In short: the kids have started school and are both having great experiences, I’ve joined a “women’s friendship group” that might actually be a cult, and we’re collectively crushing it at the gym. I’d tell you more about all of it, but for the first time in a while, I’ve got real, tangible, juicy updates on the renovation, so that’s what I’m focusing on today.

The house that will one day be

This is a reminder that we closed on our house in mid-January. It’s now late August, and we still haven’t broken ground on the renovation needed to actually move into this house.

That’s not to say nothing has been happening. We did the asbestos remediation in February, into March. We hired a designer and a general contractor, both of whom have done a ton of work. We have architectural drawings, we have the signoff of our structural engineer, we have all the weird plot measurements and soil tests and drainage maps that were required.

It’s just that everything takes time, and I still don’t have an estimate of what the timeline for the project is as a whole. Our original timeline was Christmas, which is obviously shot.

But next spring? Next summer? Next school year? Your guess is as good as mine, and as a planner, that’s a difficult place to be.

I’m actually less stressed about it than I’d expect to be, in part because our rental is so great. It’s comfortable and enormous, with more space than we actually need. It has a big, grassy fenced-in yard and a patio where Stephen and I drink wine every Friday night. The current state isn’t bad.

I’m enjoying the design meetings and the contractor conversations and obsessing over every detail - what will our doorknobs look like? What do we want the edges of our baseboards to look like? Do we want one or two hooks next to the towel racks in the bathroom? (Two, duh.)

Getting to the good stuff: design meetings

Three weeks ago, we met our designer, Rachel, at the house for the initial design presentation. For this presentation, we focused on the three most design-intensive spaces: our kitchen, primary bathroom, and guest bathroom. She brought two fully photorealistic renderings of each space, as well as a plethora of samples of everything - tiles, countertop chunks, cabinet doors - to help make the renderings feel more real. This was very fun, and very tactile. It’s one thing to see a picture of a tile online - a totally different thing to hold it in your hand, feel the weight and see the way the light captures the texture.

Because Rachel is the best, and goes above and beyond in every possible way, she added a little something extra at the end of her presentation. (Following my friend CB’s advice to always add “just one more thing” at the end of a presentation for extra wow factor.) She brought samples of wallpaper and fabrics we could use for window coverings for all the areas of the house that aren’t being fully designed - areas like the dining room and downstairs family room. These bonuses will help the house feel cohesive, rather than having three fully designed rooms surrounded by very-obviously-new-but-untouched spaces.

We mixed and matched between the designs for each space, made some tweaks based on our preferences, and then concluded the afternoon, alight with the future glory of our home.

Then, last Friday, we had a full day Design Event. We met Rachel and our general contractor, Danny, at the house for a full walkthrough. Rachel brought the final materials and renderings, Danny asked one million detailed questions (outlet placement, how did we want the seam of a wall to meet the seam of the wallpaper, what kind of banisters do we like for the stairs).

I’m grateful that Stephen and I are equally decisive people. We made the majority of decisions on the spot. We know what we like and we’re not afraid of commitment… which is, now that I think about it, how we ended up together in the first place. I still like him a lot, and am very happy with my commitment.

After two-and-a-half hours of in-person decision making, it was time to head to the plumbing showroom to pick out all the plumbing fixtures. It’s always a learning experience to discover things you care about deeply, and things you don’t care about at all.

Plumbing fixtures I care about deeply:

• The kitchen sink I will use at least three times a day

• The toilet upon which my behind will rest daily

• The showerhead in the primary bathroom

I developed an obsession with a particular kitchen faucet. Just look at it:

So prettyyyy. Also, so not going in my house, because I fell in love with the one faucet that doesn’t come in a stainless steel finish. Booooo.

By the time we were picking out drain designs for the guest bathroom, and debating between a round or a square-but-with-rounded-corners backplate that goes behind the knob that turns on the guest bathroom shower… I turned to Rachel and said, “I don’t mean to say that I don’t care, but… we are reaching the lower limits of things I care about.” With that freedom, she made some selections for us.

I’m sure the drains will be lovely.

The kitchen of my dreams

With every faucet, shower handle, toilet, and drain selected, we went to the cabinetry showroom.

Now y’all, I have been DYING for this step. Cabinetry is so fun. There are so many new features out there - drawers with built-in spice racks and pull out cabinets with cookie sheet holders and cabinets that look like cabinets but have drawers inside. The features are endlesssss.

I wanted to see every possible feature, just to know what’s out there. Ultimately, we didn’t end up going with many of the fancy options at all - this will already be more pantry and cabinetry space than we’ve ever had, so just having the space is the biggest advantage of all.

What I’m most excited about is the overall floor plan of the kitchen. It’s intentionally designed so that all four of us can be in the kitchen at the same time. There’s plenty of working space so that Stephen and I could be making dinner together, and the kids could run in and grab a snack from the pantry (because teens) without being underfoot. Can you imagine?!?

Or Maya could be making the salad for dinner while Xan and I chop veggies. Or any other of a million configurations that we find ourselves in, but that are impractical in the rental. The rental has many things, but counter space is not one of them. Every appliance is functional, but nothing is delightful. The new kitchen is all function, and all delight.

Danger zone: the lure of luxury

The one place that Rachel will not be accompanying us is the appliance showroom. She compiled a shopping guide that listed suggested brands to choose from, the exact dimensions of every appliance to look for, and the finishes and design details to think about as we browse.

This is the danger zone, because our kitchen is designed like a pro chef’s kitchen. We’ve got room for an enormous refrigerator and a big fat chef’s range. I literally cannot wait.

I want to put in the appliances that not only look beautiful, but will outlive us all, and function exceptionally. At this point, all of us cook, and we cook A LOT. In any hobby, using good tools and good equipment is a true joy. Cooking - and the tools and equipment that enable it - is no different, but the price differential between, say, a beautiful notebook and pen for writing and a chef-style range is SUBSTANTIAL.

We went to the first appliance showroom and had a lovely time looking at many options. We have a second appointment this weekend. However… the salesman at the first showroom let us know that the highest-end brand we’re considering has their own showroom up in Denver. He described it as “an experience,” and said we should drive up if we get the chance. They have professional chefs demoing all the appliances. They have every color option and configuration on display.

On the one hand, if we go, we’re going to get fixated on some incredibly high-performing (and highly priced) appliances. On the other hand, we wouldn’t want to miss An Experience so… we’re going. We’ll accept all thoughts and prayers for our budget.

Sneak peeks

Here are a few samples of what we’re looking at for the house:

Reno next steps

Now that we’ve got all our finish selections made, we have just a few steps remaining before construction actually (finally) starts:

• A couple weeks of final budget approval

• A final signoff from the engineer once we get window sizes finalized

• Two to three weeks of permitting

And then… we break ground! The foundation for the extension will get poured first, then the structure of the extension will be built. Once that’s all enclosed and solid, we’ll get to the electrical and insulation work for the whole structure. And then - many moons from now - all the fun interior stuff that we just picked out.

Once construction starts, we’ll get weekly updates on the progress, and I think it’ll really feel like things are moving. Until then… one day at a time!

Lightning round: some fave moments from the past two weeks

• Xan took on a crazy task - his school counselor told him that if he could learn an entire semester of Algebra 2 in between their meeting and the first day of school (10 days), and pass the semester exam with an 85 or better, it would get him onto his ideal math path. Turns out, math classes are structured differently in Colorado, so this impossible task is the difference between graduating with the ideal senior year math class and a slightly lesser ideal math class. No worries, he just casually taught himself a semester’s worth of math, in 10 days, FROM THE TEXTBOOK, and crushed the exam.

• Meanwhile, Maya was assigned her school tuba, took it home, practiced for 5 days, filmed her audition video, and scored a spot in the highest level band.

• It’s back to water polo season for this family, and the season kicked off with an inner tube social. What’s an inner tube social, you ask? Well, to level the playing field, all the players (and any parents that want to hop in) get in an inner tube - like a pool floaty - and play a few rounds of water polo. The rules are strict: butt must be firmly planted in the tube, with legs and arms splayed out. It’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen, and it was so fun. Here’s an example, from our very own Colorado College.

Next time

Will we have our approved final construction budget? Will Stephen and I have newly formed and strongly held beliefs about which microwave is best for us? Will I tell you about the slightly culty “make a new friend” group I joined?

Who’s to know, and who’s to say - the only way to find out is to subscribe and find out!

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Until then, thanks for tuning in! If you deeply held and strongly felt beliefs about your appliances, drop a comment! I’d love to know!

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You may recall that I spent the first half of last year’s Vermont vacation down with plague, but this year, it was not I that fell. Two days before our departure, Stephen went down - lots of mucus, sore throat, fever, the whole bag. The household immediately entered Plague Protocol - the sick party sequestered in his room, while the rest of us loaded up on zinc, washed our hands like crazy, and practiced every other semi-scientific sickness prevention ritual we could think of.

This seemed to work, whether through upholding superstition, luck, or actual scientific methods, and none of the rest of us went down before our trip. As we walked across the sweltering Denver Airport parking lot, I prayed to the Plague Lords to leave us be until our return and to the Vacation Gods to smile upon us.

My prayers were heard, because our departure day took quite a fortuitous turn for me when, for no apparent reason, I was upgraded on our flight to New York… and then on our connecting flight to Vermont as well. Did I leave the rest of the family at the back of the plane while I enjoyed the canned wine and extra legroom in Comfort Plus?

Preparing for heaven on Earth

This vacation was the anchor that pulled us through the hardest parts of the move. Every week, we’d buckle in for a wild ride, all while saying to ourselves (and each other, and anyone else that might listen), “We just have to make it to Vermont.”

Let me spell out for you what an absolute delight this particular spot in Vermont is.

1. You are three miles from the Canadian border, right on the edge of Lake Champlain. You get a beautiful breeze coming off the lake, and it’s rarely even 80 degrees.

2. There are scheduled activities for the mornings and evenings that you can go to… or not. You don’t have to plan anything. Want to go on a guided tour of a Vermont sugar house? Just show up at the front desk at the scheduled time. Want to go on a run through the nature preserve or read a book in a hammock by the lake instead? Just take your body and go!

3. Your children will have a blast without you. The children’s programming is delightful at every age - including teens! Our teens did water sports, field trips to cool hiking spots, and visited kittens. Last year, they hung out with us a bit during family time (afternoons), but this year, they mostly hung out with their friends. They have scheduled activities available in the afternoons for families with younger kids, too - pay a visit to the art barn, or participate in family lawn games. You still don’t have to plan anything.

4. All of the meals are yummy and made for you. You don’t have to plan anything. You don’t have to cook anything. You don’t have to figure out what the kids are going to eat, because kids eat at the kids program, and adults eat together. Adult meal times are sacred. You get to have adult conversation.

5. The families that come are just wonderful. Everyone is welcoming, and kind. This is a weird observation that I made last year too, but - the people that come are also happily married. As a happily married person, I generally cringe at the culture of making snide remarks about your spouse or being passive aggressive - which is pretty commonplace in lots of public places. But not in our little spot in Vermont. Everyone just… likes each other. It’s great.

Oh, also, is it coming through that you don’t have to plan anything? After such a logistics-heavy season, that was reason enough.

A whole new life

The most stunning discovery on this vacation is that I am, perhaps, born to be a sailor.

As a person who has lived their entire existence with feet planted firmly on the earth, and spent the past year espousing the joy of touching actual dirt, who could have foreseen the joy I got from being on the water?

