Mandays

No, not Mondays, Man-days.

I was doing my daily morning routine upon entering my cube: unload laptop, dock laptop, log in, check voicemail as it syncs up to the network, check work email and shoot one or two messages off - making sure to copy my boss so she knows I’m in the office (only if I’m early, which I usually am), check personal email, check a forum or two that I frequent, check some scores, read a few select articles from a local paper online, then get working. This usually takes anywhere from 10 to 60 minutes of my morning. Since I’m typically early - and actually have a flexible work schedule, am allowed to use my work equipment for “personal activities, within reason,” and try to stay away from my junk mail folder, gossip sites, and a few of my friends messages - it’s pretty harmless to my professional well-being (hyphenated?). Our company’s IT people seem to be up to date on the popular and “harmful” (read: “takes up a lot of bandwidth”) websites as well, so really all of the fun things to do on the web are firewalled. They’ve even blocked proxy server sites, so going backdoor to the fun places (unless you’re “one of them” and obtain the proper hacker skills) is off-limits while on the clock. With that in mind, I figure that if it ain’t blocked, it’s (more often than not) okay.

Obviously, some days, while I’m warming up my hard drive with hotmail, I tend to sidetrack and spend a little more time than I should reading something other than a spreadsheet. Today, I found this.

Reading through it, I decided that although each of those ten days is relevant to me and can bring back some fond memories, they definitely aren’t all my best mandays of the year. At least not anymore.

It never fails to be rainy and windy during the fishing opener here in Minnesota, making every soaked man in your boat even bitchier than any ex-girlfriend you ever had. Superbowl Sunday has now transformed from cheap beer, cheap pizza and chips with the guys sharing stained love seats crammed in a small apartment into either a “couple’s event” with cute appetizers and desserts with your shirt tucked in (at least in my case over the last few years), or collateral for your wife/girlfriend to use against you the next time she wants to have a Sex and the City girl’s pajama and slipper night at your house in the middle of the week that goes until 2:30 in the morning, leaving your living room littered with half-empty wine glasses, your wine rack empty, and Sarah Jessica Parker’s whiny voice-over echoing in your brain the next morning. And the first day of barbecuing…please. I don’t hang up my tongs just because it’s cold enough to flash-freeze my sirloins before they hit the grill. There is no first day, because there isn’t a last day.

So, after some deep thought (and some major procrastination to complete this data entry and reporting sitting on my desk), here are my mandays, in no particular order:

The first day of walking into a hockey arena in September

I know I just said that these are in no particular order, but this is my favorite moment of each year, which is why it leads the pack. To operate an indoor arena in the summer months here in Minnesota is very expensive. There are a few rinks around the state that have the funding to cover insulation and the electric costs, but who wants to sit inside when you can be out soaking up UV rays? Once I hang up my skates in April, I don’t sharpen them again until this special manday. So, around April of each year, almost every arena shuts off the refrigeration system and opens their doors to welcome the warming, humid air into the building to melt away the sheet of ice covering the floor. Through the summer, the buildings are used for numerous activities, ranging from storage and conventions, to indoor soccer and rodeos. But as each summer comes to an end, the building managers begin assembling the boards and raising the plexiglass. Local water storage facilities must hate the first week of September, as every indoor rink in town get sprayed with firehoses to cover the refrigerated concrete with water. It usually takes a day or two to ensure proper thickness (1 – 2 inches) and evenness, but as soon as the ice is crisp enough to hockey stop on, ice time is for sale.

September is always a teaser month in Minnesota. We can go from August-like summer temperatures to frosty morning windshields within 18 hours. It can be pouring rain one week, and the snow plows can be salting the roads the next. But, no matter what it’s like outside, the weather in a hockey rink is always going to be the same.

On this manday, I’m typically carrying my hockey bag from the trunk of the car (once, my first time in a rink for the year was during a wedding reception in late August that was being held in the same community building as the local rink. I snuck out during the dollar dance to check out the rink, and mark my manday off for that year). You can normally be wearing shorts and flip-flops outside, and I usually do in order to magnify the effect. Your hockey bag weighs less than usual as your equipment had all summer to dry out in your garage (normally, after the first time you sweat in it, your equipment is never really dry until the next summer. Gross? Yes. But nearly impossible to avoid unless you can bring your equipment in the house…which, in 14 years of playing hockey, I have not ever witnessed if there is a female in the same household). You approach the wide doors of the arena and switch your sticks over to your other hand so you can pull the heavy door. You reach, pull and BAM!! It hits your olfactory hairs like a Caribbean breeze…but stinkier.

The air is heavy. Every hard surface has a glaze of condensation. The smell is something very unique. A mix of fresh leather, hockey tape, the rubber of new hockey pucks, mildew, propane exhaust, stale popcorn, and a musty sauna. It’s one that I’ve only smelled in one other place: the walk-in refrigerator in the microbiology lab in college, (in this refrigerator, during this particular voyage, we were growing E. Coli colonies from saliva swabs to determine how gross our mouths were (or something like that). Why the similarities in smell? These links give a pretty good summary. Although I can’t say that I enjoyed the micro lab smell, it did remind me of my favorite manday of the year).

That smell signals that hockey season is here for the next 8 months. Some of my greatest friendships, worst enemies, happiest moments, greatest moments of defeat, and, of course, my dirtiest jokes came from inside those many wide-swinging arena doors across much of the upper midwest. Although it’s gone from 5 or 6 days a week, down to 1, sometimes two nights a week, hockey is my escape from the real world. No matter what is happening in my life, I’ve been able to straps on my goal pads and pull down my mask, and the only thing that matters is playing hockey.

Even though that pungent smell is there all season long, and, in fact, only strengthens as the winter progresses and the air stagnates in the rafters (and the bathrooms get cleaned less often), that very first whiff of bacterial respiration somehow tells me I’m at my happy place and that I can check off this special manday for the year.


Since my first manday description ended up a lot longer than I expected, and I’ve had to minimize the window about 9 times due to my boss noticing my lack of productivity this afternoon and stopping by to “ask a quick question” and non-chalantly glance at my screen only to notice the same email open on my screen each time, I should get to work.

More mandays to come.