Yesterday I had an unexpected visitor in my office at HSRA Minnesota: the Honourable Ken Krawetz, Minister of Education for the province of Saskatchewan.

Mr. Krawetz and his assistants were being hosted in Minnesota by the talented education architect Randy Fielding. They visited the School of Environmental Studies in Apple Valley in the morning and were on their way to the new Minneapolis Central Library.

It was a pleasure meeting the delegation. I made sure to thank Mr. Krawetz for all the great hockey players (the Wild has three Saskatchewan natives: Derek Boogaard - Saskatoon, Josh Harding - Regina and Nick Schultz - Strasbourg).

The family attended a Sunday afternoon performance of Oklahoma! this weekend that was produced by the Eagan Summer Community Theatre. Colleen couldn’t wait to finally hear the real Surrey with the Fringe on Top after all of those When Harry Met Sally references.

The production quality of this show was quite high and we enjoyed the lead actors: Ashley Lemaire as Laurey and Jared Oxborough as Curley. Douglas Castle was also great as Ali Hakim and the kids liked Honey Ribar as Ado Annie the most.

The worst part of the show by far was the audience - why can’t people shut up for two hours? Aside from that, it was nice to finally see the play that every Okie is duty-bound to watch at some point in their life. Ok-la-hom-a, OK!

Got back yesterday from several days worth of wedding activities for my wife’s cousin in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Our kids were in the wedding party and everything went great. A few pictures are up in the private section of the photo gallery.

Congrats to the newlyweds and thanks for including us in your celebration.

My favorite small town newspaper had two great entries from the sheriff’s report in June:

1:17 p.m., Grand Marais: Report of a loose collie mix with no collar downtown, between Boulder Park and the harbor. A deputy determined it to be the same dog she’s been chasing all spring but can never catch. The dog ran away from the deputy when it saw the squad car, and was still on the loose, somewhere downtown.

But here is my all-time favorite:

7:55 a.m., Grand Marais: Complaint about neighbors who started partying outside on their deck at 7 a.m., being very loud, dropping the “F-Bomb,” and taking off their shirts and showing each other their muscles. A deputy spoke with them, and they quieted down.

Instant classic.

Just looked at my last.fm profile and noticed I’m up to 27,340 songs recorded via their iTunes plug-in.

The picture above gives a good indication of who I listen to the most. Looks like I need to create a new iTunes smart playlist to hear some of the other people in my library more often…

I do most of my golf writing at the Golfing in Minnesota website, but this post has nothing to do with Minnesota, so here you go…

Two years ago at the U.S. Open I attended at Winged Foot in New York, I snapped this picture of Padraig Harrington during a practice round. He was very nice to us as he went by and I was so pleased today when he repeated as champion golfer of the year at the Open Championship.

His second shot on the par-five seventeenth hole at Royal Birkdale today may be one of the best pressure shots I’ve ever watched during a major.

Cheers, Padraig!

Yesterday my wife Colleen defended her capstone/thesis project at the University of Minnesota and found out afterward that she is now officially done with her masters program in health journalism.

I know firsthand how hard it is to work full-time and go to school–but I never had two kids to deal with too for my degree. Colleen worked extremely hard for this and we are very, very proud of her.

After all the signatures were obtained and the form dropped off with the graduate office (just in time for an official July 31 graduation date), we visited the shoe tree on the west bank before heading to Al’s Breakfast for a celebration lunch.

Congrats!