There's an email sitting in my drafts that I wrote almost three months ago (okay, maybe six?). It's to a financial planner. Someone I know, a good friend who I know would do a great job, which honestly makes it worse, because there's no anonymous form to hide behind. Just me, asking a person I'll run into at the next social event for help with something I feel like I should already understand. I wrote the whole shebang: what I do already, roughly what I'm trying to figure out, whether there's...
12 days ago • 2 min read
I am terrible at marketing myself. Sounds ridiculous when I actually say that out loud, but it is true. Not strategically terrible. Like, psychologically, deeply, possibly generationally terrible. I grew up in the day and age (and I'd guess a lot of you did too) where talking about yourself was considered bragging. Where you kept your head down, did the work, and let the results speak for themselves. You didn't walk around announcing your wins. That was for people who were full of themselves....
19 days ago • 3 min read
Every June I get cranky. I'll just own that upfront. My husband is a high school teacher. My oldest is in elementary school. Which means every summer, 50% of my household gets to exhale while I'm still very much inhaling. The routine evaporates. Kids are staying up later. Nobody knows what day it is. There's a general sense that all structure has left the building and taken my sanity with it. And yes, okay, there's FOMO. I'm big enough to admit that too. They get the hikes and the lake days...
26 days ago • 2 min read
This week's Chirp started as a boiling hot rant. I had a situation happen last week - the kind that makes me pace around my kitchen with flailing arms talking to myself and my voice notes while Jax the dog looks at me like I'm crazy. I recorded the whole rant, dropped it into Claude to help clean it up (and cut a few f-bombs), and my own AI agent told me it was too much. What?! And then I got pissed at Claude. So I walked away for a few days and begrudgingly decided that maybe the robot was...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
I about peed my pants on a bridge in Washington last weekend. Seriously. How did I get here, you ask? Let me back up. A few of my friends and I did a spur-of-the-moment girls trip to Whidbey Island, which I cannot recommend enough if you've never been. Hot tip: Coupeville (the sweet little town where Practical Magic was filmed) is exactly as cool as it sounds and the hit of the trip. Somewhere between the beach walks and yummy food and laughing so hard my stomach physically hurt, someone...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
"Shoot! I wish I would have known about that sooner." "Wait, what?! How did I not know about this?" "Where did you hear about that? I didn't even know that event happened!" Sound familiar? I swear these phrases are on repeat around town. An event comes and goes, a business opens or closes, something big happens and half the people who live here find out about it weeks later (if at all). It is a running joke that you literally have to bash people over the head with information or they won't...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Nobody wants to admit they're using AI. I've been in enough rooms lately to know that's true. And while they may not want to own up to it, people are using it. Daily. And then quietly closing the tab before anyone notices, like they got caught doing something embarrassing. There's this unspoken assumption that if you're using AI, you're somehow being inauthentic (and god forbid we aren't authentic 24/7). Or that you're not really creative. Or that the work isn't really yours. And I just......
2 months ago • 6 min read
I genuinely do not understand people (and by people I mean women because it always tends to be us ladies) who won't own their age. The "oh ha ha, not a day over 25!" thing. What?! I can't do it. I won't do it. I am 44 years old and I earned every single one of those days. I'm proud of where I am and all the shit I went through to make it to this jolly old age. And 25? No thank you. Those years were exhausting. Everything was unsettled. You're right at the beginning of your career and...
2 months ago • 2 min read
You know when something happens and your immediate thought is "whoa - you are definitely not my kind of people." That just happened to me with my business coach. And all because of one piece of advice she gave me. First, a little background...six months ago I hired a business coach to help me take an objective, non-personal view of where we are and where I want to go. And I have been genuinely impressed with the progress. Since October, we've audited my time, restructured our services, built...
3 months ago • 3 min read