Five Things on a Friday: Lex Luthor, Green Lantern

Happy Friday, friends!

If you're wondering, I didn't mean to be gone all week. I want to build a better following on the blog with my book coming out, and writing nothing for a full week is not the way to get that done. 

What can you do? I got busy this week. Not just with AFF but rewriting Dr. Necropolis's sequel, Gun Girl Gracie. I really want to get that thing out to test-readers soon, but I want to make sure that it's as good as it can be before I send it off, so I wound up kind of falling down the rabbit hole with it.

Anyway. We're back now. Let's get into it.

Five Things on a Friday: Dear Mr. Fantasy

How are we doing, friends? 

I've been busy this week. It feels like there's a lot going on. I wrote a new prologue for Gun Girl Gracie this week, but as of this writing, I've not even had time to go back through it for its initial rewrite. Right now it's just sitting there, like an itch I can't quite scratch.

Anyway. Let's talk.

Notes on a Saturday Morning

Good morning, friends. 

Since early December, I've been working steadily on The Return of Dr. Necropolis and its sequel Gun Girl Gracie, and now that both are done in draft, I'm at loose ends. I still woke up at 5:30 am this morning out of sheer habit, but with nothing to work on, I've just been sitting here.

It's so weird not to have anything to work on, but I feel like I really NEED to take some time away and attempt to get some perspective on my own work. We'll see how that goes.

In the meantime, here are some thinky-thoughts, just to scratch the itch.

Styx Setlist

Sally and I are heading out to see Styx with Eagles' guitarist Don Felder and REO Speedwagon's Kevin Cronin early next month. 

You'll find the full set list below.

Styx performing in 2017 (via Wikipedia).

Mount Snow Weekend Round-Up: A Skiing Story

Sally and I went to Mount Snow over the weekend for what proved to be a fun, somewhat eventful weekend.

Sally and me at Mount Snow Saturday afternoon

Five Things on a Friday: Catching Up Since 2020

I have a LOT to do today, friends. But I need to warm my brain up a little before we get into it, and for that, we turn to Five Things. If you're wondering, our last Five Things on a Friday occured on Friday, September 11, 2020. 

So yeah, it's been a while. I hope you're all doing well in what very much feels like a world gone mad.

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. 

Journey Beyond Madness: We Finished Our Speaker Project... For Now

I don’t know how many folks have followed our first halting steps into the world of HiFi audio, but to say the very least, we’ve been on quite an odyssey. To be clear, you can take it much, MUCH further than what we’ve done here. However, like my enthusiasm for photography, I now feel like we’ve learned enough to continue learning at a slower, more reasonable pace. More to the point, we’ve reached a level of resolution that feels entirely reasonable and fulfilling, at least for the time being.

Here we're showing you a picture of an auditory experience.

To put that another way, if we go any further with this thing, it’ll get SUPER expensive. This is not the goal.

Journey Into Madness: The WiiM Pro Plus & Our Household Sound System

With this post, we've now written three times about our never-ending journey towards building a high(ish)-end sound system in our house and on our back deck. While I don't know that we're necessarily done with this project, we're done for right now. Thus, this post serves as a cross between a write-up of lessons learned and an exorcism of the madness that's developed from starting to learn about this stuff in the first place.

From an early version of Sports Bar on the Back Deck.
We've come a LONG way from here.

If you missed the previous entries in this series, you can find them here:

• Journey Into Mystery: Building a Sound System on my Back Deck
• Twitter Threads: Sound Quality

We may well come back to this in the future, but for right now, I feel like I've maybe exhausted my wife's patience with this thing. Moreover, we've definitely hit a point of diminishing returns.

Journey Into Mystery: Building a Sound System on my Back Deck

If you know me, then you probably know that I go through phases. I get obsessive and maniacal about stuff on a rotating basis. My most recent phase is high fidelity (HiFi) sound on a budget, and it's been perfect for me in the sense that it's intensely, endlessly complicated with no obvious end-point in sight.

Our back deck canopy

It turns out that like Triathlon, HiFi is a journey, not a destination.

