Golden Hour

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...

I am the daughter of a Capital-D “Doer.” My mom was always doing stuff. Social events and volunteering and working a full-time corporate job and planning my birthday parties and sewing my Halloween costumes and redecorating our house and, and, and … I didn’t get the “Doing” gene. I tried, really tried, for a long time, to do it all — work full-time and get a graduate degree and buy a house and book my social calendar and plan a wedding and plan a move and have kids and, and, and … … And,...

The biggest social media news of the last few weeks centers around TikTok’s new terms of service, which went into effect on January 22. The new agreement — which didn’t allow users to DISAGREE, btw; it was either “agree” or leave the app — lays out in writing a bunch of stuff that TikTok was allegedly doing before these new terms of service were released … but there is something especially sinister about seeing it all laid out in writing. Cybersecurity Girl had a very simple breakdown of the...

My second email this month? That’s so weird. I thought I said this newsletter was going to be monthly … ? It was. Because I thought that’s all that I could handle. And then I realized — in part based on my conveyor belt analogy from my last newsletter — that I need to be sending MORE emails. Not too many more, because I don’t want to overwhelm you or overwork myself, but let’s be real: Once-a-month emails get forgotten. Maybe you saw it pop up, said you’d read it later, and then deleted it...