Here’s a little montage of recent visitors to the backyard, including our first robins of the year.

Headed to the Xcel in a few minutes to catch the semifinals of the WCHA Final Five tournament.

Afternoon Game: UND vs. St. Cloud State
Evening Game: Gophers vs. Badgers

Third place game is tomorrow at 2, followed by the championship at 7. Go Gophers!

It’s that time of the year again. Go and vote–I get lots of great ideas from the results of this every year.

If it wasn’t for the City Pages Best of the Twin Cities issue, I would have never discovered Barbette. Mmm…Barbette…

Today I received this in my inbox:

I’ve been a free member on classmates.com for a long time, but today I closed my account. They were always on the brink of being useful, but unless you “upgraded” to the gold level, you quickly ran into a dead end. Today I wanted to add a link to this site, but that’s against their terms of service. How to remove my profile was hidden pretty good, too. Adios, classmates.com–I hardly knew ya.

As for the reunion itself, I’m feeling a little anxiety, to be honest. Twenty years is a long time. The last one was OK and I love visiting with people, but I’d almost rather just have a big picnic BBQ at Como Park, play some golf and have a nice dinner afterwards. Somehow these things never work out that way, though. Of course, if you’re not willing to volunteer, you can’t complain, right?

This weekend I spent some time cleaning up my iPhoto image library, clearing out some work photos and adding some old files I had in directories outside of the program. I also started to set up keywords, which will work great once I find the time to tag 22,000+ photos.

The montage above is from the summer of 2000 when our current house was constructed. Hard to believe that was seven years ago already…

My daughter and I had a great time at the final session of the state boys hockey tournament tonight. Congrats to Roseau for taking home “all the marbles” for the seventh time.

Today was quarterfinal day for Class AA boys hockey at the Minnesota State High School League tournament in St. Paul. We bought a ticket package this year to thank clients and get prepared for the new hockey.mn site. The seats were very nice: upper level, row two, center ice.

The first session had two games: Roseau vs. Woodbury and Hill-Murray vs. Rochester Century. I thought the Woodbury students in the stands were very rude (booing the Roseau players as they were being introduced) and I was glad to see them get spanked, 7-2. This was Roseau’s 31st appearance at state–show no respect, lose big.

The second game was great. The private Catholic school Hill-Murray is always a powerhouse, but Rochester played them tough and had the best 3-on-2 goal I’ve seen in a long time (behind the back, centering pass, goal). The chants during that game made me smile:

• “Pub-lic-Scho-ols”
• “We-Can’t-Hear-You”
• “Je-sus-Loves-Us”
• “Da-ddies-Mon-ey”
• “Good-Bye-Rich-Kids”

Despite being more than twice as old as all of them, I didn’t feel as old this year as in past years. Lots and lots of youthful excitement and school spirit. Nothing else like it…

Speaking of youth, my oldest daughter wrote me a hockey poem tonight:

I have the puck
I’m skating down, down, down
Soon the goalie sees me, I see him
My stick goes up -
and BAM!
Soon the puck is in the net.
Shootout

Tomorrow night: Class AA semifinals.