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. 

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.

Elicit Brewing Company & "Meet Me at the Barre"

My beautiful wife Sally did an event at the Elicit Brewing Company in Manchester, Connecticut, yesterday.  She called it "Meet Me at the Barre".  I went with her and took some pictures for her new website HeadSpace.Fit.

The Elicit Brewing Company

#Beertography: Recropping Old Photos

Sally wants me to write a grilling cookbook.  Been after me to get started for years. 

I have the first ten thousand words down in draft, and I have an idea how I want move forward.  That's all good.  However, the working version reads more like a grilling memoir than an actual cook book, to the point that I felt like I needed to spend some more time grilling before pressing into the meat of the story.

See what I did there?

#SBRLLR: Firstie (Part 4)

R___ was my favorite college girlfriend.  We were both committed athletes and both cadets, and if I hadn’t been such a pigheaded asshole about the nature of our relationship, I’m quite sure that it could’ve lasted.  As it was, we spent a lot of time together, dating in a traditional sense, going to local restaurants and just talking.  I enjoyed her company tremendously.

#SBRLLR: Duty - Honor - Country (Part 2)

We marched back from Camp Buckner a day before the plebes returned from Lake Frederick, and in no time, my classmates and I settled back into Academic Year rhythms.  I watched my own plebe struggle through Reorganization Week, eventually pulling him aside that Friday afternoon as my own team leader had done with me the previous year.

“Cangolosi!  Go take a shower right now!  That’s an order!”

Two Roads' #RoadJam 2017

Sally and I attended Two Roads Brewery's 4th annual RoadJam music festival yesterday, and it's become one of my favorite annual events.  We went with our good friends Colin and Elizabeth, with whom we also went camping last weekend.  I was, to say the very least, pretty damned excited in the run up to the day.

Me and Sally in front of the Brewery Stage.  West End Blend is behind us.

Two Roads Brewery & #RoadJamFest 2016

Two Roads Brewing Company held their third annual Road Jam Beer and Concert Festival yesterday on the brewery grounds, and Sally and I attended.  $30 got you admission and a beer, with subsequent beers available for $5 apiece via the many beer trucks and tap-tents set up around the yard.

Veracious Brewing Company

My wife and a few of my friends headed up to the Veracious Brewing Company over the weekend to celebrate my and my buddy Colin’s birthdays.  We’re both beer geeks, but I dare say that Colin has a few levels on me in this specific genre of geekdom.  Nevertheless, we all had Hell of a good time.

This sign is painted above the vats inside Veracious's brewery.

Veracious is a great little place.  Located in Monroe, Connecticut, it’s the kind of small, truly artisanal craft brewery that you think you’re going to find every time you head out for a craft brew tour.  But where a lot of craft breweries have only a few kinds of beers and maybe one or two signature mainstays, Veracious carries more than a dozen.  They do everything, often with multiple variations on a theme.  In an increasingly crowded marketplace, this is a unique and enjoyable approach.

As I told my buddy Colin, Veracious doesn’t just make beer.  At a certain level, they make art.

5 Things on a Friday: Hoping for an Opportunity

My first draft of got a little jingoistic this week.  Perhaps that's inevitable in the wake of the Paris attacks and the other, also very considerable attacks that hit Beirut and that Russian plane in Egypt.  I find myself uncomfortable calling for a war in which I am extremely unlikely to fight--although, who knows, right?--but it feels like we may yet have an opportunity here.  This might be one of those moments in which we can achieve regional consensus and act, even if that consensus is short-lived and entirely self-serving on all sides.

Consider: Russia, Britain, and the U.S. were not all fast friends in the late 1930s and early 40s.  In fact, the allies invaded Russia in 1917 to try to oust the Communists.  The smarter half of the American public was keenly aware of the British interest in maintaining its colonial presence in North Africa and elsewhere--and distinctly un-interested in the ramifications this held for our collective strategy.  These differences were real.  It’s hard to say what would have happened had Japan not blundered its way into attacking Pearl Harbor in 1941.  However, the resulting three-way alliance fought a relatively unified and collective war that defeated its enemies and set the course for the modern world.

5 Things on a Friday: Science Loves Dad-Bods

Hey!  It’s Friday!!!  

How was your week?

***

1. Lockheed Martin Announces Sikorsky Purchase And Strategic Review Of Services Portfolio (Forbes)

Acquisition of Sikorsky for an after-tax price less than its current annual sales will improve Lockheed’s market positioning — already viewed as the best among first-tier defense contractors — in several ways.  First, it will boost annual revenues over $7 billion by acquiring rotorcraft franchises central to U.S. military operations.  Second, it will reduce company reliance on the tri-service F-35 fighter program, which had been projected to grow to over a quarter of corporate revenue as production ramped up.  Third, it will accelerate the company’s efforts to derive a greater share of income from foreign sources, since Sikorsky last year generated nearly half of its revenues overseas (Lockheed was at about 20%).  Finally, it will provide the combined enterprise with a multi-decade stream of sustainment revenues as it supports thousands of Black Hawks and other Sikorsky helicopters in use around the world.

Weekend Round-Up

I know, I know.  I said Mondays were supposed to triathlon posts.

It wasn't much of training week, though.  I ran three times, including on Sunday with Sally, but none of it was particularly outstanding.  It snowed Saturday morning, and I still managed to get out and run Saturday afternoon, so I guess that's something.  It was fun, but it wasn't any kind of record or anything.  I ran, I bopped around to my tunes... That's what I do.

5 Things on a Friday: The Curious Case of Kim Jong-Un

I feel like I’ve been waiting all week for the coming weekend, and it’s made the week drag badly.  We have a lot going on this weekend.  Sally and the kids and I are going up to West Point for the game against Rice, and after that, it’s a three-day weekend.

#RICEvsARMY

But we still have to get through Friday.

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.

Weekend Round-Up: Dreaming of Maine

It's Monday, and that's a bummer, but we've got less than two weeks until we leave for Maine. That is awesome!

Level Up: I Believe in IPA

Is it weird that I'm really fired up every time I get one of these crazy merit badges?

You get this one for checking in with ten different IPAs.

Drink Locally

The "Local Flavor" merit badge from Untappd.  Five beers from a
local brewer?  I think that's what it's for.

Watching the SEC Championship Game

With Sierra Nevada's DevESTATEtion.

Auburn is killing it.

Thanksgiving Pics: 2013

Ten pounds of turkey, raw and in the pan.

Sierra Nevada's DevESTATEtion Black IPA

Fall is great for a lot of reasons, but as the season rolls on, things start to cool down in a serious way, and it can become kind of a drag.  Yeah, Thanksgiving is cool, but Christmas is equal parts family day and absolute stress-fest, and living in Coastal Connecticut, both holidays are apt to come with freezing weather--and even the occasional winter storm.  Add in the fact that the sun is now setting at around 4:30 pm, and that college football is nearly over, and bottom line, late fall has a lot less to offer than does the early part of the season.

One of the upsides of the season, though, is the fact that we tend to get some of the year's best beers.  My absolute favorite of these is Sierra Nevada's Estate small-batch, fresh hop seasonal.  I've been wondering for a few weeks now when we'd start seeing it in stores, so you can perhaps imagine my surprise when I saw not "Estate" but "DevESTATEtion," (6.7% ABV) an apparently fresh hop Black IPA seasonal in a bottle that looked like Estate's bottle, but capped with black wax instead of Estate's traditional green.

I step in close and see the following: