I bet Backstrom is glad he doesn’t have to face this coming at him (pictured above: Gaborik and Demitra attacking during pre-game warmup).

My daughter and I had a Girl Scout hockey outing today to see the Wild play the Oilers. I’m getting spoiled–this was the first time I’ve been on the upper level all season. There really aren’t any bad seats at the X and it was fun seeing the game from a new angle.

We took the camera down by the glass for the practice skate. I’m slowly learning some of the secrets to taking better action shots indoors, but I still have a lot to learn. I’ve uploaded a number of un-corrected images to the Wild photo album (the new ones start on page 11).

The game itself was a blast and they played a solid game. It was great to see Burns score the eventual game winner. The back-and-forth with Demitra and Gaborik was a thing of beauty and we think PMB scored that empty-netter for my daughter. We don’t have any more tickets for games this season, but I may try to pick up a few more. Fingers crossed for the playoffs too…

Today we battled the freezing rain and snow to see if there really was a player appearance by the Wild’s Pierre-Marc Bouchard at a car dealership near our house. I heard about it during the last TV broadcast, but it wasn’t listed on wild.com and I wasn’t sure he’d be there.

We pulled into the dealership (after passing several cars in the ditch and one 3-car accident) and saw some green, gold and red balloons inside. There were about 30 people waiting, but the table was empty. About ten minutes after the scheduled starting time, PMB arrived in a nice Range Rover and started signing shortly after that.

Mr. Bouchard was extremely friendly to everyone and seemed like a truly nice guy. At a reported five foot nine, 162 pounds, a lot of people seemed surprised by his size. I’ve posted a few pictures in the private photos section of PMB and my daughter, who had her jersey signed. They were using different 5×7 photos today, so I elected to have him sign a “To DK” hockey card instead.

Tomorrow we will fight the snow for a home game against the Edmonton Oilers and Rollie the Goalie.

Never thought I’d meet a Wild player at the golf show, but Wes Walz was doing a presentation with Mike Barge from Hazeltine. He was kind enough to pose for a picture afterwards.

More on the golf show coming soon on the Golfing in Minnesota site.

Last weekend I took the kids to the newest indoor water park in town, the Water Park of America, located next door to the Mall of America. I’m not a big swimmer (and had an earache that day), but it was part of a birthday promise and my wife needed to write a paper for school…

Aside from the pricing (same price for adults and kids, ranging from $20 to $44 per person, depending on the day of the week), I thought it was a well done attraction. It has a Minnesota theme, with a mock Split Rock Lighthouse in the middle and lots of references to various parts of the state. There is enough variety among the different sections to provide something for all ages. It was crowded, but people were dispersed enough to make it tolerable. We ate lunch at the passable greasy spoon cafe and beat the rush by a few minutes.

I would go back again sometime in the future, but I’ve heard that it’s actually a better deal for families to get a room in the attached hotel (which comes with free water park admission).

“that sucked–it didn’t have anything to do with Peter Pan” - my wife

Apparently I didn’t explain it well enough to her before we went. This was a movie we tried to see at the Uptown in Minneapolis a few weeks ago (before it went into wide release) and the line was down the block.

I loved it. Dark, intense, violent, shocking, sad, moody and well-made, this adult fairy tale (in the traditional sense of the word) was full of eye candy for nerds. I wish I knew Spanish better so that I could have spent more time watching the actors.

This was our first time at the new AMC Rosedale 14 theaters and I still can’t get over how dumb an idea it was to have outdoor ticket windows in Minnesota (and not connecting it to the mall directly–you have to go outside to enter the rest of the mall). Still, it’s always nice to have brand-new seats and projection equipment.

The photo section of 7 Minute Miles embeds an open source photo management application called Gallery 2. It’s worked well for me, but it’s pretty complex and somewhat hard to customize. There are a lot of hidden features and some that don’t work so well. It also supports custom themes, which I’ve done on this site.

This weekend, my sister and my wife both asked if there is a way to view a slideshow. I had experimented with that in the past and didn’t really like it. I just turned the latest slideshow version on and it’s not bad. The full-screen option is clunky, but the regular option is OK. Here are the steps to use it:

• Go to the album you want to view
• Use the album actions drop-down box to select “View Slideshow”
• Change the max size to 640×640
• Change the delay seconds (if desired)
• Click the [-] box to hide options
• Enjoy the show!

I also enabled simple RSS feeds for albums, so if you use a newsreader, you can subscribe to an album to find out when new photos are added. My favorite reader for Mac OS X is still NetNewsWire Lite, now offered by NewsGator.

Two final photo tips: when navigating single photos, you can click on the right side of the photo to go to the next one and the left side for the previous one. Lastly, if you are on page 2 of a multi-page album, you can change the page number in the URL and hit return to jump right to that new page.

Little did we know last night was the final game in a Wild jersey for Pascal Dupuis (or as we affectionately called him, Dufus). My daughter is actually a little sad, so in his honor, I present my fake commemorative Dufus puck above.

The first ten minutes of the game were awful, but the Wild escaped the first period tied 0-0. We had lots of action in front of our net in the second, when the Wild took a 2-0 lead. The third period was full of suspense, as the Panthers made a game of it at the end. I’m not sure what they were reviewing with Demitra’s goal, but who cares as long as it counted. Burns’ shot to seal the victory was a thing of beauty. The final two minutes of the game were strange–it seemed like both teams just wanted to get off the ice.

The line to get Koivu pucks at door one was totally backed up, so we snuck out a different door. I’m trading one Koivu for a Gaborik puck with my aunt and uncle and might try to pick up a ticket for the Phoenix game (and PMB puck) on March 20th. This was our last regular season game with season ticket seats. There is one Girl Scout game at the end of the month and I still really want to find a way to attend the final home game on April 7th. Fingers crossed for playoff tickets too!