The Timberwolves are in the NBA Playoffs!

 

The Timberwolves are in the NBA Playoffs!

Todd Swank's Diary Entry for April 16, 2023

It was an exciting week at our house babysitting Blue's mother & brother.  The weather warmed into the eighties, so we couldn't pass up the chance to walk them every day.  Miss Sheri did state that 3 golden retrievers is quite a bit more challenging than 1, especially when stray dogs wander into the picture.  She's hoping to get that arm back into it's socket any day now.

The warm weather did allow the ice to finally exit Prior Lake, although I am disappointed the lake levels didn't get much higher with all that snow.  That big rock in the background used to be mostly underwater a few years ago, so we have a long ways to go to get things back to normal.   I'm nervous we'll have challenges come boating season.

The bald eagles seem to enjoy the shallower water as we've seen them hanging out near our house more than normal.  The spawning fish must be real easy targets given the fact that their stream is about a quarter of the size it used to be.

I lamented the fact last week that we went looking for trumpeter swans and couldn't find any.  I was excited to see these two this week so naturally had to disturb their little party.   I'm sure they didn't mind.

There's a lot of debate about working from home vs returning to the office.  I hooked up with several of my old Oracle co-workers on Thursday.  I've been working from home for several years now, but when I did go downtown to the office I had the good fortune to hang out with these amazing people every day.  It does make me miss the good times we had in the office, although I still don't miss that commute!

On Friday night, we went to watch the Timberwolves Play-In game against the Oklahoma City Thunder.  Avery had a conflict so our good friend, Karl, volunteered to take his place.  We were very happy to have him along for the ride.

The team gave away glow sticks to everyone in the crowd which made for an interesting scene when the lights were turned out.  It kind of had a Disco feel to it.

The Wolves had a tough time against the Lakers earlier in the week, but we were hopeful Anthony Edwards and team were ready to get the win and in to the playoffs.  

Karl Anthony Towns had missed several months of the season due to injury, but has looked really good since his return.

Alex Rodriguez is in the process of buying the Timberwolves so we get the opportunity to see him quite often.  He's such a stud.  I'm hopeful he and his partner Mark Lore will bring a winning environment to this team.  God knows we've been waiting a long time for it.

One of our favorite Minnesota Vikings, Adam Thielen, was in attendance in the front row near our section.  Unfortunately he was released this off season and is going to be playing for the Carolina Panthers next year.  It's a bummer for us, but still cool to see him at the game.

We had some drama on the team this past week when Rudy Gobert punched his team-mate, Kyle Anderson, during a time-out and ended up suspended for the Lakers game.  They seem to have buried the hatchet, though, and walked around together much of this game holding hands.

The home team was firing on all cylinders and seemed to control the game for most of the night.  They went into half-time with a 10 point lead.

We were thrilled at half time to see Christian Stoinev & Scooby perform.  They were finalists on America's Got talent back in 2014 and we rooted them on back then.  Christian is an acrobat and Scooby basically rides him around while he does his tricks.  Sadly, Scooby is looking like he's getting pretty old and it's becoming evident he won't be able to continue doing this a whole lot longer.  I'm glad we had the chance to see him before he retires.

The Timberwolves dominated the rest of the game and finished with a final score of 120 to 95 and will now take on the West's #1 seed Denver Nuggets.  Let's go, Timberwolves!!

@toddswank This AI Bot has a secret plan to wipe out humans! #ai #chatgpt #openai #chaosgpt #artificialintelligence ♬ Suspense, horror, piano and music box - takaya

I've been fascinated with Artificial Intelligence and all the new tools that are being released.  I heard about a new tool called Chaos-GPT this week which is pretty crazy and pretty scary.  I'm not sure where we're going to end up with capabilities like these available to the masses.  However, technology has been good to me my entire life so I'm counting on this wave of innovation to be a net positive for us also.