The camp has a real sailboat for experienced sailors, but for newbs, they offer lessons on something called a Hobie Cat - ‘cat’ being short for catamaran.

We actually signed up for a lesson last year. We went out on the lake, and there was no wind at all. We spent a beautiful half hour or so floating on the mirror-flat lake, soaking in the sun and watching birds coast on by. There wasn’t much learning last year, as it turns out that in order to sail you need… wind.

Turns out, wind makes the experience sooo much better. About 5 minutes into our lesson, our instructor revealed that he had only learned how to sail about 8 weeks prior. This turned out to be wonderful, because he explained everything in simple terms and broke down every step in a beginner friendly way.

There are only three things you need to do to successfully sail a Hobie Cat:

1. Maintain tension on the sail

2. Steer using the rudder

3. Don’t flip it

The last one is optional, but we noticed the staff had “Hobie Flips” listed on the whiteboard, alongside other embarrassing incidents that they track throughout the summer, and I didn’t want to give them a reason to add a tick mark.

Born to be pushed by wind

The feeling when I pulled the sail tight and the little boat took off across the water - the spray of the water on my face, the wind blowing my hair back, the speed.

Steering is a funny thing too, because you have to get a feel for the wind. It’s not like driving a car - you can’t just turn and steer in the direction you want to go. You have to align yourself so that the wind hits your sail at the right angle - which means that changing directions is sometimes a bit of a creative maneuver.

For example, to circle around a small island, you might sail in a diamond shape instead of a circle.

We took one lesson, and we were hooked. We went out again on our own, and when we came back, our instructor told us we should enter the regatta.

The folly of the new and bold

Of course we entered the regatta, and of course we immediately began making bold proclamations that we were not just going to enter the regatta, we were planning to win the regatta.

It’s a vacation - how many people are realistically going to enter the regatta? We’d only seen a couple of other people taking the Hobies out.

A full deck, it appears - all 9 available slots were taken by the end of the afternoon, and we were grateful we signed up early. At dinner that night, we laid down our claim: after two times sailing the Hobie, we were going to take home the prize. “Trying to claim your dark and stormys?” our friend asked. That was when we learned that the annual prize for winning the regatta was a free dark and stormy at the bar. I couldn’t remember the last time I had a dark and stormy, but I do love to win a prize.

That was also when we learned our friend entered the regatta, and grew up sailing.

Regatta regatta

“The word regatta comes from the Venetian dialect word regata, which means “contest” or “contention for mastery””. (Thanks Google AI.)

Friday morning, the last day of our vacation, dawned clear and bright. We were prepared to throw down in the contention for sailing mastery, proving ourselves worthy of our new identities.

We showed up, focused - locked in, as the kids would say. The deck was full of other regatta champion hopefuls. The only thing missing was… wind.

You might’ve been wondering what happens if you’re out on the water and there’s no wind. Like… what if you’re all the way out in the middle of the lake and the wind just dies and you want to come back?

Well, friends… you paddle. I made a joke that this would level the playing field for us newbs, and no one laughed. Apparently everyone else had competed in the regatta before, and therefore was envisioning the misery that lay ahead.

It’s a good thing we’d already planned to win.

Had any actual sailing expertise been required, we would’ve had our asses handed to us.

But there was no sailing, because there was no wind, so all that was required was iron determination, impeccable steering (me), and relentless paddling (Stephen).

We won by a nose.

Victory

I think I’ll be riding this high for the foreseeable future. Word of our victory spread fast, and we were congratulated over and over again.

I couldn’t stop beaming when we got our certificate. Good for us for signing up for something, showing up, and committing to what the day required!

Lightning round: some fave moments from the past two weeks

• My daughter cooked dinner tonight because I was tired. Seriously, what better gift?!?

• Stephen and I walked a labyrinth together in the nature preserve, and it was an unexpectedly moving experience. I did not realize this, but a labyrinth is different from a maze. A labyrinth is a single winding path, intended for meditation and reflection. Find out if there’s a labyrinth near you - I highly recommend the experience.

• We are back in our routine of having a family planning meeting. That sounds like we’re planning to add members to the family, so I’m retitling it “family logistics meeting.” In any case, this past week, we had the meeting at a fun local coffee shop instead of at the kitchen table, and I enjoyed the change of location!

Next time

I had to leave Vermont behind, but the five books I read on vacation are sticking with me! I’ll tell you about them next time! I also actually do have renovation updates (yay!) - things are moving forward, and I should have a few pictures to share. Depending on my mood, I may whine a bit about the re-entry to real life.

How do you get back on track with real life after a vacation?

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As far as I can tell, folks started making them as an antidote to doomscrolling on their phones, which we can all collectively agree does not make us feel good. But in order not to doom scroll, you need an alternative, which is what the dopamine menu provides.

The rules for a dopamine menu

Well, this isn’t a formal activity, there are no rules. But if there were to be some guard rails, I’d say, don’t put anything on the dopamine menu that doesn’t align with your long term goals. For example, if you have a savings goal, don’t put “get an expensive massage” on your dopamine menu. It’s meant to feel good in the short term AND the long term.

I also quite like the idea of a seasonal dopamine menu. Different activities make sense at different times of your - I’m not out looking for pumpkin picking and hot cider in July. (Though, I suppose it might be time to be planting pumpkins? Am I late again? I’ll have to check my Colorado planting calendar…)

All the advice I’ve read about big moves is to lean into what your new city is good at. Well, my new city is good at sunshine, beautiful views, and patios. We are good at the outdoors, whether you want to be in it, or marvel at it from afar. For my personal goals, I’m also trying to lean into some more sunshine and movement, and the season seems perfectly made for it, so all of that shapes my personal dopamine menu.

Go for a 5 minute walk

My goal is to take a 5 minute walk, preferably outside, as many times a day as I can. I was inspired last year by a book called Get Up! (my 2025 book of the year, in fact), which did a phenomenal job laying out the science of why long, uninterrupted stretches of sitting are so bad for us.

This year’s answer was Body Electric, a book by TED Radio Hour host Manoush Zomorodi, who partnered with researcher Keith Diaz to figure out how to undo the damage sitting causes. In short: a 5 minute walk, ideally every half hour. If you’re thinking - that’s a lot - you’re right, but there are benefits even if you only take a 5 minute walk every hour or two.

Five minutes is nothing in terms of time, but it’s everything in terms of keeping your body functional. For restoring energy, focus, and undoing most of the physical harm from all the sitting we do - all it takes is a little walking here and there throughout the day.

I like these little breaks to step outside. In 5 minutes, I can’t get very far, but I do notice the boost to my mood and energy. I can feel my blood moving again, my breathing deepen. The sunshine warms me up and brightens my spirit. It also helps me hydrate more, because I always swing by the kitchen for a tea or coffee refill on my way back to my desk. Win-win-win.

Find a new trail

In 2018, I set really simple goals: cook enough new recipes to add 12 new “regular rotation” meals to the family rota, and discover 12 new trails. I ended up enjoying these goals immensely, despite the fact that they weren’t what I thought of as traditional “big goals”.

There’s an overhead with doing something new. Whether it’s going to a new doctor’s office (big ew, but adulting gold star), or doing something fun, there are logistics to making the new thing happen. For discovering a new trail, you have to figure out where to park, when is it busy, is it dog friendly? Is the trail wide enough to walk side by side with a friend? Are there bathrooms or porta potties - just at the parking lot or also anywhere along the way? Is there a water station? The list goes on.

BUT. Once you’ve done the new thing once, you’ve unlocked a novel new thing that could become a regular favorite. The neighborhood our permanent house is in connects to a giant park with a wonderful trail, but I’ve yet to explore the trails near our rental. We’re right across from a giant open space that has 25 miles of trails - surely there’s a trail for me there!

Because moving involves so many new things (the new doctor’s office AND the new dentist’s office and the new grocery store), it requires a bit of a mental commitment to remembering and penciling in a time for and then noticing when you’re doing a FUN new thing.

So I put this on my list to proactively seek out a fun new thing. In fact, why not seek it out in a fun new way…

Host a little “best in my city” competition

I’m excited to find new trails, but I’m also excited to find my new favorite coffee shop, and bookstore, and pizza shop, and date night spot, and and and.

This gave me the idea for a bit of a competition. Which coffee shop do I think is the best of all the coffee shops nearby? The only way to know is to try them all and develop a ranking. I thought it’d be fun to get the kids in on it too - which pizza shop is “our” pizza shop?

First, we must develop our ratings criteria - a scoreboard of sorts. For a pizza shop, for example, we’re rating them on crust, topping options, appetizer options (extra points for garlic knots), and pizza-alternatives - a funny thing to put on the scoreboard for a pizza shop, but critical for us because our daughter doesn’t actually like pizza all that much.

There are a number of companies that will do the work of finding all the pizza or coffee shops for you - there’s a company that puts together something called The Pizza Passport for a number of cities. It’s a nice option, and tells you a bit about each shop - but I prefer to make my own, customized to the neighborhoods I want to explore and the dimensions I want to rate on.

I suppose this might be a multi-entry on my dopamine menu - one to make up each of my fun little competitions and maybe even print them out, and then a separate entry for each time I get to make a stop at a new spot.

Make eye contact with a mountain

I’ve started a collection of photos (some actual pictures, some just snapshots in my mind) called, Why’d You Put That Mountain There?

We keep finding ourselves absolutely dazzled by the mountain views. The other day, we found ourselves watching a stunning sunset over the mountains, nearly panoramic views… from a Chili’s parking lot.

It’s hilarious to me that there are these insane view from completely mundane views. But I guess when there’s beauty all around, there’s just nowhere ugly to tuck the strip malls and the Chili’s and all the other institutions of daily living, and so you wind up with these silly mismatches.

If I walk out the door of our rental, turn left, and start strolling, I can lay eyes on Pike’s Peak in 8 minutes (10, if the dog is being exceptionally sniffy). Whenever I get overwhelmed or need to stretch my legs, I pick this item from the dopamine menu to put whatever small troubles into perspective.

Make eye contact with another human

People get weird when they don’t have regular contact with other people. Don’t give me any of that “I’m an antisocial introvert, I hate people!” bullshit either - people need people. Some of us need them in greater doses than others, but we all need each other.

I remind myself of this when I start getting a bit weird. Too long without a casual conversation and the plants will start talking back when I ask them how they’re doing. Thankfully, this doesn’t need to be as much of a project as we tend to make it for ourselves.

It does seem particularly easy in Colorado though. Walk into a coffee house and the barista actually wants to know how you’re doing. Even though we’re in a decent-sized city, if I’ve had the gift of having the same barista twice, they ask how I’m settling in.

The South is known for its hospitality, but my impression so far has been that people here are more genuinely interested - both in the people passing through, and in the people settling down. I don’t have any theories (yet) as to why that is, but I’m grateful for it. So far, I’ve had several great conversations with folks that run booths at the farmer’s market, chatted in passing with a multitude of baristas, and even made a few friends at the gym. This makes me happy, and will also help me stay sane.

Daydream about a greenhouse

In Georgia, I didn’t need a greenhouse. The growing season is so long and the conditions are generally so impeccable for a huge variety of plants that a greenhouse feels a bit like socks in sandals - extraneous, unnecessary, a little bit silly.

In Colorado, however, a greenhouse may be a beautiful indulgence. I don’t actually know enough yet to commit to it, but I’ve been told by a wizened gardener at our farmer’s market that it’s a must have.

