Minnesota Wild vs Arizona Coyotes
Todd Swank's Diary Entry for January 22, 2017
I had a week's worth of flashbacks to my 14 years working at Nor-Tech as I had multiple encounters with my old co-workers. On Wednesday night, several of us connected for our Fantasy Football Awards Ceremony hosted by our wonderful commissioner Steve "Cuds" Cuddihy. I had another horrible year in fantasy football so my personal awards weren't very lucrative, but getting to share time with these fantastic people is it's own award.
On Thursday night we headed into St. Paul to watch the Minnesota Wild host the Arizona Coyotes in an NHL match-up.
The Minnesota Wild are one of the hottest teams in the league sporting a record of 30-10 at this point in the season. This was the first time this year we were able to make it to a game and were not disappointed. The Wild won the game 4 goals to 3. It was incredible!
We were invited to the game as guests of Wishes & More who gave Luke a wish about 8 years ago. Here's details of that:
This is Joelle from Wishes & More and she was our hostess for the evening. Thanks, Joelle and Carol from Wishes & More for the great time!!
I was pretty excited when we walked to our seats and bumped into Wally The Beer Man. I hadn't seen him at a game in quite some time so I thought he may have retired, but nope. He's still the most popular beer man in the business. Although I don't know how he's able to sell anything with so many people stopping to get selfies with him.
We had awesome seats in the front row of one of the suites. It gave us a great view of all the action on the ice!
The team was intensely watching the game waiting for their chance to get in on the action.
If I was going against this guy, I'd probably try to shoot it between his legs. But that's just me.
We even saw a few fights while we were there. I'm kind of glad the fighting didn't spread throughout the arena because I'm not a real big fan of getting punched in the face like this guy was doing. That hurts.
We wandered over between periods to see some of our buddies from Nor-Tech and their wives. They are Wild regulars so we were excited to have the chance to come hang out with them for a bit. They're good people.
On Friday night, we stopped by the high school to see how Prior Lake's FRC team, KING TeC, was doing with building their robot. They're about 2 weeks in to the 6 week build season and things are coming along nicely. We are looking forward to seeing the finished product.
Avery is the head of programming and he showed me how he could make the prototype bot spin around in circles. I'm not sure how much that will help in the competition, but it looked like he was having fun doing it.
On Saturday night, we hung out with my old boss, Dr. David Bollig, and his lovely wife, Cynthia, who are some of our oldest friends in the twin cities. We had a grand old time catching up on stories and playing pool with one another.
Their son, Andy, was home from college and he brought his little friend Hamilton the Hedgehog. I had never been around a hedgehog before but these are incredible little creatures.
It's kind of like a fat rat with a porcupine skin and he's not very mobile. He basically lays in your hands or on the ground if you set him there and doesn't do much moving around. Andy explained to me that they are more nocturnal animals and he hears him at night running on his wheel, but becomes very embarrassed if he knows anyone is watching him run. He's a weird little animal, but very cute.
We ended the night with a long walk in the woods. David has his whole backyard lit up with Christmas lights so it really stands out when you see it from a distance. We had a bunch of fun with these guys and hope to get together with them again soon.
