Greetings from my Social Media Break

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year, friends!

I started my social media hiatus on Friday, December 15th, which was about ten days ago. I drove up to the University of Vermont that day to pick up my eldest daughter Hannah, making it easy to leave Facebook and Twitter behind. I'd found myself getting a little too obsessed with seeing reaction to things I'd written, mostly for As For Football, over the previous months. I therefore wanted to break the habit of checking in with the world-at-large. 

Merry Christmas from Casa Cabeza!

It had gotten a little too easy to doom-scroll my way through the day, and with that had come a lot of unfiltered bullshit. Too much of what passes for opinion comes from miserable bastards looking to outsource their own unhappiness. I've missed interacting with AFF's Firstie Club, but the cold turkey approach seemed like the best thing for the moment, and here we are.

I've read quite a bit, I've listened to a few audiobooks from my local library, and I've watched a few movies. The beauty of all of this is that I've gotten to do it in the vacuum of my own space, allowing an easier place from which to form my own opinions.

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.

Merry Christmas from Mount Snow

Merry Christmas, friends.

The girls and I are up at Mount Snow today, staying for a few days at the Sterling Ski Club’s Mount Snow Lodge.  

Sally and I both sometimes get a little depressed at Christmas.  My family has all passed save for my wife and kids, and Sally’s family has never been anyone’s ideal.  But we are truly blessed to have found each other, to have the mutual strength to break the cycles in each of our families’ lives, and to have the opportunity to spend the holidays in the mountains in Vermont.  Whatever else happens, I will always be grateful for the love, strength, and support to meet challenges head on.

It’s been an interesting year at Casa Cabeza -- in a good way.  I’ll spare you the stories, but we have a lot for which we are thankful.  We hope that you and yours are richly blessed in the year to come as well.

5 Things on a Friday: It’s Officially Christmas Season

I'm actually excited for Christmas this year.  I think that marks a certain amount of personal growth.

This is how I plan to commute to New York City this month.

Merry Christmas!

Dear Friends,

Sally, Hannah, Emma, and I would like to wish you and your families a very merry Christmas and a healthy and happy New Year.  2017 was a great year for us, a year of change and joy and growth.  We can’t wait for 2018, and we hope that it will be a great year for you as well.

5 Things on a Friday: Hot Human Sacrifice & Santa Claus’s Bones

Man, this week just flew by!  Shortest week ever!!!

Just kidding.  This week sucked.  It was long as all Hell.

Happy Friday!

2015 Christmas Letter

Dear Friends and Family,

It seems like only a week ago that spring finally gave way to summer, letting us put on shorts and t-shirts for the first time after a winter of prolonged blistering cold.  And yet, here we are again, decorating the house for Christmas and preparing for the coming of another New Year.  2015 has felt very much like a year of keeping on, of incremental growth and measured accomplishment, but in collecting my notes for this letter, it’s become clear that this is only the way that it feels, that the truth has been both happier and more productive than my poor memories suggest.

Christmas Theme is Up!

Now that football season is over, I've (finally) got the new theme is up on the blog.  It's supposed to be Christmasy, so by all means, let me know what you think.  I played with it for a quite a while this morning but ultimately came down on the side of readability over holiday-power.  Hopefully it is at least readable and not too garish.

I've also been playing around with the blog's ad structure.  Yes, this blog is ad-supported, and if you're wondering, I'm about three-quarters of the way towards getting my first $100 check from Google for my share of this thing's revenues.  No, that's not a lot on a monthly basis or anything, but getting that check has nevertheless been a long-standing goal--and one that I fully intend to see through now that I'm close.

I also played with the widths this morning, and honestly, I'm not sure how they're displaying.  They look fine in the Chrome browser on my Chromebook, but Blogger is a Google product, as is this machine, so of course it all displays correctly here.  However, I've no idea how it looks on I.E. or Safari or any of those other browsers that the kids are using today.  If it looks wonky, please, please, please do me the favor of letting me know.

Thanks!

Merry Christmas, folks.

5 Things on a Friday: Christmas is Coming!

Keeping it short this week.  Here's hoping your Thanksgiving kicked ass.

1-hr, 25-min: 1st flip. #turkeyprep #Thanksgiving2015 pic.twitter.com/07VuDIqpnK

— Dan Head (@Dan_T_Head) November 26, 2015

5 Things on a Friday: Looking for Vets from the "War on Christmas"

Happy Friday, folks.  Let’s get to it.

***

1. Starbucks ‘removed Christmas from their cups because they hate Jesus,’ Christian says in viral Facebook video (Washington Post)
Some say Jesus Christ healed the sick and died to redeem humankind. Little is said about his views on the Pumpkin Spice Latte.

Still, secular coffee maker Starbucks has come under fire from some Christians who say the company isn’t repping hard enough for Jesus on its recent understated holiday cups.

Shots fired!  It’s a War on Christmas!!!

Merry Christmas, Star Trek-style

I saw this on Twitter this morning. It's the starship Enterprise, made out of gingerbread.

Christmas Tree 2014

We finally got our tree trimmed last night, and in spite of everthing, it’s beginning to feel like Christmas.  The kids were fired up, singing Christmas carols, and even I felt a little pang for days gone by as we pulled some of my family’s old ornaments out of their boxes for another year.  Some of these ornaments have been around a while, and I know that for me, my memories of Christmas are intimately tied to some of our specific tree ornaments.

Our Christmas Tree.
You can't see it, but the kids also installed an electric "Christmas train"
around the tree's skirt.

Christmas Card

That's about as good as it gets as far as Christmas Cards are concerned.

Monday Morning: Weekend Round-Up

What a weekend!

Ugh.

Back when I was in the Army, the thing we used to practice all the time was breaching obstacles.  It was a different Army back then, and I suspect that the emphasis on breaching came largely from the experience of the First Gulf War when the Iraqi Army spent six months digging in, and America and its allies then had to breach to get at the enemy.  It’s also possible that we practiced breaching simply because it’s a tremendously complicated and difficult operation, and by practicing it, we were effectively working our combat command structures in a useful way up to the battalion and brigade level.

5 Things on a Friday: Black Friday Edition

It's Black Friday, and I don't mind telling you that I ate too much last night at dinner.  It was worth it.  We had tons of Sally's family over, along with Hannah's best friend and the best friend's mom.  That's a total of thirteen people!

With that many folks, I thought we might struggle to feed everyone.  However, we had a seventeen pound turkey, at least two full trays of stuffing (including one gluten free!), a whole roast pork loin, and tons and tons of other stuff.  We wound up eating much less than half of the food we prepared, but as Thanksgivings go, this was a good one.

Christmas Letter, 2013

Dear Friends,

Dixie

I hope this letter find you happy and healthy this Christmas season.  2013 has been an interesting and exciting year for our family, certainly full of its share of moments worth sharing.  For one thing, our dog Dixie passed on this year, which made me sad, especially since she was the last remaining member of my family from Tennessee.  But we also welcomed a new puppy into the family, Faith, and she’s brought a lot of joy and happiness into our lives.

Christmas is Ready

Christmas Time

Getting our Christmas Tree

We went to get our tree today...

Five Things on a Friday: Amazing Spider-Man 2 Edition

1. The trailer for Amazing Spider-Man 2 is finally out.  

If you haven’t seen it yet, well, it looks pretty good.  

Electro is one of those villains that gets treated like a relic by a lot of today’s comic writers, but as Brian Michael Bendis showed with his first arc of the New Avengers, he can be plenty terrifying.  I like the treatment that they’ve got in this movie quite a bit, as well as the fact that they have Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield) looking like he’s barely holding on by the skin of his teeth.