I was walking around the vet college at Kansas State the other day with baby Sorenne strapped to me, and was telling anyone who would listen that Kansas State now had the foundation of a NCAA woman’s hockey program, if only they would build an arena in Manhattan.

Someone asked me, what is it you like about hockey, and I said it’s so fast and violent and requires skills like no other game. Don Cherry, right, agrees.

You can see that on display right now as Canada and the U.S. are playing in the World Junior Hockey Championships in Ottawa. I’m in Manhattan, Chapman is in North Carolina, and we’re both watching hockey on the NHL channel. Nerds.

Daughter Braunwynn, below, – herself a great skater and hockey player – arrives tomorrow for a visit.  And while I’m all nostalgic, here’s the year in review.

I’m not sure what to make of these statistics. Like media hits, I had thousands if all the media appearances are counted, and I’m not sure what to count anymore. And am too busy doing to count what I’m doing.

The listservs have peaked and I need to exploit new technology to get the news out. That will be happening soon enough. For this year, I developed 2 on-line courses which will start being offered in Jan. 2009, and got together 16 journal articles and book chapters. So I was doing that academic thing.