As the lockout becomes a more and more distant memory life is returning to normal quickly. Whitney is being blamed for a slow start in Edmonton, children are screaming at Horcoff with wild eyes afire and Jordan Eberle is already cruising to the top of the scoring race.

Ah the good life. Today we update NationDrafts out of the gate, give a status on NationHoodies and summarize the Charitable Donations from the Nation Network so far in 2013.

The inaugural NationDrafts pay-to-play draft kicked off this past week. For those of you who entered be prepared to be trash talked on the regular by yours truly with the confidence that can only come from being in (looks at standings) 535th place? WTF?

How is this possible? We picked Martin St. Louis who already has 11 points for heavens sakes! Let’s see who has goose eggs so far for the Ministry of Squee:

Jamie Benn: 0 points in 0 games. This is excusable, the kid just signed his massive deal and should be taking to the ice shortly. Jamie Benn is solid.

Brooks Laich: 0 points in 0 games. Now this is surprising. We have no idea what’s up with this guy but the Capitals have Ovechkin and therefore this pick is rock solid too. That’s sound logic right there.

Jarret Stoll: 0 points in 4 games. For heaven’s sakes. What were we thinking when we picked this clown? We had no idea he would diss Yakupov early in the year for his now infamous celly. Classic mistake by yours truly right out of the gate. Luckily all of our other picks can carry one dud in the run to number one.

As is our strategy in every single hockey draft we have ever entered we have selected every single Oiler available. The Nuge, Taylor Hall, Yak City, Justin Schultz and someone you may have heard of who goes by the name J. Leslie Eberle. These fellas will see us through no matter how badly Stoll tries to sabotage things.

So prepare yourself to be passed current leader Road Gear Sports. You picked Sheldon Souray for heavens sakes! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

*wipes eyes*

The folks over at Speak Volumes will finish shipping all of the NationGear Hoodies today and one would hope that all of these sexy beasts will arrive at their new homes by the end of the week.

When your hoodies arrive please take a picture of yourself reppin the Nation wherever you are and whatever you are doing. Like our main man and official NationGear model for all eternity Mandeez here who is curling and looking funky fresh.

Tweet us the pics @wanyegretz and we will show the finest ones to all of teh internetz.

A big thank you to everyone who bought hoodies and entered NationDrafts recently. These are parts of our new program indended to raise $200k per year for charity through the Nation as quickly as we can. This may take us a couple years to get it to that level but we swore a blood oath with our imaginary best friend Jordan Eberle and we don’t intend to let him down.

From the first season of NationDrafts we have been able to donate $3,800 to charity after deducting the prizing and operating costs. We had hoped to get 1,000 entries in our first go around but came up at roughly half of this with just over 500 teams in the mix.

We will now sit down with the team at Nation HQ and figure out how to improve things including reducing the number of declined credit cards, opening it up to non Alberta residents and will give it another go in time for playoffs.

But add that NationDrafts money to the $1,200 raised from the inaugural hoodie run and we are definitely getting somewhere. That’s an even $5Gs raised in the month of January.

Not too shabby! We will be giving half of that to the MS Bike Tour per the wishes of Jason Gregor and will be donating the other half to the Inner City Children’s Program per the request of Jason Strudwick.

Thank you very, very much for your support Nation. MWAH!

Our eternal friend Rick from the Pint was kind enough to read the article and text us "we want to help you raise money! One of our customers gave us two tickets to raffle off tonight at the Pint Downtown. We will charge $3 per ticket and send you all the money to help you get to that crazy goal!"

Ah the Pint. Tis no wonder you are our favourite bar on planet Earth. Well played!