Five Things on a Friday: College Football Begins!

Friends, I've been busy as all hell this week. 

My wife and daughter Hannah went to Bar Harbor, Maine, leaving me to water the plants, watch the dog, and mind the house. Not a big deal, really, except that I've also been working, swimming, and gearing up As For Football for Week 1 of the college football season. Thankfully it rained pretty consistently through the back half of the week, but finding an extra half-hour to water the plants became a real challenge on Monday. In addition to everything else, I wound up doing three podcasts this week, two for AFF and one to promote AFF and The Return of Dr. Necropolis. 

All of that was great, but it definitely kept me jumping.

Thankfully, things slowed down later in the week, giving me enough time to breathe a little.

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. 

A Few Favorite Pics from Maine

Sally and I went to Maine last week on vacation. Now that I've finally had a chance to comb through all the pictures we took, here are some of my favorites.

Pics from St. Sauveur & Acadia Mountain

 Sally and I hiked St. Sauveur and the Acadia Mountain Trail while we were up in Maine last week.  As the title of this post suggests, these are our pictures.

The hike wasn't too bad save for the climb up Acadia Mountain itself. The mountain is not quite seven hundred feet high, but the way is extremely steep.  We also got turned around a bit at one of the trail junctions.  I blame myself, but we were trying to follow the signs instead of looking at our map, which was an obvious error in retrospect.

I should note, too, that we took our dog but left our kids at the campsite.  This would've been a little much for them.  For better or worse, this just isn't their thing.

Our route, via AllTrails.com. 
As you can see, it's steep towards Acadia's peak.

More pics after the jump. 

Sunrise at Cadillac Mountain

We went to Maine last week.  I don't think that's a secret.  While we were there, Sally and I trekked to the top of Cadillac Mountain to watch the sun rise.  Given that this was at 4:00 am on Wednesday, we decided to drive. 

We weren't the only ones.

These are my pics.  Enjoy!

Frenchman's Bay and the Porcupine Islands at first light

D&D Travelogue: The Tipsy Mermaid

Welcome back to Dungeons & Dragons Travelogue.  

I’ve said before that I’ve always felt that the biggest challenge of running an adventure in D&D is managing the travel and intermittent locations.  Good storytellers show their players fantastic worlds, letting them experience that sense of wonder for themselves. What they don’t do is explain, “This is wonderful and weird.” Alas, that’s not an easy thing to do on the fly.

Breakwater Bay is modeled on the real world town Bar Harbor, Maine.
This shot is of the actual town.

My goal here is not grandiose.  I simply want to note a few unique locations ahead of time for use in travel or downtime scenes. Today’s location is an upscale tavern in Breakwater Bay called The Tipsy Mermaid.

D&D with Kids: “The Sunless Citadel” Play Report

We were up in Maine last week, and as we have been wont to do while on vacation, the girls and I sat down for a few sessions of D&D while we were there.  We all enjoy D&D, but we never seem to play as much as we want when we’re at home, owing to the busy nature of our Real Lives.  Life’s a little different up in Maine, however, and this time in particular, I went up with a goal.  I wanted the kids to come away with a legitimate understanding of how to play their characters to their fullest potential.

I wanted them to “get” the game, not just the basics of combat mechanics.

I decided to run The Sunless Citadel out of the recently released Tales from the Yawning Portal.  The adventure’s intro notes that it was designed in part to help teach the game, and in this it performed flawlessly.  It was also relatively short.  We got through it over the course of our week away, totally maybe eight hours of actual play.  This included character set-up and level-ups along with one wholly unrelated side-quest written and run by my older daughter Hannah.

Postcards from Maine

Greetings from Maine!

I hope you guys are all doing well.  We've been having a great time, save that I swam through a bunch of lily pads the other day--this was not intentional--and managed to pick up an annoying case of Swimmer's Itch.  It's right on my head!  

It's been driving me crazy.  Seriously.  Because of all the damned ducks up here.

Anyway, we've had a good time, especially yesterday, when we accidentally went on a much longer bike ride than intended.  It was perfect for me, but the pour kids pooped out a bit somewhere around Mile 15.  It's always that one last, unexpected climb.  Still, they were troopers, climbing something like 700 feet at the start over the course of nearly seven miles of unbroken inclines.  Honestly, that first stretch was mindbogglingly long, especially since we had no idea where we were or how much further we had to go before we hit the apex.

Three cheers for map reconnaissance.

We thought this was near the top.  Then we climbed another three miles.

Needless to say, it was a nice, long descent.

Anyway, we've hiked some and biked a lot, and I've swum a few miles in Green Lake.  All of which has been wonderful.  Word to the wise, though: don't swim with the ducks unless you're prepared to pay the price.

That price is... itchy.

I put some pics after the jump.  If you follow me on Instagram, you've probably seen some of these.  Others are new.  Hope you like them.

