario just does not function properly.

Oh well, tommorrow will be another day. Tonight I am supposed to watch a movie with Megan and her friend Ingrid. I also was planning to kick it with my buddy Joe for a bit. So now I have to try to combine the two. Joe is a pretty compatible friend, so it should not be a big problem. I do have a few friends, who sadly cannot be taken into any kind of social environment. For some reason they just don’t flourish within it.

Anyway, enough for today. I will keep you updated on what happened tonight.

Good morning world.

I am sorry that it has taken me so long to get the mario blog started again this year. But life has been crazy to say the least. Europe was awesome. I spent a bit of time with my family and a lot of time, reliving the good old times with my friends. The experience of living in two different cultures has been amazing, as I am learning how much people are affected by their environment. Really a cool concept. Why not just live in 3 different cultures every year, and be a different person wherever you go. Tell you this much, you will never get bored.

Anyway, the mario blog is going to change a bit this year. I just got done reading"microserfs" by Douglas Coupland. It is a great book. Almost like a diary, but highly fascinating. It surely inspred me to change things up a bit. The book talks about a couple of guys who used to work at Microsoft and then started their own dot.com. Fascinating stuff…

Look forward to some insider stories coming up in the next few weeks. Have a great day….

Today will be the last day of making posts until the New Year. I will be flying back to Europe tommorrow morning and will spend a week with my family. We are spending the holidays on some island in the Baltic Sea. The island is called Ruegen (http://www.ruegen.de/).  I assume that Internet connectivty will be limited, and my mum surely has planned a tight schedule filled with fun holiday activities (sarcasm…).

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. I am looking forward to continue this blog in 2003.

Mario