Golden Hour

I'm not going to lie to y'all — I'm not really in an ✨expository✨ mood this week. I had some ideas of what to write about, but nothing really felt right. So instead, I'm going to take a moment to be vulnerable. I'm struggling right now. I know many of us are, especially those of us who are small business owners. Prices are going up. Budgets are tightening. Clients are walking away — not because they don't need our services, but because they are having to cut costs wherever they can. One of...

I took my kids to the library last week because they wanted to learn more about the prizes for summer reading, but also because my 8-year-old had a very important question about space: What's beyond black holes? Now, this is a question that I'm not even sure NASA knows the answer to, but there's no harm in asking a librarian who can then recommend books or resources that might talk about black holes. ... At least, that's what I thought was going to happen. We went to the desk. We asked a...

I'M FINALLY HOME. (Wait. What does that mean??) WELL. If you've been following along on Instagram / Threads, you know that I spent most of the last two weeks in the hospital with my Big Kid, who had to have multiple surgeries! They don't want me to disclose what kind of surgeries, but what I will say is that they are doing SO much better, we are FINALLY home, and I am really grateful we finally have some answers and — hopefully 🤞🏻 — a solution. BUT. That's not the point of this newsletter....

I did it, y'all. I rebranded. With the help of the incredible Kristy Black (please check out their work if you're not already familar!), I've finally turned Golden Poppy Digital into something that looks and feels like what I want this business to be. And you, my lovely newsletter friends, get to be the first to see the new fonts, colors, and general ✨vibe✨ Please bear in mind that I'm writing this newsletter while on Day 4 of The Cold from Hell™️, so if any of this is nonsensical, we're...

Happy Wednesday. "Wednesday? Doesn't this newsletter usually go out on Tuesdays?" It does. You're right. But this week, I just could not get it together. I plan to send these newsletters out on Tuesdays following the weekends my kids are with their dad. The logic there is like, obviously, if I'm not parenting all weekend, I should have time to sit down and write a newsletter, right? You don't need the boring details of my entire weekend, but on Saturday, I was on my way to, at, or heading...

Do you ever stop to think what your life would be like if social media didn't exist? Like, really, really think about it. Would I have friends? I met my bestie from college in the dorms ... but really, we met on the UCSC Livejournal the summer before college started. If we hadn't connected there, would we have been as close as we are now? Would I be a mom? I know people don't think of dating websites and apps as "social media," but they are. And that's how I met my ex-husband. If not for...

I work with several clients who are in high-vulnerability industries. We're talking healthcare, organizational conflict management, survivor advocacy — genres of work where people's lives and livelihoods are quite literally on the line, and introspection, restorative practices, and humanity are necessities. And yet, many of my clients feel weird about having their faces all over their socials. I've had several conversations about this over the last few weeks where I've gotten to quote one of...

My 8-year-old daughter has been on a tear with organized sports this year. She's always been an athletic kid — lots of running and amateur parkour that gave me, even as a seasoned parent, the worst anxiety of my life — but I never actually enrolled her in anything. This is in part because my older kiddo is an indoor kid. I was a (mostly) indoor kid. Their dad? Also a former indoor kid. So I figured whatever wild energy she had, whatever physical activity she needed, could be managed with...

With the World Baseball Classic coming to a close tonight, this would have been the perfect opportunity to write some LinkedIn AI-slop like “What the USA’s WBC run taught me about running my own business.” But I’m not going to do that to you. Well, not really. What I am going to talk about this week is vibes and values, and how I see those playing out in the WBC between teams who are clearly having fun (hola, Dominicana!) and teams who are treating this like they are literally at war with...

One year ago today, I was unemployed and desperately trying to figure out what came next. After being laid off from my corporate HR job a year prior to that, I found myself running out of savings, getting zero bites on job applications (I have thoughts on job hunting in the age of AI, but that’s a whole other newsletter), and feeling like I needed to do something to shake things up. I had taken on a (very) part-time job doing social media for a local swim school a few months prior, and it...