The other delight in daydreaming about a greenhouse is that I get to daydream about what sorts of plants I would start in it, and which I would keep in it year-round. (Tomatoes, it seems, do best staying in the greenhouse, to my surprise.) This affects my daydreaming about the entirety of the garden, since it impacts what I plant in the front and the back of the house.

I’m getting swept up just thinking about it - which is sort of the idea. It’s fun to daydream! Just don’t interrupt me when I get going - I’ll go on and on about theoretical drip irrigation systems, and how I’d do the lighting, and, and, and…

Lean into a local hobby

Apparently, we are going to be mushroom people. Not like, shrooms and psilocybin and exploring our inner depths mushroom people. I’m talking wearing a shirt like this one (source: Chummy Tees)

Or this one (source: Indigo Lake Design):

And then getting very serious about the healing properties of various mushroom varieties. It’s not all psychedelic, you know! And sharing lots of facts about how mushrooms communicate, and feel things, and basically hold the earth together.

I thought we were heading towards bees, but since we’re still right in the city, it seems the mushrooms will happen now and the bees will happen at some future time.

How did this happen? As with many good things, our son. Last year, he was the progenitor of the garden, coming home with a few packets of seeds. This year, it’s getting sucked into the magical, wonderful world of mushrooms.

I knew something was afoot when we ordered subs (from Snarf’s - OUR sub shop) and he got mushrooms on his. Given the years of debate whenever a recipe we made called for mushrooms, I was certain this was a mistake. When I dared ask, I was met with fact after fact about The Greatness of Mushrooms.

It was at this point that I got to absolutely blow my teenager’s mind - I have, in fact, attended Mushroom University. Years ago, Four Sigmatic, a company that powders a variety of mushrooms and turns them into something deceptively called mushroom coffee, hosted an online mushroom school. Their very-mushroom-passionate founder did several hours of lessons on lion’s mane, reishi, and hen of the woods, cordyceps, and more.

I loved it so much that I actually still remember a number of medicinal properties, and still drink a reishi mushroom drink before bed (not Four Sigmatic, but a similar concept. A tastier version, apologies to 4S.) I do not, however, have any knowledge of how to grow these mushrooms, or the best way to cook a number of them, so we’re going to take some classes at the local mushroom shop… at which point I will have yet another conversation with my son about being very careful talking to strangers about magic mushrooms.

Start a new tradition - Friday night patio wine

Evenings on our patio are just unbelievable. The heat of the day dissipates - sometimes to the point that I need a sweater. In late July. Outside!

There aren’t bugs.

What on literal planet Earth more could I want? A glass of a crisp, dry rosé, perhaps?

Participating in some sort of a tradition, especially a made up one, is good for the soul. What’s the difference between a tradition and a routine? Nothing, except one is more fun. The dictionary may disagree, but this is what I’ve decided.

And so, our weekly glass of wine out on the patio becomes a sacred tradition. We sit outside after dinner, watch the sunset, talk about nothing, and enjoy the wine. Remember how lucky we are to be here, in this moment, in this beautiful place, enjoying each other’s company.

Lightning round: some fave moments from the past two weeks

• We’ve signed our dog up for training with a man that I cannot call Magic Mike, because that evokes images of a very different kind of Magic Mike. This Mike happens to magical in that he specializes in working with reactive dogs, and has an aura that made both my corgi and I sit down and follow orders. Gosh, now it sounds more like the first Magic Mike again. In any case, our pup is spending the next two weeks with him, and then we get our training so we can be better humans.

• We went to Boulder for a weekend, and I entertained myself for a few hours on the local trails that happen to host the landing spot for hang gliders. Very fun to watch! One was up much higher than the others, and I did wonder if he was having the time of his life, or in a bit of trouble.

Next time

A recap of our Vermont vacation, the multitude of books I read there, and perhaps, if we’re all collectively lucky, a renovation update.

In the meantime, what’re you all up to this summer, and what’s on your summer dopamine menu? I’d love to know!

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PS: You might’ve noticed that my posting day has changed. The July posts have posted Thursday mornings, and I think that might be my go-forward, but I’m going to continue experimenting with days and times as we settle into our new routines.

I also shipped out on the 20th, headed to Prague for a weeklong business trip. I returned home on the 27th. Stephen, the kids, and the cats flew to Colorado Springs the morning of the 28th, and a few hours later, the dog and I set off as well. I made a spreadsheet for my coworkers titled Pia’s Great Big June to help them keep up with where I was in space and time, and my working hours for each day. What a whirlwind.

And now the family’s reunited, semi-settled into our rental in Colorado Springs, nothing else to say about all that. KIDDING. What kind of blog would this be if I didn’t wander through every stray thought I had while globe-trotting and driving across the country?

Pretty (sweaty) Prague

I went into Prague TIRED. In my ideal world, I would have had several weeks of careful preparation heading into this trip, and, as you may recall, I had just a few things going on instead. I was determined not to stress myself out about my lack of preparation, which I mostly managed.

Look at me, practicing acceptance - gold star!

In any case, rather than elegantly gliding into this business trip on the coattails of immaculate preparation, I came screeching in like a rally car taking a turn too fast, just one that maybe started the race with an empty tank of gas and two flat tires.

All was well. I got to meet many colleagues that I hadn’t had the opportunity to meet in person, and what better place than a beautiful and historic city, experiencing an unprecedented heat wave? Nothing bonds new friends better than learning who sweats the most out of their literal nose folds.

On the upside, I learned that lemonade is a big thing right now in Prague. Almost every restaurant served some version of homemade lemonade, and I had a delightful time trying as many of them as I could. I am also grateful that I traveled to Prague from an even hotter, even more humid climate, because despite the unbelievable amount of sweat that poured from my face, I still managed to go on a five hour walking tour of the city without doing too much trouble. Shout out to Atlanta, I will not be as well heat trained in future years.

In any case, here are some photos from my travels:

Returning to depart again

I arrived back home in the early afternoon on Saturday, with 24 hours to see the fam before all of us scattered our separate ways. The children, in classic teenager fashion, reported that they had nothing to tell me about their three weeks at summer camp except that it was good.

Well, glad there was so little to report, because it was time to pick up the dog and pack up the car. Since Stephen and the kids were flying, anything that wouldn’t fit in their suitcases (or that we, ahem, forgot to pack in the POD) needed to make it into my car. We fit it all with barely an inch to spare!

My route from Atlanta to Colorado was an estimated 22 hours of drivetime, plus stops for the dog and I to eat, pee, stretch our legs, etc.; and due to a variety of factors, I didn’t want to drive for more than 5 hours a day. I planned a 5 day route, and I was quite pleased with the results. I worked half days, drove, crossed time zones, walked the dog, judged rest stops, checked in on work, and then enjoyed (to various extents) the comforts of several AirBnBs.

Random thoughts from the road

Initially, I thought I’d break up the drive into a day by day run down, but that turned out to be quite boring. I listened to a lot of Dungeon Crawler Carl. I stopped at rest stops and gas stations. None of that was super interesting. What was more interesting to me were some of the themes that emerged along the drive - where my mind wandered as I went. And so that’s what I’m going to share with you.

What an incredible amount of infrastructure is required to make the country run: road construction, rest stops, and runways

There was not a single day that took the amount of time I expected it to. I got better at estimating how much time to add as the days went on, mainly because I learned that Google Maps’s estimates of how much of a slow down to expect was unlikely to be accurate. Google Maps also does not adjust your estimated speed adequately for shockingly strong winds, or needing more breaks to shake out your hands due to shockingly strong winds, etc.

But the thing that really hooked my brain was the amount of construction that was happening along my route. On the first day, driving from Atlanta to just past Nashville, there was just a little bit, and because there’s always at least a little bit on the major Atlanta highways, it didn’t really surprise me.

But then on the second day, driving from Tennessee and crossing into Kentucky, there were major lane closures and slow downs. And then through Kentucky into Illinois.. And then in Missouri. And then across Kansas. The amount of slow down varied by the time of day, of course, and how populous the area was, but it felt like regardless of which state and which region, huge amounts of road improvements were taking place.

You hear about major infrastructure improvement bills in the news, and how many jobs that kind of infrastructure investment creates, but I’ve always found it difficult to imagine the scale.

Perhaps the feeling is particularly acute after my week away in Europe, trying to explain the distance between Georgia and Colorado in European terms. The trip is roughly 1390 miles (2237 km), which equates to:

• Driving in a straight line from the northern tip of Scotland to the southern coast of England (600 miles/965 km) and back up again, plus 190 miles (305km) of sightseeing along the way.

• Driving from Copenhagen, Denmark to Salerno, Italy, taking a slight detour for a stop in Hamburg, Germany.

• Driving from Madrid, Spain (where several of my colleagues are from) to Prague, Czechia, the location we happened to find ourselves in while having this discussion.

There were some other comparisons we stumbled across as well, but the resounding review of my European colleagues was, “Right, you could do that… but why on earth would you?”

It appears The Great American Cross-Country Roadtrip, the one in which you cross a single giant country rather than multiple smaller ones, is only an American ideal… and it requires a great deal of road-building to be feasible.

A miracle in current capitalist times, it also offers the opportunity to stop at rest stops. It’s because there are so few places to exist for free that I find rest stops so miraculous. I can just go, and take my dog out, and use a bathroom, refill my water bottle, and not pay for anything, without breaking any laws. And somehow these magical waystations are (generally, surprisingly) clean and well maintained. Check out this beautiful rest stop I came across in Kentucky:

(I will say, the rest stops in Kansas had weird metal prison toilets, but besides THAT, they were all quite lovely.)

And then finally, the random tiny airports in the middle of absolute nowhere. Who are they for? Do farmers ship in supplies this way? Do they have small planes to fly over their fields? Something completely different? I want to know!

What a different way to live

Man, you really see a lot of different ways to live, crossing this much terrain. There are the cities, which are quite familiar - and I popped through several big ones on my way: Nashville, St. Louis, Kansas City, Topeka.

Then there are all the mid-sized and small towns - cute places to drive through, a few with interesting shops or landmarks.

And then there are the positively tiny communities, or the long stretches of farmland. I have to imagine that if you live on one of these farms, you can go quite some time without seeing another person outside of your family. For some of the largest farms, I wondered how long you’d have to drive to even get off your own property, much less run to the grocery store. If you forget something at the store, I’m going to bet you’re not running back to grab it unless it’s absolutely beyond necessary.

Some of the towns I passed through had populations of less than 200. I felt a weird tightness in my chest every time I passed a tiny township’s sign - you really can’t be choosy with your social circle in a town that size. Or if you are, I suppose you turn to the internet. In any case, I imagine you’d consider yourself very lucky to find yourself in a tiny township with fellow crocheters or book clubbers or any other particular interest that we don’t even think twice about as a social group in a city.

The last town I stayed in was Goodland, Kansas - population 4,000. The little town surprised me - it had a game shop, much like the game shops my son goes to to play D&D or Magic. It had a cafe, and the owners turned an extra room into a little book shop. They had a red sharpied thermometer drawn on a big piece of flip chart paper, showing how many books they had to sell that month to keep the bookstore open.

I had a hard time imagining how such a small town could sustain these wonderful little businesses, but I like to think that people were willing to drive from further away than they might be in a bigger city with more options.