Blog in Review: Top 20 Posts of 2015

I enjoy this blog quite a bit, but it can be frustrating, too.  A certain tension exists between the subject matter that I personally enjoy and the stuff that I know will bring in readers.  This is nothing new.  I’ve known for years that the parts of my own work that I myself prefer are only rarely favorites of others.  By contrast, I’ve written things that I think are obvious or pointless and had literally hundreds of people tell me how amazing they are.  This is one of the reasons why I write a lot.  I never know what’s going to strike a chord with others.

Very occasionally, I’ll write something that I like that other people also really like, and those are the days—rare though they may be—that make me love writing.  In the meantime, I hope to balance the need to write what I enjoy with what I think other people want to read.  

This list seeks that same balance.  It chronicles a very good year of blogging.

Views from Pemetic Mountain

Our last hike of vacation was up Acadia's Pemetic Mountain to perhaps the most spectacular views we saw all week.  It was a fairly steep climb, especially in the tree line before we broke out onto the ridge trail, but we all made it, and everyone had a good time.

Pemetic Trail starts down by Jordan Pond.

Friday Morning & the Blue Hill Fair

Friday's here, and it's our last full day in Maine. After a week or more of warm--even hot--weather, it's 56-degrees and windy this morning. That's kind of what we're expecting all week, but it's been glorious instead. Hard to complain about that.

Rough Water Swimming

It's been kind of a lazy morning around the cabin.  I got up early, made some coffee, and spent some time writing before anyone else was up. Today's piece was a write-up of the adventure I created for our family's vacation campaign, Zeke's Mine.  If you're into that sort of thing, I expect I'll have the final posted by next Tuesday.  Then Sally got up as I was finishing my draft, and we sat for a while drinking coffee together.

Islesford & Great Cranberry

We caught the ferry out of Southwest Harbor yesterday to the Cranberry Islands, Great Cranberry and Islesford (Little Cranberry).  Technically speaking, there are several more "cranberry" islands, including privately owned Sutton Island, Bear Island, and others, but we just visited the two larger islands, neither of which is actually large.

Friday Is Cancelled

I had some fool notion of doing 5 Things on a Friday this week, but as you can see, I'm out of the office.

How's your Friday going?

New Year's Notes

Sally and I still haven't sat down to hash out our goals for 2015.

It's maybe worth noting, however, that she took issue with my characterization of 2014 as a basically unsuccessful year.  Sally herself got raises at several of the places where she teaches fitness classes, she thought that Hannah's turn in the play was a really big deal that deserved more celebration, and we took a ten-day vacation to Maine that was totally awesome.  My work and support of our family made all of that stuff possible.

Sally also noted that even if the year wasn't particularly goal-tastic or glorious, it was still good.  We were happy.  In real terms, that is at least as important as anything else.

We're Home

If there's an upside to being back at home, it's that we have TV in the house.  I watched part of the Giants pre-season game last night while flipping back and forth to try and catch Johnny Manziel's debut for the Browns.  Sadly, the Browns put Manziel in too late, so that by the time he was in, Sally and I were already watching Suits.

I keep wanting to tell myself that it's good to be back, but I miss my beautiful lake view in the morning and the call of the loons.  I slept so well up there, but last night I was restless from the drive and--as often happens--couldn't stop thinking about the million-and-five things that I need to get back to now that we're home.

Heck, even our dog seems to miss Maine, but she's re-adjusting better than Sally and I are.

Pics from Blue Hill

Yesterday was our last full day at the cabin.  We hung around for awhile, swam, and took out the canoe, but it was mostly a lazy day. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

We drove out to the town of Blue Hill late in the day.  There's a local brewery out there that we'd read about, and Sally and the girls were looking to do some last minute souvenir shopping.

One Last Picture from Green Lake

This one's gonna have to last me awhile...

The car's all packed up. We'll be on the road before the turn of the hour. 

Five Things on a Friday: the End is Near

1.  Vacation is Almost Over.

We've been in Maine for ten days, but tomorrow we have to go back.  I suppose I'm ready.  It's been great being up here with my family, but it's been a little like living in suspended animation. I want to get back, start sending out inquiry letters for my book, put my new story notes into some kind of order, and write.  Stuff from work has also started piling up, but I refuse to think about that just yet.

Schoodic Penninsula

We got a deliberately late start yesterday.  We lazed around the cabin, ate blueberry pancakes, and then played through the first part of Sneax and company's journey up from the town of Phandalin to the ruins of Thundertree. The company traveled safely the first day, but their camp was attacked by a band of orcs that night, and in fighting off the orcs, they gained enough experience to get to Level 3.  At some point today, I have to sit down and help my Players level their characters up.

This, by the way, is how my book was born. It's a set of short stories inspired by our travels in Maine, starring my kids' D&D characters.  This particular trip has seen a little more focus on my wife's new character, Salamatu, and her incipient romance with the dashing young Eldritch Knight/Artificer Wolfgang Amadeus, of House Amadeus.