Well, it's good to be back at work after a week "off." I was supposed to fly back to Iowa last week to see the folks, but as luck would have it, half of my face swelled up like a balloon the night before I was scheduled to leave! After seeing two docs, they weren't sure what was going on and I was resigned to sitting on the couch watching Harry Potter movies all week. I can't say it was all bad though, Melissa was there non-stop to take care of me and nurse me back to health... at least healthy enough to be seen in public :)

On Friday I was feeling much better so we headed up to Folks Fest in Lyons, CO. It was a pretty amazing bill: Greg Brown, Dar Williams, Patty Griffin, and more! Despite two days of fifty-degree rain, we toughed it out and camped onsite. There's nothing like sitting under a shelter in the rain playing cards and eating hot chili!

At least Fall is right around the corner! We've still got the Vuelta and the Tour of Missouri to cover in September, but things will taper off pretty quickly and we can resume our lunchtime VeloNews 'cross practice.

Now that the Tour is over, I've got some bandwidth for development. So, I've been doing some experimenting with Drupal. In response to a Drupal.org post, I tested a method to create an auto-fill search form that was fun to play with. I also wrote a pretty interesting slideshow module for VeloNews that we're testing out this week. The module uses CCK to associate a bunch of images, then constructs a slideshow and corresponding thumbnail gallery that scrolls using Javascript. I don't get to do much Javascript coding, but it's a lot of fun. I might play around with jquery and try to do some more complex animation, but it'll have to wait. I'm headed home this week to see the Folks. Cherokee should be lovely right now... nothing like August heat in Iowa!

I was bored, so I decided to install the latest version of Drupal and play around with it a bit. The default template is lacking a certain pizazz, but I'll see if I can spice things up a bit :)

I'm currently hanging out watching the live coverage of the Tour, waiting for the results to come in. Things are pretty chill for me during the stage, then it's about an hour's worth of scrambling to get the site up to date before things calm down. Tomorrow is the big day up L'Alpe d'Huez, which should be our biggest day on record for traffic. Then it's a slow taper to the finish in Paris and a much needed break for myself.

It's been a busy year to say the least. Here's a quick rundown of where I've been:

2007

• July: Moved out to Boulder with Melissa to start working at VeloNews during the first week of the Tour de France
• August: Did a lot of hiking in the mountains and went to Folks Fest in Lyons
• September: Started the new version of VeloNews.com using the Drupal CMS as a framework
• October: Did a coule of local 'cross races and realized that it's tougher out here - especially when you're out of shape
• November: Flew back to Maine to spend Thanksgiving/Melissa Day with her folks
• December: Drove down to Kansas to spend Xmas with my folks and a few of the Millers

2008

• January: Launched a beta version of the new VeloNews.com
• February: Fully launched the new VeloNews.com site and launched straight into the race season with the Tour of California
• March: Busy, busy at work, but my Mom spent a week out here and Lee and Andrea make it out to visit
• April: Melissa [and I] worked hard on getting the garden turned over, fertilized and planted
• May: Migrated the VeloNews site over to Rackspace, which was a month-long process of building, hardening and moving one piece at a time. Probably the biggest, most complex job I've ever done.
• June: Melissa's parents came out to visit, and we made it up to Estes Park and came home with a bunny
• July: Whew, Le Tour Toujours