The thing Goodland is known for (insomuch as Goodland is known for anything at all), is having The World’s Largest Easel. I wonder how and why the particular community association that chose The Easel chose… of all things… an easel, with a replica of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, as The Thing that would put Goodland on the map.

What an incredible number of lies about Kansas

There was a lot of scoffing about Kansas. Apparently, folks tend to find Kansas boring.

First of all, I was under the impression that Kansas is flat, and I can tell you from white-knuckling my way across the first quarter of Kansas, attempting to keep my car from getting wind-blown off a hilltop, Kansas is not flat. Or, at least, not as flat as I thought.

It does flatten out the further west you travel, but the wind doesn’t quit. In some parts, the trees alongside the highway grow almost horizontally from the constant flow. The elevation across Kansas rises pretty significantly. By the western state line, crossing over to Colorado, Kansas ranges between 3 and 4 thousand feet in elevation.

I was fascinated. There was so much farmland, and you could see SO. FAR. And it was beautiful, and green. Sometimes you’d see a tractor, or a truck, crossing a field so far away it looked like a Hot Wheels car, kicking up tiny dust clouds.

I saw fewer cows then I expected.

At one point, my husband called, and I said, “I think I might love Kansas?” I needed him to tell all the colleagues who’d assured him that I’d hate it - bored out of my skull. I don’t ever want to live somewhere with so few people and so few coffee shops, but I sure did enjoy driving through.

And then… we made it!

And just like that, the drive was over, and I was at our rental. The rental is wonderful - so much more spacious than we imagined when we were looking at photos online. It’s decorated like the house of a grandma in a 90s sitcom - Thomas Kinkade prints on the walls, chairs and couches that you really sink into, big wooden armoires in every bedroom. It’s so cozy.

Well, that was my wrap up of an absolutely insane month. Send me a sign of life! What’d you get up to in June?

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Lightning round: some fave moments from the past two weeks

• I’ve adapted to the altitude! Did you know that high elevation makes you extra hungry? Apparently, you’re supposed to eat extra carbs to help adapt. Say no more, and pass me an extra plate of pasta!

• We’ve started checking out coffee shops, game shops, and family activities nearby. So far, my favorite was Dungeon Crawler Carl-themed painting night at a nearby game shop.

• There’s a community garden close to the rental, and I’m debating whether or not to get a plot. We still don’t have a timeline for our renovation, so I think I’m safe from that perspective, but is getting a plot so late in the season silly up here? I’m thinking about emailing the Garden Stewards to find out.

• View from a local pizza shop:

Next time

We are hoping to nail down some more renovation details - everyone keep your fingers crossed for us. At this point, it’s unlikely we’ll be in the house by Christmas as we’d originally hoped, and I’m starting to lose faith that we’ll be in the house before next summer. I’m working on a little summer dopamine menu for myself, so I might share that. And I’ll continue to debate with myself (and any of y’all that weigh in) on the pros and cons of attempting a fall garden at high elevation.

Until then, I’m so happy to be back, and thanks for reading!

I didn’t want it to be my sanity. I appreciate everyone’s understanding during this absolutely ridiculous time. Here’s where I was at last week:

Stuck in a stress loop

We’ve been in a bit of a holding pattern with further planning the move, since we don’t have closing dates for the house, and therefore don’t know exactly when we can leave. In terms of renovating-the-house things, I’m hoping we can lock in our final quote for the renovation and start the permitting process - it’d be really nice to get the construction portion of the project underway. The design portion has been so much fun, but every day that passes without us breaking ground makes me nervous that we’re not going to be in the new house by Christmas.

Rhythms, seasons, and rests

There’s a concept from a popular early childhood education program that has always stuck with me - the idea that there are rhythms to our days, our weeks, our seasons - that periods of busy-ness should be followed by periods of rest, that loud hours should be followed by quiet ones, that still moments should be followed by active ones.

If you’re thinking this intro is the beginning of me saying how our period of insanity is now being followed by a period of rest… you are incorrect. We are continuing in the absolute whirlwind for a bit longer, and I realized that until I get my season of rest, I’m going to have to settle for making the most of the little pockets of time. I thought I could just power through, but it turns out, there is only so long a person can power through before the power starts to run out.

Burning the candle at both ends… until the candle burns out

It’s not a surprise that I haven’t been taking impeccable care of myself for a few weeks now. I usually have a whole system… but that whole system has been thrown out the window with the absolutely unhinged packing-cleaning-packing some more cycle, work hitting a very busy season, Stephen’s work travel, and showings, showings, showings.

Some number of weeks ago, I stopped sleeping through the night, popping awake at 4… then 3… then sometimes 2 o’clock in the morning, unable to go back to sleep.

Sleep is an area where I usually don’t struggle unless I’m mega stressed… and I’ve been mega stressed for some time now. At first, I assumed it was the stress of getting ready for picture day at the end of April. Then I thought if I made it till the showings weekend, I’d magically reset and start sleeping like a hibernating bear again.

That did not happen.

It turns out that I might be past the age where I can get away with eating garbage, curling into a shrimp shape in front of a screen, then spending hours packing boxes and carrying them back and forth from storage after having absolutely no other activity during the day.

Fatigue built, stress mounted, and I seemed completely unable to let that stress go. (I mean, did I like, go for a walk or do anything about it? No. But I couldn’t out-think my stress… a tried and true strategy, in that it is a tried and true failure of a strategy.)

Back to basics

So, two weeks ago, I finally admitted to myself that self-care (and, uh, basic self-maintenance) fell by the wayside during the crazy pre-photos and immediate post-photos weeks, and I was starting to feel it.

I set a few basic goals, and the level of basic perhaps highlighted quite how far off the normal-healthy-human path I had fallen:

• Eat breakfast before starting work - ideally sitting down

• Eat lunch - also sitting down, not at my desk, not while working

• End work at a reasonable time

• Go through some sort of evening shut-down ritual

• Reinstitute my Brick schedule (which prevents me from scrolling on my phone first thing in the morning and late at night)

Evenings are when my brain likes to surface all the things that escaped my attention during the day: I need to reschedule our cleaners to a different day, did I ever charge the lawnmower battery, did I move the laundry over, did I plant enough flowers or should I order some more seeds just in case? It also keeps a running list of everything on my plate for the move, the renovation, at work, children’s appointments upcoming (oh, I’d forgotten until 9:59 pm that next week there’s an allergist appointment - a fact I could’ve continued to forget until dawn, but NO)... The list goes on.

This brain has been busy.

I’m starting a dreaming list of how I want to take care of myself as soon as we’re in Colorado, and then pairing it with a “bite-sized” version I can start doing now. I don’t want to further delay healthy practices, but I also don’t want to be rigid about how I implement them - I want to be realistic about my capacity and stress level. The goal is to be kind to myself, not to punish myself.

Colorado dream 1: Get into a workout routine again.

Bite-sized version: Get up from my desk and walk/stretch/bop for 5 minutes every half hour.

Colorado dream 2: Go walk outside during lunch.

Bite-sized version: Walk around the garden for 5 minutes during breaks/lunch.

Colorado dream 3: Join the community garden, the book club, whatever other clubs will have me.

Bite-sized version: Meet friends once a week.

These are the rituals that help ground me. None of these are wild, and all of them make a difference. Every little bit helps. I’m curious if there are any practices that are part of your day-to-day that you consider sacred for your sanity and happiness?

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We’re all just plants

I’m so grateful for the garden in this season. It makes it easier to pull myself outside and into sunlight, and to stretch for a few minutes and let my eyes look at something that’s not a screen, when there are gorgeous little sprouts right outside my door.

The garden requires very little of me right now - just the occasional squirrel chasing (the flowers are getting too tall for me to leave the nets on) and watering. Beyond that, it is just a pure delight to me. The sunflowers are really starting to stretch up, and I just learned about the practice of pinching.

Not familiar with the fine art of pinching? WELL, let me tell you! Apparently, you can pinch off the top off a sunflower plant once it has its first few sets of real leaves, and it will split and form multiple branched stems from that point. Each branched stem will form its own blooms.

You can do this with zinnias, cosmos - a whole plethora of plants, apparently, and I’d never heard of it!

I was skeptical - it feels wrong. Why would I damage the plant that I’ve been so carefully guarding from damage by other predators? Well, I’m here to tell you that I tried it and it WORKS. Look at this sunflower!

Some of them split in two, some of them split in THREE. My zinnias aren’t big enough to pinch yet, but with all the rain we’re getting right now, I’m sure they’ll get there soon.

Do you want to hear something EVEN WILDER? If you pinch zinnias, you can take the top part that you pinched off, pop it in a glass of water, and the stem will sprout roots. Then you can plant that portion! Double zinnias!

Turns out, a few laps around the garden every day, the occasional flower pinching, some sunlight, and better nutrition, and I’m feeling a lot better. There’s still a long way to go to get back towards any sort of peak performance condition - but in this season, I am candidly aiming for a sane arrival in our home over any kind of physical peak for myself.

Since last week…

Well, in the span of those 7 short days, much has happened:

• We accepted an offer on our home, passed the inspection and appraisal gates, and have our official closing dates!

• Stephen and the kids will fly with the cat, and I will be driving across the country with our dog. I’ve booked AirBnBs for every night of my cross-country drive!

• We realized we needed to get the keys to our rental in order to have somewhere to send the POD of our belongings… so we booked a trip to Colorado before the closing to pick up the keys.

• We found out I’ll be going out of the country for a week in June for a work trip.

These are all good things, just things that continue our apparent 2026 theme of Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. Which leads me to…

A Stayin’ Sane Summer

An update on the summer posting calendar - in June, Stephen and I are taking a trip that we’d planned many months ago, followed immediately by a flight out to get the keys to our rental, followed by closing on our house in Atlanta. Then we have 48 hours before I leave for a 7-day work trip. The day after I get back, I will start my cross-country drive with the dog. And then it will be July.

SO. I will not be posting in June, but I will be back on July 8 with many updates, and plan to resume the every-2-weeks posting schedule from that point on. I appreciate y’all sticking with me during this time, and I can’t wait to hear about everyone’s summers!

Subscribe to watch us hopefully close out this chapter, and start the next!

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Do you have a fun vacation planned in June? Are you a flower pinching expert? Tell me what’s going on with you!

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Lightning round: some fave moments from the past two weeks

• A good listen: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, The Art of Manliness is one of my favorite podcasts, and I swear Brett McCay is just THE BEST interviewer. This conversation with Manoush Zomorodi is what got me back on the good path of moving my body. It’s such a hopeful, optimistic conversation - you don’t need to do anything crazy to feel better, lower your blood sugar, and increase your energy levels!

• I started declining recurring events on my calendar for Atlanta-based events. This is a sad moment, but also an exciting one - it’s making the move feel very imminent.

• We are gearing up for BONNAROO - one of our favorite events of the year. I cannot wait to load up our rental RV and set out for four days of fabulous music, sunshine, and incredible lemonade. I look forward to returning blissed out, caked in dirt, and with a weird sandal tan.

• My first calendula bloomed!

And my first cosmo of the season as well! (Wow, the meaning of the word ‘cosmo’ sure changes in your mid-thirties…)

Next time

Until July - thanks for spending some of your rare and precious time with me!

We’ve officially survived photo day, and my brain cells appear to be coming back online, which is quite nice. Stress levels in our household were very high in the two weeks leading into photo day - contractors in and out, busy weeks at work for both of us, a myriad of children’s activities, vet visits, and packing, packing, packing, oh my.

