Since my last post describing how I was getting into Drupal, I’ve worked on it a total of once. Not exactly going to get me closer to my goal of figuring out how it all comes together. This seems to be the way I operate; I get excited about something, I start working on it, I build a few pages, get a very low-level basic knowledge of whatever it is I’m working on, and then I let it go idle for a period of time. I’m trying to overcome that, but not having a lot of success at the moment. Too many other distractions.

One of those distractions is back – soccer season has swung into full gear. Our team had its first game of the season this past Saturday, which we won, 1-0. It was a great game, and we had some great plays by our keeper. After the whistle blew sounding the end of the game, we were all giving each other high-fives and congratulations and lining up to go shake the other teams’ hands when I noticed Sarah was in tears. I asked what was wrong and she said she couldn’t breathe. Turns out she’d been trying to get my attention the last part of the game because she needed a break and was having a hard time catching her breath. I asked why she didn’t just run over and tell me or the other coach that she needed to come out and she replied with “I was worried the ball would come my way and get past me and they’d score.”

Talk about making dad feel like a heel!

After being able to rest for about 10 minutes, she was back to her normal bouncy self and was happy they’d won. It didn’t seem like asthma or anything, she was just wiped out.

The rest of the weekend was spent doing the normal weekend-suburbanite chores. I did manage to wipe out the front page of a website I’d been working on. That was lots of fun. Thankfully because I had the page still loaded in a browser, I was able to create it with minimal fuss and had it back online within 20 mins. Hopefully the owner of the page didn’t notice.

And hopefully this will make me start doing backups more often!

I’ve been working on a new site, and I decided to build it using Drupal. Many (OK, none) of you know I’m a big fan of Expression Engine, and are probably wondering why I’ve decided to torture myself with a new CMS. I have a few reasons:

• It’s FREE as in beer (ExpressionEngine costs $99 for a personal license)
• It supports members
• I like learning new things
• It seems to have a strong developer and user community behind it
• Never hurts to have ‘experience developing with Drupal’ on a resume

It’s been a long, slow learning curve. I should throw steep in there as well. I’m sure like Expression Engine, I’ll have an ‘a-ha!’ moment or two. The problem I’ve had lately is trying to sit down for a quite hour or three and dig into it.

I had some time last night so I was playing around with it. If you’re new to Drupal, one of the first modules I suggest installing is CCK (Content Construction Kit). This module allows you to insert fields of any type where you want them. I’m creating a site for writers, which will allow them to post short stories for review. Rather than a typical Title field and Body field, I wanted a place for a summary. This is where the CCK module comes in. Now when someone submits a story, they have three fields: The Title of Your Story, Summary and Your Story. I will probably change these fields to sound better, but you get the idea the flexibility the CCK module gives. There’s so much to this module that I’ve only barely scratched the surface of it.

Otherwise, it’s been trial and error, trial and breaking, breaking and fixing, getting frustrated and giving up, and then having a thought and going back to it. It’s a long process, but I’m starting to feel like I’m making a bit of headway. Once I have the fields in place, and the comments working, then it’ll be putting it into a layout I want. And THAT will be a serious challenge.

It will be during the dog days of summer that I’ll recall mornings like today’s with fondness. As I sit there on my motorcycle, stuck in traffic with all that metal of the cars reflecting the hot, overbearing sun onto me from all directions, the heat rising from the asphalt, the engine idling between my legs cooking my jeans. As I struggle through traffic to try and get some speed up to create a breeze to cool my sweat-beaded brow, as I feel the sweat drip down along my spine to the small of my back. That’s when I’ll recall wistfully of the rides taken in March, when I was snug in my leathers, my head encased in my full-face helmet and the temperature brisk. Mornings where you felt happy to be alive.

But this morning, as I traveled down the road and the fog grew increasingly thicker, I was being anything but wistful about the ride. The weather reports were promising a beautiful afternoon with highs near 70, blue skies and a slight breeze. Completely perfect riding weather. As it’s been a nearly two months since I had been out on the bike, I figured it’d be a great day to ride to work. It was a great day to ride HOME from work, but certainly not to.

When I got on the 6-lane that I take to work, the already thick fog grew even thicker, and I couldn’t see twenty yards in front of my bike. Combine that with the condensation that was collecting rapidly on my face shield and the traffic coming up quickly behind me and probably not seeing my puny tail light, I decided it was time to get off the road. I pulled off at the next exit, and found a Chik-fil-a for some breakfast. I couldn’t even see the buildings across the parking lot, so I figured I’d stay until I could. Luckily I had a book of short stories in my saddle bag, so I had quite the pleasant morning sitting and reading.

I do love foggy mornings. Just not so much when I’m riding in them.

If any of my neighbors looked out their windows around supper time last night, they might have seen my wife leaving my house...in the back of a cop car.

Yes, you heard me right. My wife was taken away in the back seat of a county sheriff's cruiser.

And that's about as dramatic as I can make it. No, she wasn't being arrested or anything like that. No spousal abuse, no domestic disturbance, and no, she didn't short circuit after having finally finished her mid-term and term paper. Let me tell you the story...