Weekly Newsletter: January 8th-15th, 2024

This week didn't go as we had hoped; Lindsey was still sick and a massive snowstorm made it nearly impossible to safely ski this weekend. 😔 However, we made the best out of a bad week by working on some much-needed website tooling updates and trying to focus on recovery.

Check out our new posts and videos 🆕 🎥 📝

2023: Our Year in Review (Part 2)

2023... what an amazing year! We experienced so many wonderful events and activities this year. Part 2.

Keith and LindseyKeith Huster

Still recovering from being sick 🤧 💊

We are both starting to feel better... finally! 😅 It's been a rough couple of weeks for both of us since returning from Vegas. We have been fighting a nasty cold/flu but are starting to feel normal again. Keith is nearly back to full strength other than dealing with some lingering chest congestion. Lindsey still felt pretty rough through last weekend but she is also finally feeling much better.

Massive snow squalls hit Utah 🌨️ 🚧

Several back-to-back snowstorms hit Utah this week. This included storms containing periods of "snow squalls" that made driving extremely dangerous. Thankfully, we both work from home so we didn't have to drive through any of these wicked storms.

Excited to get back to skiing, but... ⛷️ ❌

We were both super excited to finally get to ski again this week. Unfortunately, things didn't go as planned. Lindsey was still too sick to ski and the weather had other plans for us. Early in the week, the weather forecast was pointing to 70+ inches (178 centimeters) of snow over a 2-3 day period! That's a lot of snow and should have made for some incredible powder skiing.

Unfortunately, the storms came in with too much of a vengeance. The storms hit so hard that UDOT (Utah Department of Transportation) had to close nearly every major mountain canyon/pass due to the extreme avalanche danger. This included the only road that accesses Snowbird and Alta ski resorts. The UDOT crews worked diligently to clear the roads and minimize the avalanche risk but the storm was just too much for them to handle. Backcountry skiing access was also basically closed due to extreme avalanche danger as reported by the Utah Avalanche Center.

A similar situation occurred at the ski resorts themselves. Both Alta and Snowbird were inundated with too much heavy, wet snow. At times, the storms were dropping up to 3 inches (7.6 centimeters) of snow per hour! 🤯 This caused full resort closures, interlodge mandates, and a general inability to safely get skiers onto the mountain. Because of these factors, we decided to not even attempt to ski this weekend. We do applaud all of the hard-working UDOT and ski patrol crews that were out in these storms trying to get the roads and resorts open. 👏

Tour Divide training update 🚴‍♂️ 😅

With the lack of skiing this week, Keith was hoping to at least be able to do an outdoor ride. Unfortunately, his outdoor riding plans were also shot down due to the extreme weather. High winds and freezing temperatures led to lots of ice and road snow making any travel by bike very dangerous.

So, Keith decided to forgo outdoor riding this week and instead focused on indoor Zwift training rides. This week, Keith only managed a total of 40 miles (64 kilometers) with a little over 2,000 feet (610 meters) of climbing. This is well under Keith's typical training load. However, Keith was just happy to be back on the bike after being out sick for almost two weeks.

Website tooling updates 👨‍💻 🤓

Keith spent many hours this week revamping our website development tooling. This included the tools that he uses to develop new website features, apply security updates, and implement an automated deployment pipeline. Keith has been wanting to work on this effort for the past few months but couldn't seem to find a large enough block of time to kock it all out.

With this week being sort of a dead-week for physical activities, Keith decided that this would be an opportune time to make these updates. So, he tackled the following list of updates which will make it even easier to manage our website.

• ✅ Implement a VSCode Devcontainer local development environment.
• ✅ Switch from Nginx to Caddy as the local development reverse proxy and resolve TLS certificate issues.
• ✅ Refactor the source code repository directory structure to make it easier to deploy just the built theme files.
• ✅ Utilize 1Password for secrets (e.g. passwords) management and automation.
• ✅ Update the CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) GitHub Actions pipelines to support beta theme releases for testing purposes.

Upcoming posts and videos 👷‍ 👷‍♀️️

Now that Lindsey is feeling better, she will be putting the finishing touches on our Two-Week Road Trip Through Oregon with Friends post series. Keith is also working on a few posts from our Las Vegas trip during the holidays. We experienced some amazing exhibits and saw some incredible sights while on this trip. We can't wait to share the details of our trip with you.

We hope that you are enjoying our newsletters. Did you have an amazing 2023? What were some of your most memorable moments from the year? What are you most looking forward to in 2024? Let us know in the comments section below.👇 💬