But now we’re on the other side, life is easy, breezy, and beautiful, and I can look back kindly upon our very stressed selves and tell you all about it.

Behind-the-scenes: staging and photo day

By Wednesday night, I was confident that we had not done enough packing. I was equally confident that all four of us had packed as much as we reasonably could in the days given. I packed before work, we packed on lunch breaks, and then we packed some more after work.

I had a presentation to do Thursday morning, so I worked a half day, and then went to join the rest of our crew to go to WORK.

The crew:

• Our realtor

• Our stager

• Adrian’s crew of movers - 3 or 4 dudes

Our realtor had done so much work by this point that I was not surprised when she showed up ready to pack and carry boxes, arrange furniture, and generally do anything else that needed. Not surprised, but very, very grateful.

I knew what she meant when she said she wanted all surfaces clear,. Countertops: empty. Dresser tops: empty. Dining room table: empty. We didn’t quite accomplish this before her arrival, but we’d made good progress.

Where our visions deviated was in regards to the many (many) bookshelves. The guidance originally issued was “about half empty.” I thought half empty meant 4 or 5 stacks of books per bookshelf. For reference, the bookshelves in question are about 5 feet tall, and comprise the upper 80% of our living room shelves. Both have a cabinet base, and are maybe 3 feet wide.

Y’all, 8 of our books are left upstairs.

AND THEN THEY BROUGHT IN FAKE BOOKS. Only two, but still - there are fake books in my house! I packed HUNDREDS of real books, only for them to be replaced with fake books!

I get it, they’re nice and clean and not distracting. I don’t get it because… we had so many to choose from. But alas.

They did leave our book rainbow downstairs - one full shelf of our 16’ long basement shelf is full of books arranged artfully by my daughter.

In any case, as soon as I got done working, I got to more packing. I packed books while Stephen packed mugs (mugs, it turns out, are also Not Approved in real-estate-land). We ran to buy more boxes, we took turns taking things to the storage unit, and we cleaned up in the yard.

I don’t think I’ve worked as physically hard as I did on Thursday and Friday… maybe ever. If we hadn’t had such an intense crew helping, there’s no way we would’ve gotten it done.

While we were packing, our stager and her crew were bringing in oodles of furniture, paintings, and decoration - all in the approved Tastefully Neutral (Boringly Beige, Glaringly Grey) color palette. I’ll joke about this, but while it’s all very neutral in color, it’s all also very nice. I was sort of expecting half-fake cardboard furniture, and this is all actual, sturdy, nice stuff.

They brought in rugs, moved furniture around to accommodate the rugs, replaced lightbulbs that weren’t the desired level of brightness, installed curtains, and hung the art. Despite my urging, they did not take a break for lunch - all of them were in full motion from 10 until 5.

Our realtor was the same, helping us pack one moment, then selecting throw pillows the next, then loading my car with yet more boxes.

It was absolute mayhem. It was also the night of my son’s last band performance at the high school, so we rinsed off and went to a beautiful performance immediately after a full day of labor.

Coming home, we had a list of to-do’s from our realtor, an endless pile of boxes for storage, and a pile of misfit objects and furnitures that simply did not fit with the new decor. It was… overwhelming.

I was also issued strict instructions as to what needed to be done before my realtor arrived again at 8:30 Friday morning. Here’s a sample (a tiny sample from a very long list):

• All towels hidden - only white hand towels in bathrooms, only one per bathroom

• FULL rolls of toilet paper in every bathroom

• All toilet seats down, lids closed

• All countertops everywhere sprayed and wiped

• All glass sprayed and wiped (shower door, mirrors, windows, etc.)

• All curtains opened the same amount

• All blind opened and turned to the same degree

• All lights on - ALL OF THEM

That’s the teensiest tip of the iceberg, but you get the vibe. I got started at 5:30 am, and was in full swing by the time our realtor arrived again.

“Do you mind if I just tell you what I need you to do?”

I did not. I did not have a single brain cell left to think, and being pointed in a direction and told precisely what to do was quite a novelty.

By the time the photographer arrived at 10, the house was spotless, arranged exactly the way the realtor wanted it, and I was kicked out to await an “all clear” text.

I was so tired, the cumulative weeks of effort leading to this moment, the weeks of contractors - painters, carpet cleaners, tree trimmers, etc.; the mounting stress and fear that we wouldn’t get everything done in time; many days of waking up at 4 am, working hard all day at work and then working hard all pre-dawn and night packing; that I did not have anything left to give.

I bought a decaf coffee, drove to the park, and laid down in the backseat of my car until it was time to head back home.

And then it was over

And then that was that. I was back at home, my daughter was on a field trip, Stephen was out of town for his marathon trip, the dog was boarded, and it was time for a whole weekend of relaxing. Since it was just my son and I, we made plans to watch Anaconda (highly recommend), make homemade pizza together, and just generally lay low. A wonderful time!

I’ve seen the outdoor photos, and a preview of the drone video (!) they took flying through our house and backyard, but I haven’t seen the indoor shots yet. Let’s all cross our fingers and hope they’re stunning.

My only goal for the weekend was to not pack more boxes - to take one weekend fully off - and I’m happy to say I accomplished it.

Go touch grass… dirt

I also wanted to finish planting the last of my spring seeds, and I accomplished that as well!

All 700 seeds, yes really, have been planted. I finished planting the calendula seeds a while back, and this weekend was reserved for sunflower seeds and the remaining zinnia seeds. Also, a mystery flower - perhaps bachelor’s buttons?

I read some advice on the internet to soak sunflower seeds for 12-24 hours before planting for faster germination. Sunflower seeds generally germinate quickly in warm conditions, but I care about this because my secondary enemy, The Birds, love to pick through the garden and eat all the sunflower seeds. They don’t care as much about sproutlings, so the faster we can get to that stage, the better.

I’ve planted some sunflowers in all three of the big backyard beds, but the majority I reserved for the front of the house, next to the driveway. This is peak squirrel and bird digging territory, but after my early success in the backyard, I’m optimistic that I can get through the sprouting stage with the help of my trusty mesh netting.

Thriving tomato territory

You may recall we had some volunteer tomatoes growing in the yard, right outside some of the garden beds. I decided to take a shot at transplanting them, and these hearty lil’ fellas seem to be THRIVING in their new environment. I double planted them because I assumed they wouldn’t all make it, and now I’m wondering if I should move some of them into their own areas.

For context, last year we had 3 cherry tomato plants out front, and 5ish in the back. We had more tomatoes than we could humanly eat. Now we have 9ish tomato plants out back… and I just found two volunteer sprouts in the front as well.

New owners, I sure hope you have a gaggle of small children that are prepared to develop a tomato obsession.

Renovation update: design

The success of the garden has certainly bolstered my spirits in this stressful season. The idea of moving out of the sad-asbestos phase of the Colorado house into the fun-design stage of the Colorado house also carried me through.

Because they’re here, y’all! We got our blueprint/floor plan/layout options. Call it what you want, the drawings are here!

We met with our designer last Friday to walk through the many (many!) layout options. She’d prepared four variants for our kitchen, each with 3-5 sub-variants underneath, and six variants (with a smaller set of suboptions) for our primary suite.

Y’all. This is the fun we’ve been waiting for.

Every detail of our lifestyle was considered - are we TV-in-the-bedroom people, necessitating open wall space or a dresser across from the bed? (We are not.) Are we balcony-off-the-bedroom people? (We considered it, but decided that while we might aspire to be balcony people, we actually aren’t.) Are we mirrors-in-front-of-windows people? (We weren’t sure, but turns out… yeah, with the right design, we dig it!)

Where do we want to drop our keys when we walk in the front door? Do we care more about a backpack drop zone or a bigger range? Do we like a more island cabinetry or an island seating area?

The list goes on. It was marvelous. We got to take into account everything we love about our kitchen now, and consider new options that better fit our new space. We got to consider all the tradeoffs, and tip them towards our preferences.

I’m grateful that Stephen and I are both so decisive. We agreed on all the big decisions right on the first call - now we just have fun, delightful, unique little details to ponder over. There’ll be a million more decisions ahead, and getting the floor plan locked down feels like a huge and exciting step!

Lightning round: some fave moments from the past two weeks

• Stephen did it! He ran his first marathon and absolutely crushed the execution.

• One of the bizarre parts of raising teenagers is that their interests shift with very little warning, into topics you know literally nothing about. The latest obsession is Sun Tzu - as in, The Art of War, by Sun Tzu. Every other sentence now starts with, “Well, you know, Sun Tzu says…” I do not know what Sun Tzu says, but I’m so curious to find out.

• I got a gold star (even like, several) from one of my developers for something I built recently. I love a gold star, and I really love my mega-supportive developers!

• I hadn’t seen my friends in FOREVER during this hot stressful mess of a season, but last week, I got to see a bunch of folks! I’ve missed y’all’s faces - thanks to everyone I got to meet up with!

• I got to quiz Xan for the AP Gov exam he took yesterday. He had to learn a bunch of legal cases as part of it, and it reminded me of learning cases in college as a political science major. Such a fun blast from the past, and even more fun discussing the cases with Xan! I’m confident he’s going to do great on this test.

• Need a very light-hearted and slightly tripped TV show to watch? We’ve recently picked up Zack Galifianakis’s This is a Gardening Show on Netflix. The episodes are only 15 minutes long, they’re quite weird, but I’ve also picked up some great gardening pointers! A great wind-down episode at the end of the evening.

Next time

Oh wowza, so much is happening in the next two weeks. I leave for St. Louis on Friday to visit a friend for a long weekend, and then am headed straight back into packing-land when I return. The following weekend is our first weekend of showings - everyone cross your fingers for a multitude of generous offers.

Xan and I will be out of town that weekend, as he’ll be attending a special teen driving school event in Greenville.

We’re expecting a fair bit of rain in the next couple of weeks, so I’m hoping for a big garden boom!

To keep watching the garden grow:

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I’ve been asked to write some more about my AI use cases at work and beyond - let me know if that’s something that you’re actually interested in reading about, or if your feed is too full of AI as it stands.

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Until next time, thanks for spending some of your rare and precious time with me!

We are now IN IT. We are packing for realsies, and the preparatory packing we did leading up to this moment turned out to be a bit of a joke. I’m glad we did it, but it was absolutely the tip of the iceberg. We are now in The Reckoning with everything we own.

An update on The Vibes

Every surface is covered in boxes, things that we don’t know how to pack, things that are terrible to pack (why are there so many discrete tiny objects in our home?), and bags upon bags of stuff to take to Goodwill.

The Buy Nothing group has been wonderful, and they’ve come to take all sorts of odds and ends, but managing the pickups is a job, and it is a job we no longer have time for. It’s “pack the car and Goodwill everything” time. It’s “if I don’t want to even drive this to Goodwill, throw it away” time.

Last week, we had painters here to repaint the inside of the house. This meant that we had to get everything off the walls, and away from the walls, in order for them to be able to do their jobs.

By late the week prior, I realized we needed help - so we hired movers to help us get much of what we’ve packed so far, as well as many of our bookshelves and various other small furniture items, into our storage unit. This was a wondrous choice - it opened up enough space for the painters (and us, the packers) to actually work.

It was also a horrible (but still good) choice in that it was a forcing function - we wanted to pack as much as possible to make the expense worthwhile. I woke up at 4 am on Friday morning, desperate to pack “just a few more things.” In the end - it all worked out. But it’s descriptive of the pace of every day - we have reached the Medium-to-High desperation phase of getting the house ready.