Twitter Threads: Sound Quality

Been on a quest to improve the sound quality from our record player and TVs. Turns out that the cheapest, most effective way to do it was to install some 1/4" silicone feet on the bottoms of our speakers, isolating them from the dampening effects of being on the ground.

— Danno E. Cabeza (@DannoECabeza) May 21, 2024

The (Live?) Album Project: Let’s Talk New Rock Bands

My wife and I saw Styx, REO Speedwagon, Foreigner, Sammy Hagar, Loverboy, and George Thoroughgood all in concert over the summer a couple of years ago. We had a LOT of fun, but we also realized -- inescapably -- that our favorite bands are all getting old now. These guys are in their mid-to late-70s or worse.

Like it or not, seeing these bands in concert is becoming a limited time proposition.

With that in mind, we launched the Live Album Project, both because we wanted to get recordings of our favorites before it gets too late and because we wanted to find some new favorite bands for the future.

The Black Crowes: Shake Your Moneymaker

My buddy Chris and I went to go see the Black Crowes last night as part of their current tour, celebrating the 30th anniversary of their debut album Shake Your Moneymaker.

They played the whole album last night from start to finish!

The Black Crowes: Shake Your Moneymaker

Swim Across the Sound (Update 2): Aerobic Threshold Mystery!

Well friends, we have reached the part of the training cycle in which I remember why I retired from competition. Which is to say that I woke up this morning tired and sore to the point that it took a real effort of will to get out of bed and go swim. Looking back on my competitive swimming career these days often feels like remembering that time I had a mental illness. I was mad about everything pretty much all the time, and I used those feelings to fuel my competitive fires. Today I’m in a much better headspace, and that’s great 99% of the time, but boy, it is sooooo much more difficult to find the right mindset when things get tough in training.

Click here to learn more about our Swim Across the Sound team.

5 Things on a Friday: Purple Rain

Hey folks, happy Friday!  Let’s do it.

5 Things on a Friday: Skiing the Super Bowl

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

5 Things on a Friday: Titans, Jeter, Rush

By the time you read this, I will be on my out to Colorado to ski with my buddy Brian.  Yay!

Alright.  Let’s do it.

5 Things on a Friday: Football Season is Coming!

The New York Giants reported to training camp this week along with the rest of the NFL.  With that, my buddy Joe and I scheduled the new season of our now annual four-week NFL divisional previews.   The NFC will be here again during the week while Joe covers the AFC over at A Hoosier on the Potomac on weekends.  I think Joe said he was going to run his columns on Sundays, but don’t hold me to that.  Mine will run on Thursdays.

Live shot of Eli Manning and the NY Giants in training camp.

More to the point, I’ve personally got a lot of football scheduled for the next few weeks.  It starts Tuesday with the return of weekly Army Football Preview posts, and then we’re off.

Let’s do it!

Pics: Def Leppard & Journey at the XL Center

I took Sally to see Def Leppard and Journey last night at the XL Arena in Hartford.  We saw Def Leppard about a year ago at Mohegan Sun and had such a good time that we wanted to go again.  But we'd been on the fence because the show was on a Monday night, and the XL Arena is not, in all honesty, the nicest venue I've ever been to.

After what has felt like a month of rain, yesterday was gorgeous.
Took this shot on my way down to the Hudson Greenway to memorialize the weather.

5 Things on a Friday: You Really Should Be Following Me on Twitter

Facebook instituted a new News Feed algorithm recently, and I hate it.  Ostensibly intended to cut down on the site’s 3rd party media manipulation and endless political arguments, what’s happened instead is that I’m now seeing the same posts over and over again.  Stuff that I would have glossed over in months past is now literally inescapable.  If anything, I’ve actually muted more people in the last month than I had in the previous twelve.

Usually just for 30 days, mind you.  I use the “Take a break from this poster” option because I still like my friends.  I just don’t need to read their political thoughts on repeat.  

Meanwhile, the algorithm’s effect on me has been to cut this blog’s traffic in half.