the unlikely orange

on this tuesday, the day after our church conference, i am breathing a sigh of relief.  now that all that paperwork and nominating work is done until next year, i feel like standing up straight and breathing again.  that feels nice. so, i thought i'd give you a light and fun post today.  even though it is ravens week, and all i can really do is lie awake at night with visions of rashard mendenhall running over ray lewis dancing in my head.  but i'll try and give you something besides steelers this week... here is cade from his thanksgiving program at school (the one where they told us the kids were making us a thanksgiving lunch, only to find out that this meant little itty-bitty rolls of turkey lunchmeat on a toothpick with a one-inch square piece of cornbread and some popcorn.  i was thankful for my son's smiling face, and for the pizza in the fridge at home.  here he is with the turkey he made: one day last week, in fact it may have been ...

here are my picnik.com creations from yesterday's steelers game, which the steelers barely won in overtime.  it was a nailbiter, and if that term were anatomically accurate, i would have only bloody stubs on the ends of my fingers.  thankfully, it's not.  in any case, the game was crazy and hard to watch, but the steelers, despite injuries all over the place, showed that they can win the close ones.  now, it is ravens week.  holy heck.  just want to point out in the picture above where mendenhall is scoring that the steelers were playing in buffalo, where you would expect to find bills fans.  but look at the stands behind the end zone where he is running.  what do you see?  black and yellow, black and yellow!  steeler nation rocks.  and how are you supposed to tackle someone?  i don't like where the nfl is going, and it's really pretty pathetic to watch it happening.  i wonder that the Chief would say about all of t...

don't know if you're thursday was as yummy as this, but mine sure was.  and my friday will likely be about as frenzied.  hope you enjoy this video from the realm of the utterly random. 

caedmon has recently been learning his "prayer before meals" at preschool.  for now, he is very anxious to practice it at every meal.  it has taken on a couple incarnations as he's learned it, which is good because it started like this: God is great, God is food, let us thank him for our food.  which, one could argue, has some theological truth to it.  then for about a week we had seemingly mastered the whole thing: God is great, God is good, let us thank him for our food.  By our hands we are all fed thank you, Lord, for daily bread. but i guess that was too long for him, so we've sort of settled on this rhyme-challenged version over the last several weeks: God is great, God is good thank you for our daily bread. and while it isn't exactly a good rhyme, it is a good reminder to me each time i sit down with my family to eat: the goodness all around us comes from God.  and while i am so prone to focus on the un-goodness of my life (my food is too hot,...

"ghost in the wind" mixed media collage on hardcover book board november 2010 gregory a. milinovich i write today just to say hello from this crisp and cracking little corner of the world, complete with a pre-winterly cold sky that tells of things to come.  the wind, which i can feel in my joints, carries an omen - a ghost - not only the voices of the millions of fallen leaves, their colorful ending swirling at my feet, but also of the coming harshness.  it is a season of death, as much as we don't want to think about it.  the crops are harvested.  the fields have been cut down.  even the comic-book-yellow mums are browned with dying.  the anxious trees bend their creaking bones in a hollow wooden cadence.  it is autumn.  and there is a ghost in the wind.  a death all around us. but in the midst of all this death, all this foretelling of freezing, we take a moment - a day, even - to stop and realize all we have for which to be grateful....

when i was a young boy i played midget football: a frightening and yet exhilarating experience for a young boy.  always one of the most difficult parts for me, was trying to impress the coaches.  since i already had an unhealthy tendency to need to please adults, i approached football with my regular overachieving ways.  but my football coaches made it difficult for me to succeed in my normal ways because they rarely communicated clearly, choosing instead to bark out random commands and expect us to pick up the game from these guttural syllables.  every once in a while they would pull out and brush off another tool from their coaching arsenal, and this one was the out-of-context-football-phrase-that-no-10-year-old-really-understands.   "hit the hole," they would yell, and we would just keep doing what we were doing, but trying to make it look like we were hitting some hole while we were doing it, since none of us had ...

shew.  what a relief that was after the debacle that was the patriots game.  this week, an angry and hopefully embarrassed steelers team took on a surging raiders club at heinz field and, although starting a little slow (assisted by just about every variety of questionable personal foul call you can think of), dominated.  i liked what i saw yesterday, other than the continual rash of injuries not just on the offensive line, but across the board.  i believe this steelers squad to be one of the most talented ever, with a real chance to go deep in the playoffs, but the injury bug is an uncontrollable factor, and has been too much of an issue here in 2010.  it stinks, but it's life in the nfl.  and rather than let it demoralize them, or use it as an excuse, what we witnessed yesterday was a steelers team who played hard and passionately, all the way to the whistle, and within the rules of the game.  i nabbed this pic of harrison from yahoo sports and added...