Blessings in unexpected formats

It is a good thing that work at the Colorado house has come to a bit of screeching halt. This is a bit unfair to say - last you heard, I was on the way to Colorado, hoping it would be air-cleared while I was there.

It was, and it is… empty.

Somewhere in the distance, a millennial started singing, “From the windowwww to the WALLS, to the WALLS.” Only to realize, there are, in fact, no walls.

It’s a complete blank slate for us, which is both overwhelming and exciting. I think people keep trying to lean more on the “hey this is so cool” side - and it is, but I would like to acknowledge both realities: I am THRILLED to be customizing this house and building it out exactly the way we want it AND it is a hugely overwhelming amount of work that we had not planned to do as part of this move.

The trip started out on the stressful side - Stephen was already in Colorado for work the week I was flying out, and we were supposed to have only a few hours of overlap to meet our designer and the contractor before he flew home to be with the kids. I was planning to stay an extra day or two to get everything squared away with the house.

Unfortunately, Stephen contracted some sort of horrible plague, and spent our overlapping evening shivering and feverish in a hotel bed while I maintained a germ-free zone at the AirBnB I’d booked. Thankfully, my wonderful in-laws were able to step in to take the kids so Stephen didn’t have to fly home while plague-riddled.

Thankfully, we were able to meet with the contractor, though our designer couldn’t make it due to an emergency. We really liked him and his approach, and were grateful we were able to meet with him. We were also able to lock down a rental for the 6ish months that we’ll need one (we hope) - so great progress was made!

Things in Colorado have been very quiet since. Once the house was air-cleared, our designer was able to send in a drafting firm to draw architectural drawings of the house as-is - those are the so-called “as built” drawings. Once they’re complete, our designer will use them to start drafting possible layout options.

That’s where things go back to being 100% fun for me - I can’t wait to look at layouts. The first drafts of our options should be ready in the next 2-3 weeks… and I’m glad they’re not going to be ready any earlier, because we still have quite a bit of work here in Atlanta to keep us busy.

The labor ahead

This week, we have tree people coming to trim an unaesthetic tree branch in front of the house (okay), round 2 of movers, HVAC maintenance (just regular seasonal maintenance, so of course doing it this week makes sense), an electrician to tighten up a few things, a carpet cleaner, our regular cleaners, a landscaper (also routine maintenance) and the stager coming - all in preparation for Friday photos. The window washer bailed, and we can all agree that was maybe a blessing.

This is after the wave of painters, pressure washers, movers, and other assorted tradespeople completed their work last week.

Our very intense realtor (who I like very much, and would trust with everything from my firstborn to my largest financial investment) essentially walked through our house and said, “Yes, this is great, now do this times 100.” Not really, of course, and she’s very nice about it, but our house continues to look like people live in it.

This is a cardinal sin in real estate - the house must look like no one actually lives there, in a way that makes people WANT to live there. It has to be bland enough that people can project their own lives upon it, but not so bland that it’s uninspiring.

I hope, fervently, passionately, and with every cell in my body that this is the low point of the house selling project. It would suck if that point was still to come.

We are so tired. I am so crabby. I did not realize how much I love being home alone in the middle of the day until SOMEONE is always there with me.

It’s like I must always be wearing pants and prepared for conversation.

Garden updates

Thankfully, I’m not so stressed that the flowers have started talking to me. (Yet. Check on me Friday morning or so.)

I ordered more seeds! I think the red and pink zinnias will complement the sunflowers nicely.

My first batch of calendula seeds across all the beds is starting to pop up nicely, as are some of my balloon flower and clematis shoots. I have some unfortunate volunteer tomatoes that are growing directly next to the garden bed… I think I might leave them, but I worry that someone might trample them if they don’t know what they are. I watched my husband just very nearly take them out with the lawnmower, so we’ll see if they make it long enough for me to even try to transplant them.

I think I’ve stumbled across the best way to keep squirrels and birds out of my beds, but it’s unfortunately pretty unglamorous.

I’d really hoped to tell a tale of internet-ordered wolf pee, but alas, this will be a tale of cheap garden netting. It’s fine - I’d read the wolf pee is more effective on deer anyway, which will be more relevant once we move.

In any case, the netting is working fabulously. I tried some different netting last year that was a hot mess - it kept getting tangled and was difficult to unspool. Eventually I stopped trying and just sort of draped the half unwrapped spool over the bed and called it a day.

This worked fairly well for keeping birds out, but the squirrels just dug around it - I obviously needd something that covered the whole bed.

This stuff is more like a fine mesh - it lets enough sun and water through for the seeds to be fine, but because it’s a very fine mesh, keeps out any grabby squirrel hands and curious bird beaks. I credit it wholeheartedly with my seed germination success thus far.

Water for all, except me

The other garden problem I managed to solve was that of my hose. I mentioned last time that I bought a lightweight hose (life changing). I likely did not mention that the garden nozzle I used on it leaked like a giant pain in the ass.

Essentially, every time I went out to water the plants, I’d end up wearing half a gallon of water. This meant, I dreaded doing it.

When you plant new seeds, you have to water… a lot. At least once a day, preferably twice a day if it’s hot. I finally realized that I could solve this problem by just replacing the nozzle on the hose - I bought a new one for $15, and it’s amazinggggg.

No more dripping! No more dread! It has a bunch of fun settings to play with! Whee!

I planted some slightly more finicky seeds, so I hope they’ll germinate well with all the watering I’m about to do!

Lightning round: some fave moments from the past two weeks

• I promised a March reading update, and here it is: I’m obsessed with Dungeon Crawler Carl. I finished 2, 3, AND 4 in the last month or so - they’re so good! I don’t know why the first one didn’t immediately click for me - I think it must be a timing thing. Right now, Carl and Princess Donut’s adventures are the only thing I want to listen to while packing, cleaning, going to the horror-movie-esque storage unit facility…

• Stephen has officially completed his training plan and is running his marathon this Sunday! Yes, on top of everything else, we have a soon-to-be-marathoner in the house. Get your celebratory balloons ready!

• Driving with Xan continues to be a weekly highlight for me. You really gain an appreciation for the fact that driving is 1000 small skills that we all do at the same time without thinking about them… until you’re driving with someone that is learning them one at a time. He’s doing great though!

• The kids have gotten very into Stranger Things, Ancient Aliens, and Ghost Adventures. It’s hilarious to me that I can walk into the living room at any time of day and hear about a grisly murder, a missing child, or an alien abduction. Light fun topics, perfect for right before bed.

• The kids continue to be actual champions. (Anyone moving with small children - I’ll keep you in my prayers, but look forward to big kids! They’re so great.) Maya has started cooking dinner twice a week, and Xan is supporting heavily on the gardening front.

• We went to the movies! Twice! We saw the Mario movie and Project Hail Mary - I enjoyed both. If you haven’t seen Project Hail Mary - do it. It was so good, a perfect emotional journey, full of hope and the best of humanity in a time where we could all use a bit more of that.

Next time

Will we have floorplans for the new layouts? Will we be able to hide all the things we own in time to make our realtor proud on picture day?

Will I plant all 700 seeds I ordered? Find out if I do by subscribing!

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Will life slow down and start moving at a reasonable pace again?

Next time, friends, we’ll be in Mayhem. I hope your Mayhem dawns bright and clear, with only a delightful number of social commitments. Thanks for spending some of your time with me!

And a cheers to the new friends we’ve made along the way as well! What a ride it’s been.

And what a ride it continues to be! Let’s start with a little check-in of how things are going.

Vibe check, 1-2, 1-2

Y’all remember that Gwen Stefani song, where she says, “This shit is bananas” and then she spells BANANAS a bunch of times? That is an accurate representation of where we’re at right now. Every day involves packing, juggling multiple contractors (are they going to show up? Do we have the quote yet? Holy shit, it costs how much? Can they do it on our timeframe?), working, packing, keeping up with what’s going on in Colorado, gardening (yes, gardening!), posting stuff on our local Buy Nothing group, running to Goodwill for things that aren’t Buy Nothing-able, running to our storage unit, did I mention packing?

It’s logistical bananas. Our house looks wild. The vibes are wild. Emotions are running high or completely suppressed, depending on the member of the family and their natural tendencies. Stephen and I are oft repeating some version of, “Pulling together through hard things is what makes us a family!” We are about one utterance away from the children proclaiming themselves to be ready for a new family.

We’re going to slow down though, and set that aside for the length of this post. This is our time to catch up, so let’s not rush it.

A deep breath

Right now, I’m sitting on an airplane, flying back to Colorado.

The man catty-corner in front of me is reading students’ scholarship applications. His screen has the essay on one side, the student’s name and high school on the other. Below their high school, there’s a question and a dropdown: grant student scholarship, yes/no.

I got a little teary-eyed when he selected yes for a student, then chicken-pecked out, letter by letter, a short congratulatory note that he inserted at the beginning of what looks like a very standard form email template.

You should know, if you ever go anywhere with me, I’m a terrible eavesdropper. I listen to everything that’s going on around me. You’ll know it’s happening when you see my eyes drift gently over your shoulder, hazing over a bit as I tune into whatever drama is unfolding at table 38, or the airport bar, or the cubicle three cubes down. It’s terribly rude.

I’m an eye-dropper too. Well, I suppose that’s not what the word for it is, but I observe just as much with my eyeballs as I listen with my ears. Heavens forbid you head out to our local wine store in flip flops and a bad case of foot fungus - I will see you. (Then I will desperately elbow whoever’s with me, and try to telepathically communicate that they need to look at your feet. Don’t do this to yourself, or us.) At least watching the man reading scholarship essays is uplifting.

I like the whole vibe of being on an airplane. It’s like a massive commuter situation, but people are (generally) more polite than on Atlanta public transit. No one’s blasting music from a speaker. Everyone’s a little bored. I generally have a no screens policy while flying - I usually read for entire flights. Sometimes I listen to podcasts. But I’ve missed writing, life has been moving at airplane speed on the ground, and today I have been gifted these blessed hours in this liminal space.

The vortex of uncertainty

The asbestos remediation of our house is currently two, almost three, weeks behind schedule. I booked this flight a week ago, carefully coordinating timelines so that I would have one overlapping day in Colorado with my husband. The idea was that if I came out late in the week, the house would certainly be done, and Stephen and I could meet a new prospective contractor for the renovation at the house on Friday.

Last week, the contractors said the house would be done by last Friday. Then it got to be mid-week. I started to worry that the house wouldn’t be air-safe by the time I got out there - and as I sit here now, I still don’t know for sure. I’m hopeful though - I received a text just as I was boarding that they’ve started the air test this morning, and hopefully we’ll be in the all-clear by this afternoon.

I’ll be using the word “hopefully” a lot in the near-term, I think.

A pillar of stability and delight

I am looking forward to seeing our designer again. She has been a grounding force for us as we’ve navigated this process. She’s teed up another contractor for us to meet, interviewed and selected a company that can generate blueprints (as-builts, for those in the know) for us, and agreed to help us with the much-larger-than-originally-planned renovation project ahead of us.

Putting a whole house back together has its perks: rewiring will be easier. We’ll know what’s behind every wall. Every light and light switch will be in a place that makes sense to us.

