Highlights from 2024

Happy New Year! I hope this note finds you happy and healthy heading into 2025. 

It feels like a lot happened this past year for Casa Cabeza, to the point that this is now my third attempt to put it all into some kind of context. I finally decided to publish a simple list of highlights. 

Danno & Sally Cabeza

These are presented in no particular order. 

Swim Across the Sound

My Swim Across the Sound, Team RBG, team raised over $10K to fight cancer in my local community. As athletes, our team finished 4th overall from a field of 17 teams despite being a bunch of over-the-hill 50-year-olds. We had to beat a bunch of college teams to do that, including three from UConn among others.

Team RBG at the finish in 2024

Maine

Sally and I took a week-long trip to Mount Desert Island in Maine in early September. Among other things, we hiked the Beehive, rode the 15-mile Mountain Loop, and swam at Acadia’s Sand Beach. 

On the drive home, we listened to The War on Drugs’ new live album Live Drugs Again. This has become my favorite new album of the year.

Sally at the top of the Beehive

If you're wondering, I also really liked The Cure's Songs of a Lost World and Tears for Fears' Songs For a Nervous Planet, though neither of those had released as of our Maine trip.

Skiing

Sally and I also skied both Breckenridge and Northern Vermont last season with various friends, and it was great in every case. Skiing — well, snowboarding — might be the least socially impactful thing that we do, but it might also be my favorite thing in a lot of ways. There’s a chairlift at Breck that drops you at just above 12K feet up, maybe 1000 vertical feet above the treeline, onto a windswept moonscape from which the world unfolds before you on clear sky days. I love that. We also spent a couple of days up at Sugarbush in late February. That might’ve been my favorite week of the entire year.

The longest chairlift I've ever been on.
It goes from one side of Sugarbush to the other.

Sally’s Professional Success

Sally has had the best year of her professional career this year, highlighted by winning the 2024 Fitness Idol Competition. With that, she was invited to present at a major fitness symposium in Boston this past November.

Owing to my wife’s professional success, I’ve had to learn to cook a good bit more this year. She’s busy! And so, while I’m still not a great cook, I can now make a decent meatloaf and some rockin’ mashed potatoes.

Sports Bar on the Back Deck

We replaced the canopy on our back deck and reorganized our back yard generally, creating a variety of spaces for sitting outside at various times and under various weather conditions. We installed permanent outdoor speakers under the new back deck canopy and a large back patio area with white rocks and adirondack chairs under the shade of a gigantic pine tree further into the back yard. We even bought new deck furniture, making the back deck arguably the most comfortable “room” in the entire house.

I really love sitting out there.

#SportsBarOnTheBackDeck upgrade. pic.twitter.com/qhSv1P8l1v

— Danno E. Cabeza (@DannoECabeza) May 18, 2024

As For Football

Army Football’s success this season propelled As For Football to new heights of popularity. We capitalized by increasing focus on the American Conference and on the larger college football landscape generally via the College Football Roundtable show and by bringing in a new writer specifically to cover the AAC in print. I feel really good about the way AFF performed this year.

Hiking, Craft Brewing, and Renewing Our Marriage

Sally and I transitioned to becoming nearly full-time empty nesters this year. Hannah has become a college senior. Emma is a sophomore. The house still feels decidedly fuller when the kids are around, but when they’re not around -- which is now most of the time -- Sally and I have managed to double-down on our marital relationship. 

We had kids early in our marriage, so it’s never really been just the two of us. With that in mind, this now has become our time. That’s been really great.

As noted, we went to Maine over the summer. We also went away to Mystic, CT, for Sally’s birthday this year, and we’ve been on any number of hikes this year, punctuated by trips to local breweries. We must’ve gone to a half dozen or more in the past twelve months. Mostly, though, we’ve tried to be there for each other around dinnertime on, like, a Tuesday or whatever.

Twenty-two years on, and most of the time, I feel like our marriage works better than ever. That’s worth celebrating.

At Beer'd Brewery

It’s been an eventful year, and I know that I’m leaving some stuff out. What can you do?  Some of these stories aren’t mine to tell.

Wherever you are, we wish you the best in 2025. 

Happy New Year, friends! You deserve it.

With love, Danno & Sally Cabeza