i have been waiting to write this post for about a week, but i figured i'd wait until the release of the movie, since there will be a great deal of cultural buzz this weekend.  i'm sure #harrypotter will be a trending topic on twitter, and we'll be seeing news coverage this morning of people lined up in front of theaters last night to see the newest film installment of the harry potter series at midnight.  there's certainly no avoiding it: harry potter is now an unmovable part of the cultural lexicon.  whether you love or despise the stories, they're not going anywhere. i, for one, love them.  i always have.  i started reading them with some curiosity, seeing as how some of my own church people at the time were slandering the story, saying that it was "of the devil" and "a force of evil."  so of course i went out and bought one as quickly as i could.  i remember my first time through that paperback copy of "harry potter and the sorcerer...

here's a collage i made in the last several weeks.  for me, it's about eternal life and what happens when we die.  thought you might enjoy seeing what i've been working on recently.  i've actually been fairly productive (sometimes i'm most prolific when i'm busies with other stuff....weird), and have several projects in the works.  don't forget that you can look at my collages available for purchase here and get one as a christmas gift!  i'll be adding more soon, so check back in.  "like after" mixed media collage on hardcover book board gregory a. milinovich

the rationale a poem by greg milinovich (side note: the word poem is a widely defined word, and by poem here i simply mean that this is a collection of words particularly put together to express what is in my heart, without deference to rules of grammar or the norms of communication.  this is not a poetry in the classical sense, but only in the sense that it is a cornocopia of letters and words that, when arranged a certain way, say what i need to say in a way that can't be said in any other way.  that is all.) i write. i write because i need to.  because not writing smells deathly and dead. because, strangely, there is blood coursing through all the inches of tangled tubes inside my skin, and it is pounding out a rhythm that i can't quite make out.  just below the surface it keeps speaking to me, saying, "i am alive because...." and then i never hear the rest.  so i write. i write because i still see so much and because there is infinitely more that...

while 6 wins and 3 losses doesn't sound too bad, last night was simply awful.  just terrible.  this picture pretty much sums it up.  we looked overmatched in just about every phase of the game.  while the 2010 steelers are facing some really serious injury situations, the fact remains that there are no excuses for what happened last night.  it was embarrassing, and i hope that it will serve as a rallying cry for the guys who are suiting up next week against oakland.  if not, we can kiss the 2010 season goodbye.  and, dear mr. brady, you'd better hope that you don't cross paths with these pittsburgh steelers again anytime soon, after that little spiteful demonstration you put on in the end zone.  yes, we know you can throw the ball for 9 yards every play when our starting defensive line isn't playing and james harrison is suffering from back spasms.  thank you, captain obvious.  but you'd better just hope that you can finish out your ...

okay..it's saturday, i have a house full of company (a total of 5 kids in our house aged 6 and under, and my very sanity on the brink of utter destruction), so i don't have any time/energy for anything more than the following saturday song.  this song is by a guy named greg x. volz.  in the early 1980's he sang for a christian band called petra.  then, in 1985 or so he left petra and went solo.  i had his 1986 album called "the river is rising" on cassette.  remember those?  the clear plastic credit card-sized contraption of joy, mysteriously embedded with wicked gnarly 80's tunes?  do you remember the smell of one of those cassettes, newly opened?  heaven.  but i digress.... anyway, in 1986-7, you would have found me next to a tape player with this album on.  as soon as the side hummed then clicked to an end, i flipped it over and listened to the other side for 4,593rd time.  i loved greg x. volz.  i mean, we shared the same...

in the interest of full disclosure, let me start this way: i hate war.  i hate the idea of war.  i hate the word "war."  i hate thinking about or imagining or watching films or newsclips about war.  the very idea of two nations disagreeing enough to send their young men and women to go and try to kill the young men and women of the other nation is beyond staggering to me.  i am admittedly pretty comfortable in my own little corner of the world, with all my freedoms and luxuries and apparent entitlements.  so i acknowledge that it's pretty easy for me to hold that position.  but when it comes to veteran's day, it's a different story.  all i have to do is imagine one lonely soldier, standing in a field in korea, or vietnam, or germany, or iraq or afghanistan.  all i have to do is imagine them standing there in camo, armed, maybe afraid.  all i have to do is imagine that human being standing in the midst of God's good creation, wrestl...