It also means that we won’t be moving directly into our new house. When we’d planned to renovate just a kitchen and bath, the timeline was for them to start in mid-January and complete the work by mid-June, in order for us to move in by late June/early July.

I don’t know if y’all are keeping track, but it’s just about to be April. I think we’ll be lucky if we’re in the new house by Christmas.

BUT - it will be beautiful. We’re considering all options, given that we now have an essentially blank canvas to work from. We’re considering a small expansion on part of the back of the house, or possibly just moving a few interior walls. Everything’s on the table, and once we have our “as-builts” (structural drawings), we’ll get to start playing with options. Once we meet this new contractor, we can start the process of getting quotes for all the different options.

Layouts are really where the fun begins. Right now, all the top floor bathrooms are long and skinny, meaning they both have quite a bit of wasted space. Imagine walking down a hallway to get to your sink and toilet… it’s an odd choice. If we restructure them, it’s possible that the rooms will actually feel more spacious, just in a way that makes sense. We might also be able to get a little extra space for the smaller bedroom upstairs, and a small reading nook in the primary bedroom as well.

The real winner of the expansion would be the downstairs, though. Do y’all remember that when we bought the house, the previous owner marketed it as a 5 bedroom… despite two of those “bedrooms” actually being one long open room divided by a curtain? Yeah.

If we do the extension, we could put a wall in the middle of that room, and have two actual good-sized bedrooms. One could be a nice guest suite, and the other, a spacious, sunny office facing the garden.

Right now, anything is possible. It’s fun to live in this space - where none of the options have been struck out due to impracticality or cost. It’s also cool that we get to make a ton of design choices and really tailor-build this house to be exactly what we want. It’s not what we planned for, but when life hands you asbestos… make lemonade in your new dream kitchen!

Saying good-bye to our first home together

If you read all of that and thought, “All of that sounds expensive,” you would be correct. The asbestos remediation alone was a hefty, unwelcome price tag. A few surprises along the way means that not only do we not have walls or ceilings, but several of the rooms also no longer have floors. Just the quote to get the house back to a livable state is more than what we’d originally planned for our renovation.

And so, we’ve made the difficult decision to sell our home in Atlanta, rather than renting it out. I mentioned it in passing, but it’s still both a bummer and a relief. I don’t really want to manage a rental, I just also really don’t want to say good-bye to this house.

If you’ve been a reader for any length of time, I hope our love for this home has come through.

Stephen and I bought the house together in the early days of COVID. We told our friends and family that we were under contract on the house on April 1, six years ago. Everyone told us to call back the next day because it all happened so quickly.

And it’s been wondrous ever since. What a wonderful home for our family.

And the shed! My little safe haven. My little quiet getaway.

And the garden - oh, the beautiful, bumblebee and flower and veggie and bean and herb filled garden.

It is all very sad. We are making space for the sad right alongside the excitement.

Welcome to your (third) home!

Because two houses just aren’t enough, I’m currently scoping out rentals. This is… not easy. We need the rental to be fully furnished, and for a weird amount of time (hopefully - HOPEFULLY - 6 months). We also have three pets, including a dog that can’t be within hearing distance of other humans. And he’s 90% ears, so “hearing distance” covers quite a range.

On the upside, we’re looking at fully furnished rentals, so if we can just make it there, we’ll have a moment to rest before moving for realsies - AKA unpacking all the crap we are currently shovelling into boxes.

Keep your fingers crossed for us, folks. What a time!

Lightning round: some fave moments from the past two weeks

• I’m obsessed with this hose. How did I not know lightweight hoses are a thing? Our ancient rubber hose weighs a million pounds and is a pain in the ass to lug around, but this new hose makes watering a delight.

• The local Buy Nothing group is so wonderful. We’re getting rid of a ton of stuff, and I hate giving nice things to Goodwill. People coming to pick up toys my kids have outgrown or garden goodies or random decorations are so excited, and sometimes they send me photos of my items in their new home. It’s so wholesome and nice!

• The kids are being SO HELPFUL. They’re actually doing a great job sorting through stuff and recommending items to donate - a far cry from how they felt about parting with their things when they were smaller. I could not be more grateful.

Next time

Will we be able to see the inside of our house? What will it look like with no walls?

Will the squirrels eat all my flower seedlings, or will I devise some ingenious solution to keep them at bay? I keep threatening to buy wolf pee. Find out if I do by subscribing!

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I’ll have a short segment on my March reads, and hopefully some fun photos of the current house projects as well. Until then, I hope y’all had a wonderful Q1, and onwards into spring!

Every year I swear I’m going to start taking Zyrtec in mid-March, and every year I fail, until suddenly I am struck by the overwhelming urge to claw out my own eyeballs.

My son is overwhelmingly smug, and deservingly so: he’s at the end of year 3 or 4 of allergy shots, which has been a huge commitment, and he’s completely symptom-free. I’m thrilled for him - he’s been slowly weaning off a whole cocktail of allergy meds, and to be symptom-free without any medication at all is a huge deal.

I was planning to write a whole post with house updates, but unfortunately, I can summarize quite quickly: delays, delays, delays. And for our current house: packing, packing, packing.

What I really want to share today are all the fun garden things that are happening!

A front yard refresh

You may recall that one of my very first projects during sabbatical was to tear out most of our front yard grass and start a pollinator garden.

The great thing about a pollinator garden is that it requires very little maintenance - just refresh the mulch once or twice a year, weed as needed, and you’re pretty much good to go. Here’s what ours looked like before and after… and then with a few extras.

Before: just coming out of winter

After part 1: mulch! (And an extra week for all the flowers to bloom)

The deep purple lantanas I picked up on a whim are beautiful, and our phlox is showing out in pops of pale lavender and hot pink. Our white irises are starting to boom as well.

After part 2: more plants! More time to bloom!

You can really see that deep purple lantana here (under the window on the right hand side, between the irises).

I couldn’t resist - we added a few more native perennials, for the bees and for the overall look. The native grasses in the front flower in small, star-shaped, deep blue flowers, and will spread to create a gentle no-mow border to the street. The muhly grasses will add height and texture, and bloom in either pink or white. Interspersed throughout is mountain mint - not a garden pest like culinary mint, it’ll spread slightly, but without taking over the yard. It smells wonderful, and bees love it!

The back yard is up next, but so far, it’s been all maintenance tasks: weeding, removing the husks of old plants, and refilling beds with fresh soil.

A pop of phlox by our back walkway. This one is my absolute favorite - every flower looks like it’s been handpainted. Aren’t these just a miracle?

Flowering tree in front of the shed.

Soon, I’ll be planting more flowers! I got a variety of calendula flowers to fill the back beds. Aren’t these just lovely? I’ll be interspersing them with zinnias, and later on, sunflowers.

But first… backyard mulch mountain must be conquered! The bees are busy and so am I!

Lightning round: some fave moments from the past two three weeks

• My son got his learner’s permit! I had my first lesson with him and we had so much fun. I can’t wait to do more!

• I’m completely sucked into Dungeon Crawler Carl - I’ll say more in my March reading round-up, but I flew through book 2 and am already mostly through book 3. The perfect read for a crazy season!

• My beloved little dog has been joining me in the backyard shed (my home office) for a few hours every day, and he’s just so cute in here.

Next time

An update on the move, the many house projects, and hopefully, the Colorado house. It’ll be time for March reads, and a Q1 recap!

To catch all those updates and more, make sure you subscribe:

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Can you believe we’re already a quarter of the way through the year? What a wild time. Thank you for spending some of that precious time with me!

It feels like it’s been everywhere for some time, but the vibe has shifted. The AI news used to be more sequestered to the tech sector. All of us were making fun of every B2B website suddenly having “AI” in every sentence, when those of us on the inside knew half of those features were either useless or not as “AI-powered” as they claimed.

Now, AI is a major news story, and I think everyday non-tech people are familiar with ChatGPT and Claude, potentially even Anthropic and OpenAI, even if they don’t know all the specifics. The impact of AI on war is in the headlines. (Ahem, not-so-subtle reminder to switch to Claude and ditch ChatGPT.) The news went from making fun of AI for making stupid mistakes to worrying about teens getting AI girlfriends to holy shit, AI is coming for all of our jobs. The economy is reacting to articles written by relatively random people (as in, not key economists) about the impact of AI on the labor force and productivity.

It has been a series of weeks, y’all, especially if you’re working closely with AI. I’ve talked about AI a little bit before, but I’m going to share a larger segment now that I have more hands-on experience. If you’re AI’ed out, feel free to skip to Reclaiming my time and attention (about the Great Unsubscribe of 2026) or some quick peeks at the garden below.

Playing with the robots

I refer to the entire landscape of AI as “the robots.” As in, “I enjoyed playing with the robots today” or “the robots really helped me pull some research together” or, most recently, “wow the robots really f*cked me over on the slides for this presentation.”

In case you’re blissfully unaware of how AI works, my descriptor is completely inaccurate. There are no robots involved. When we casually refer to AI in day-to-day terminology, we are mostly referring to generative AI, and more specifically, the use of large language models, or LLMs. These are the technologies that are frequently in the news lately, and that many of us are interacting with. They’re not new, but their widespread usage is, as is their rapid rate of improvement.

Other forms of AI have been around for much longer - you may be familiar with phrases like machine learning and/or deep learning. Don’t worry - we’re not going to get into the super technical stuff here - this is just a reassurance that AI isn’t new, and also, I can’t believe I have to say this - not sentient.

My robot terminology is only because I find it funny, not because I think sentient robot shellfish (Clawdbot joke) are coming to take over the world.

Back to play time

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, and I’ve done my small part to combat misinformation on the internet 😅, let’s get back to my tinker time with my robot pals.

When I started my new job, I quickly came to realize that everyone was FAR more AI literate than me. I had built AI products at my previous job, taken classes on it, and understood the use case for product builders - but to be honest, I wasn’t using it a ton.

As a manager, it wasn’t super clear to me how it was relevant to my role. I spent most of my days in meetings - whether 1:1 or larger, typically cross-functional meetings - not churning out code. Writing code has never been part of my job description. I could see how it might’ve benefitted me in a past content marketing job - churn more content out faster! - but even for that - so much of the AI-generated content we were seeing at the time was… not great.

A lot changed while I was on sabbatical. The models got better - a lot better. Claude Code became publicly available in May 2025, the month after I quit my job. I was familiar with ChatGPT, and hadn’t tinkered with Claude. I built a few custom GPTs, even, and then I promptly moved on with my life.

Claude Cowork dropped my second week at the new job, and I was so busy trying to determine up from down that it didn’t register for me. What did register was that everyone was using Claude Code. Everyone in my department, at least - designers, product managers, engineers. For a hot second, I felt like I was learning across too many dimensions at once - trying to learn my new org, my new role, my new colleagues, my new product, and - just one more thing - how to use Claude Code all at the same time.

It felt like a vortex of chaos for about a month, and then suddenly, it all clicked into place. I turned a corner, and my AI usage skyrocketed. I went from feeling like a complete numpty to a relatively competent daily user.

Here are a few of the beliefs I’m developing as I use it.

3 AI beliefs I currently hold

If this were an AI headline, I’d say “3 Fundamental Truths of AI” and get a million more readers. But then I’d constantly have to write clickbait and that’d be terrible for everyone, right? I think so.

Learning is fun - and you can only learn by doing

I learned a lot about learning by doing during my sabbatical. I jumped into the deep end gardening, writing, and testing out a smorgasbord of different crafty things and cooking new recipes and generally experimenting with how I filled my days.

