Merry Christmas, My Friends

Good morning and Merry Christmas, everyone.  

As I write this, it's Christmas morning.  I'm sitting in a ski lodge just down the road from Mount Snow's Carinthia base listening to the rain.  Sally and the girls are asleep in their rooms just a few feet away.  We skied Okemo yesterday, finding good snow but lousy visibility in the morning before high-altitude winds hit as the forefront of the current storm.  Those blew away the low-lying fog, allowing us to at least see, but they also shut down the lifts running all the way to Okemo’s summit.  We had a really good day on the lower half of the mountain, but at age 47, I've reached that stage where it can take quite a few runs to get fully warmed up.  

Our tenth and last run was by far my best.  Go figure.

View from the Sunburst Six yesterday

For those keeping score, we finished up with 10 runs covering right around 10,500 vertical feet.  That's a decent day of skiing, all things considered, if not quite as much downhill as we might've hoped given a day with better visibility and less violent weather.  We got the data via the Slopes app, which was great right up until the last run.  It registered that last run when we were on the mountain but now shows us sitting at the top of the last lift.  Weird.

What a year, am I right?  We were sitting right here in this very lodge when we first heard about the coronavirus.  Some of the guys from the club were talking about it, wondering what its long-term impacts would be.  By that March, we were all living this same, sad reality.

At the summit of Jackson Gore

Like most Americans, Sally and the kids and I have slowly learned to navigate quarantine life.  We put a lot of effort into making our backyard a comfortable hangout spot, for example, and we redid our garage, turning it into a fully functional fitness studio when Sally lost her jobs at all the various gyms.  We also spent a huge amount of time down at the beach this summer.  However, it takes quite a bit of effort and planning to just live life, so even as we've worked our way through the craziest parts, I'm constantly reminded of how lucky we've been just to be in this position.  

2020 could've been a crisis.  Instead, we've somehow hung together.  I'm cautiously optimistic that things will somehow be okay soon.  

Not everyone can say that this year.

The year hasn't affected me overmuch.  Folks still need electricity, even in a pandemic, so I've more or less kept on keeping on.  That's good.  At the same time, As For Football has done better than ever.  Part of that has been because the Army Team has been good this year, and folks want to read and hear about the team when that team is good.  Part, too, is that we've become an established brand that folks enjoy.  That’s possible only because we’ve established ourselves as being worth your time.  That’s the part I'm proud of.  I’m now really looking forward to trying to grow a little as we head into 2021.

Sally and the kids are a different story, unfortunately.  The kids especially have been hit hard.  Like kids everywhere, they’ve in and out of school for almost a year.  Our senior, Hannah, has handled it mostly like a champ, but it's been hard on our sophomore, Emma.  

I get it.  Hannah's already been accepted to Manhattan College, Marist, Providence College, the University of Vermont, and Clark University.  Whatever else happens, she'll be moving on with her life soon enough.  Emma, though, has been stuck with us seemingly forever, and the things she likes to do have mostly been cancelled -- for almost a year now.  Hannah and I were going to the beach every day for a while there.  For Emma, though, there's no way to replicate ballet or the marching band.

It hit Sally hard, too.  She's blessed in the sense that when the gyms closed down, she was in a position to build her own studio and expand her private practice via Headspace.Fit. However, it’s never easy to build a business, and fighting through the coronavirus restrictions has just added more challenges to an already challenging time.  Sally is slowly building a mix of in-person and virtual classes, but it’s been slow going, especially on the virtual side.  I keep telling her that things will pick up with the new year, that folks will want to build a new fitness routine.

Truth is, I believe in Sally.  I know she’ll make this work.

Casa Cabeza 2020

Personally, I’m looking forward to turning the page.  I don’t know what 2021 will bring, but I say BRING IT ON!  Here’s hoping for a brighter future.

Enjoy the holiday, and happy New Year, friends.

Danno E. Cabeza