game on

I'm not a big sports fan, but I am a big sister, and I'm a huge fan of my little brother who gigs for the Broncos now that he's all grown up (the man has three almost four kids already -- guess that counts as all grown up).

Flew into Denver yesterday AM, hung out with the family, and then headed over to the stadium to see Game 1 of the Bronco pre-season -- ostensibly. But mostly really to see my brother do his thing as the producer of the video content that runs on the ThunderVision board for the duration of the game.



And then tour the control room and the press box and his offices afterwards, and hear silly stadium trivia like: they used to have to climb right up to the giant monitor to flip the switch that lowered the protective metal guard, but then they had stadium engineering rig a run-of-the-mill garage door opener to handle the task -- so now after the game they just pull out the garage door remote and lower the guard on the multi-million dollar video panel from inside the control room.

And there's also the mouth guard -- if you've been to the new Invesco Field in Denver you know that sculptures of football gear writ large litter the promenade up to the main entrance -- but maybe you didn't know that the gigantic mouth guard is the actual impression of Terrell Davis's teeth.



All fun. But the best part was heading back to the homestead, sleeping late this morning and waking up to a pancake breakfast prepared with careful attention by my young nieces, swapping stories and laughing with my family.

Home again.

Posting by cameraphone. A week worth of roadtripping through Colorado and New Mexico ahead. (Posting will probably be sporadic -- so far my uploads aren't behaving.)