the steelers played monday night, and i would have written about it yesterday, but i was just too exhausted from staying up so late not only watching the game, but not being able to sleep afterwards because i was so amped up.  and by amped i don't mean "oh man i'm so wired because that was such an awesome victory and now i just want to bask in steelers glory for the next 92 minutes."  no, not so much.  instead, by amped i mean "holy crap i can't believe we almost let that game get away and i swear every game this team tries to give me a combination of an ulcer/heart attack/acid reflux and i am literally not going to live as long as i should because this team can't hold onto a lead in the 4th quarter."  if you want to watch the highlights, click here . or, if you'd rather not, here's what happened: the steelers capitalized on stupid bengals mistakes to take an early lead.  the steelers maintain and build on said lead by outplaying ...

this weekend we had the wonderful privilege of spending an evening in lancaster, pa with some friends of ours from new jersey.  we met there on friday night and quickly proceeded to the bird-in-hand family restaurant where we made light work of the fried chicken on the buffet.  after waddling out and heading back to the hotel, we spent the next part of the evening with the kids in the swimming pool.  after a good night's sleep, we woke up and went to intercourse (i'm not joking) to the kitchen kettle village.  more of our adventure after the jump. 

it's a monday.  they sometimes play football on mondays, right?   a quick check of the schedule tells me that the steelers play tonight.  tonight!  the steelers!  are you ready for some football?!?  so, in honor of the greatness of the day, i thought i would share this picture with you.  a picture of something i just received in the mail on saturday.  no, not the car.  but my new license plate!  you may think that the #7 is in honor of ben roethlisberger, and that would be fine, even though that isn't why i got it.  at least not completely.  i mostly chose number 7 because the steelers are on a quest for championship #7, and i hope it comes soon.  i will wear that hope on the back of my car so that everytime i pass a browns, ravens, cowboys, bengals or eagles fan, i will remind them of the greatness of the greatest franchise in the history of greatness.  they will be humbled by my dazzling license plate, or else...

yesterday, on my day off, Caedmon and i decided to play with legos, which is a pretty regular activity around our house.  he mostly plays with the lego "guys," and you can see here what he came up with: i, on the other hand, was hearing the voice of hank williams jr. in my head, and looking forward to monday night, so i made this: go steelers!

i love television's the office .  for years now, the show has been dramatizing and hyperbolizing real-life awkwardness and making us all laugh uncomfortably at it - and maybe ourselves - in the process.  dwight schrute, one of the most ridiculous characters on the show, has always been over the top with his extremism, whether it be in beet farming or volunteering at the scranton police force.  last night's episode was no exception.  the show opened with a discussion about office hygeine, and one character suggested that she would set up hand sanitization stations around the office.  this suggestion was greeted mostly with enthusiastic nods of agreement from coworkers.  but not dwight.  true to form, dwight took the opposing view, and took it (hilariously) to the extreme.  saying that he believes we need to stop coddling our immune systems, he opposed the idea of hand sanitization stations.  he said we need to toughen up and give our bodie...

here are some pics from our house this halloween.  my lovely wife has an amazing eye for decorating, and so you never know what kind of fun stuff you'll see adorning shelves and mantles during the various seasons of the years.  for this halloween, she asked me if i could take some of the black and white photos from my collection and make it look like the portraits on the walls in those old scooby-doo cartoons, where it looks like the eye holes have been cut out of them and someone (some masked ghost, of course) is peering through the holes.  so you'll see those, as well as an assortment of other festive decorations.  autumn is my favorite season.  i mean, i love all the seasons for different reasons, especially when the time is ripe for the next one to arrive, but if i had to choose one that i wouldn't mind getting perpetually stuck in some groundhog day repeat mode, i would choose autumn.  with the fresh blue skies set in contrast to the surrendering s...

and now, for your viewing pleasure, our halloweeners: the dark and powerful leader of the dark side of the force meets the toy who would be a real space ranger.  and right on our front porch.  amazing.  below you can see the both sides of the force, the dark angry vengeance of vader, and the happy carefree joy of a toy with ANDY scribbled on his foot.  the yin and yang of halloween.  so eager to walk up to complete strangers and ask for sugar. 

sorry for my absence...my own busyness combined with a disappointing steelers loss left me with no time yesterday.  but this morning i bring you the milinovich family 2010 jack o lanterns for your spooky pleasure.  we made 7 jack-o-lanterns this year.  here is the biggest one: here are the rest of them (you'll not that mine is the steelers one): from left to right you've got frankenstein, steelers, jack's mean face, a ghost saying "boo," some flying bats, and the batman signal.  the jack-o-lantern photo shoot was going well until it started getting a little spooky.  take a look at this: pretty creepy, right?  like the spirits or auras of the pumpkin are jumping out of them.  from there it got even crazier:  so this could be some kind of supernatural halloween spookiness, or it could be that i was moving the camera quite a bit with the shutter open.  either way, it's pretty cool looking.  and it makes me hungry for pumpkin p...