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.
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.
Yesterday I attended the first day of the 2007 Minnesota Golf Show at the Metrodome with Phil Callen from the Tapemark Charity Pro-Am. Minnesota Golden Links premiered at the 1999 show, but I haven’t attended very many since then.
The show hasn’t changed too much since then (although I missed seeing Blimp Guy). The floor layout was the same–two-thirds booths and one-third driving range. With the looming snowstorm forecast, crowds were very light. I picked up a lot of information and saw a few people I knew–more from my notebook soon…
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.
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.
Yesterday was our last full day in Florida, so we jammed it full with 12 hours of theme park goodness. We started in EPCOT, with a visit to the robot-construction exhibit in Innoventions, followed by another trip on Test Track. Hopped a bus to Animal Kingdom for two more rides on Everest (six total for the trip), another ride on the Safari, then a walk on the Pangani Nature Trail to see the gorillas.
On a cloudy, cold and rainy day, we visited Disney’s Animal Kingdom today with my brother and his wife. The weather was, of course, still very warm to us (although I did add a jacket to my shorts and shirt).
We headed straight to Expedition Everest and rode it three times back to back to back. It’s really a well-done attraction, with lots of great Nepalese/Tibetan detailing (I’ve uploaded some pictures in the Walt Disney World photo section).
Yesterday was the day we picked to stay out of the parks and visit some of the resort hotels (along with Downtown Disney). I slept in until almost 11:30am and woke up to my cell phone ringing. My mother-in-law called to make sure we were OK–tornadoes had ripped through central Florida overnight and killed at least 15 people. The storm was about 50 miles north of us, so we were not impacted. Our thoughts go out to those affected by the devastation.
We met my brother at the Polynesian Hotel for lunch. Many of my childhood trips to Walt Disney World were spent at the Polynesian and it remains one of my favorite hotels. The Kona Cafe is a newer addition to the hotel, but we ate there last time we visited as well. I had a chicken in peanut sauce dish with sticky rice and macaroni salad that had too many peppers for my liking, but tasted very good.
Today we met my brother at EPCOT Center and caught a monorail over to the Magic Kingdom. Once inside the gates, we went straight to Adventureland to ride Pirates of the Caribbean and check out the new Jack Sparrow enhancements. My wife really liked seeing her boyfriend, while I was left wondering why there were no Elizabeth figures added. The Davy-Jones-in-the-mist effect was really cool, but I was a little sad to see some of the music from the movie replacing the original attraction score.