AI is no different - you’re not going to learn it by reading an article about it. You’re not even going to learn it just by taking a class, unless you really get your hands dirty during the class. (Trust me, I tried.)

If you’re a product manager, I can’t recommend Claude Code for Product Managers highly enough. If you’re not, there’s Claude Code for Everyone. It’s taught inside the terminal, so you learn in the actual environment you’ll be working in.

It’s also so fun. I love learning new things, and this has turned out to be no different. Every time I finished a module I got a zing of excitement. And then, after the second module or so - I started applying my learnings on real projects at work. This is where it really started to come together for me. I started running into challenges, and asking Claude to help me solve them. The more I asked, the more I began to understand the capabilities, limitations, and strengths of Claude… and myself.

If it’s not working for you, it’s probably a skills gap on your part - not a lack of ability on the AI’s part

This is a broad statement, but a belief I’ve adopted in the past couple of months. Every time I think the AI can’t do something, it’s usually because I:

• Haven’t supplied the correct context

• Didn’t structure my ask correctly

• Didn’t load the correct tools

Or some other thing that I’m not even aware that I’m doing wrong, until someone who’s got it working informs me.

You might be thinking, “Well, doesn’t all that take away from the value? Shouldn’t it just know based on your imperfect prompting and tools setup what you need?”

Honestly, that gap is closing, which is one of the reasons I’ve gotten lazier about prompting, especially since I learned about plan mode. In plan mode, Claude will ask clarifying questions and develop a plan that you can modify before executing. This is a great time to catch any gaps that you may have left out, and course-correct, before you end up with an artifact that isn’t great.

Context is everything

If you ate garbage every day, would you expect to turn into a trash panda? You would. Garbage in, garbage out, as the saying goes.

I think this is probably my biggest learning so far - the high cost of getting AI to do good work is the setup cost. Oh wait, just like pretty much any other tool.

AI, like any other information-based tool, needs some starting amount of knowledge in order to produce what you want. For example, it needs to know… what you want. It’s helpful for it to know who you are - which provides context around why you’re asking for what you want. It’s helpful for it to understand your company and your products and what else you’re working on.

At first, you’re like - I have to tell it WHAT. That’s so much work upfront! But it’s the input that you do once (at least to this extent) and then will pay dividends every time you use it going forward. Because then you don’t have to repeat yourself, and your prompts can get lazier, and the outputs - even if they are just shitty first drafts - are notably less shitty.

I’m realizing now that I have to shift some percentage of my time to context maintenance - keeping my company and product information and messaging up-to-date, archiving old documents in Notion so the AI doesn’t pull from them, clearly labeling when artifacts are a v1 or a v2. This is something I’m working through now - how to make this an efficient part of my workstream.

Closing thoughts on AI, for today

I believe AI literacy is a critical skill set. I’ve heard the phrase that jobs aren’t going to be replaced by AI - but workers who use AI will replace workers who don’t. I think there will be jobs that are entirely replaced by AI, but for everyone else (and more within our control), I think the second statement is likely already true. Start educating yourself now, start really challenging yourself to use the tools at your disposal.

Don’t fall into the trap of judging it based on one use of a free model. Pay the $20 (to Claude) for a higher level plan and work with some of the better models. Start asking - “Could you help me with this task? What would you need to know?” Put it in plan mode and play around.

And yes, sure, push for real efficiency gains in the long-term - but don’t let that stop you from learning now.

What’d you think of this segment? More or fewer thoughts about AI at work? Would love to know your thoughts in the comments!

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AI at home

There’s so much I don’t know. I keep seeing posts and hearing from coworkers around “AI running their whole lives.” I use AI at work, for work tasks, but I haven’t really integrated much AI into my personal life. I use a service called Duckbill, which brands itself as an AI personal assistant, with mixed results. AI does not automate the lighting in my home, the temperature of my mattress, or when the garden gets watered. I don’t really feel the need to automate any of those things. But I am starting to wonder if there are use cases I’m missing.

This is likely one of the highest-demand seasons I’ve had… ever. As a quick recap:

• My husband started a new job in December

• His job requires him to work out-of-state for a week every other month

• I started a new job in January

• We bought a new house out-of-state in January, and plan to move in June

• We’re renovating that house, and the scope has increased significantly after discovering asbestos everywhere

• We need to complete a number of projects for our current home, in order to be able to sell

• My husband is running a marathon in 8 weeks

• Our son is learning how to drive

• And we both have fun trips planned, and we’re rapidly headed towards Mayhem, the month when all school events happen, and both the kids have trips for band, and it’s water polo season and our daughter is playing on two teams and has eight practices a week, and everyone still needs to eat dinner every night, and and and.

That’s the short version.

It’s kind of a lot.

This is not a season where “balance” is a reasonable expectation. We’re overloaded, and we know it. We are actively strategizing week-by-week how to divide the load while also still spending some amount of time together. I’ve reminded the family that the goal of the move is still to be a family once we get out there, so we need to continue being a family until then - which requires very intentional usage of the hours that we’re all in the same place at the same time.

So like… could I be doing more (always a dangerous question) to delegate more of my brain space to AI? I worry that I might be like this cartoon, too focused on the workload that I’m not looking for help.

I’m accepting plenty of human help - carpools for the kids, going to therapy more often, expanding the scope of our landscaper to help with getting the yard ready; hiring a team to pressure wash the house and repaint the deck, etc etc.

But the biggest start up cost to AI is giving it enough context where it can be useful, and I just don’t know that I have the couple of hours I need to even set it up and test it out, much less iterate upon what will (undoubtedly) be a less-useful starting point.

I could’ve sacrificed writing this blog post, but writing is my happy place and I refuse to let it go.

Tell me what I’m missing - do you have any suggestions for me? What’s something in your personal life you’re using AI for?

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Reclaiming my time and attention

If you know me, you know my lifelong struggle has been to acknowledge my capacity. I honestly think one of the greatest gifts of my time off was that I got a much closer understanding of my capacity and my energy levels - and the difference between mental, physical, and emotional fatigue.

I began to see how my intake of media - even positive media, like books and podcasts and long-form newsletters from writers I really enjoy - can drown out my thoughts if I’m not giving myself enough input-free time to think.

Now I’m trying to put those learnings into practice, and really think about how to give myself as much bandwidth as possible in this time.

One of my projects is The Great Unsubscribe of 2026. Instead of just deleting emails (or worse, leaving them in my inbox to stay unread forever) - I unsubscribe. If I’m not reading it today, I probably won’t ever come back to this message. And I probably won’t have more time next week to read next week’s edition. There are, of course, exceptions - my very favorite writers; the recipe creators I follow, whose posts I save in a folder to scroll through when I’m looking for new recipes. The school emails I can’t unsubscribe from. The Georgia PTA emails that don’t have an unsubscribe link and I therefore keep reporting as spam.

My initial goal was just to spend a bit of time at the end of every day processing the emails from that day, and I realized… I am not keeping up. I need to deal with the inflow problem.

I already have a tool called Unroll.me that moves all the emails from specific senders into a digest that I can review as needed. I like this for brands that I legitimately enjoy, and whose coupon codes I want to search for when I’m getting ready to buy something, but who I don’t need in my face every week.

But I also need to get real and realize that I can’t read 26 newsletters every week. In fact, when I started searching the names of some of the folks I subscribe to, I haven’t read their newsletters in 20+ weeks. It’s nothing they’re doing wrong - they’re writing about legitimately interesting topics, that’s why their emails have been collecting dust in my inbox to begin with.

I want to support some of their platforms. But James Clear doesn’t need my support, he’s doing just fine. And should I come to a point where I desperately need his wisdom, I suppose I could always re-subscribe in the future.

It’s a good reminder of seasonality. Just because I need to say “not now” doesn’t mean “good-bye forever” - a valuable lesson for newsletters, hobbies, and even goals.

February reads: from cozy to heartfelt and inspiring to spicy

February was a good month in books. I read 5 books this month, and they ranged quite a bit in terms of topic, depth, and emotion-genre:

• This is Where You Belong

• The Enchanted Greenhouse

• Theo of Golden

• Cleat Cute

• I Just Wish I Had a Bigger Kitchen

Emotion-genre is my new phrase for what kind of emotions a book evokes within you. I’m a mood-reader: I read based on what I’m in the mood for, what I have emotional bandwidth for, what I’m drawn to on a particular day. While I read across actual book-genres, I read mostly non-fiction and romance books, and those categories are BROAD to describe a book, so… emotion-genre.

Favorite book of the month: Theo of Golden

This book is the book I think we all need in a heavy and somewhat bleak season. It’s a book about hope, how much agency humans have to make the world a better place, the quiet battles everyone around us is fighting, and holding on to faith in hard times. It’s also beautifully written.

This was my book club book of the month. Usually, when members in the book club say they didn’t enjoy a particular book, I understand why, and can nod along and validate where they’re coming from. This time, I was like, “Well, it’s good to know that people can still be WRONG.”

I read this book in about 2.5 sittings, and I do think it lends itself to an immersive read. The beginning is a Southern drawl - unhurried and winding, but at the midpoint we’ve woven in color from Portugal and speed from New York, and the second half of the book moves quickly.

But what is the book about? A short description, as I want to give literally nothing away: an old man moves to the town of Golden, Georgia (the state I live in, for my international readers!) and begins integrating himself into Southern life. He becomes enchanted with a series of portraits displayed in a local coffee shop, and sets out to discover the stories behind them.

This is the most moved I’ve been by a book in a long time - 10/10, 5 stars, whole-heartedly recommend.

Least favorite book: This is Where You Belong

This was the book I listened to while doing house chores, and I wish I’d gotten a hard copy instead. The content was fine, but the narrator was god awful. Every time she had to say a year (which was… often), she’d say twenty-oh-eight, twenty-oh-six, which is not how ANYONE says a year. The fact that I am commenting on this gives you a sense of how often it happened.

The premise of the book is a good one: the author spent her teens and twenties moving a lot, looking for her “perfect” place to live. But once she had kids, and her husband had a job change that seemed like it would have them settling in one place for a while, she realized that she couldn’t keep moving around. She had to find a way to love the place she lived, rather than trying to find somewhere better.

And so begins her “love where you live” experiment. Through a series of research-backed games, challenges, and rules, she begins immersing herself in her town, and comes to fall in love with it. This is obviously relevant to me, as we’re moving soon, and I want to love my new town as much as I love my current one.

I feel like I got a few good ideas (exploring on foot, focus on the things your town is good at, be a supporter of community projects even if you can’t be a leader) - but the narration was terrible, and I think the book could’ve been 25% shorter.

A quick peek at the garden

Things have been quiet on the garden front for a bit, but now, with warmer weather moving in, we’re starting to see some growth. Enjoy these snapshots!

My last surviving kale, going strong!

Lemon balm is perking up!

No idea what this is, but it’s happy!

Lightning round: some fave moments from the past two weeks

• Water polo is BACK in full swing and my daughter is playing on two teams this season, the same team she played on in the fall and a local club team. I got to watch her scrimmage this weekend and it’s so delightful.

• My daughter and I spent a weekend in Colorado and she loved it. We had so much fun - we went to a game of polo (horse polo, not water polo), which was absolutely wild; a cat cafe, and a number of very yummy meals. We also spent some time supporting the local economy: shopping 😉

• I cooked one of my favorite meals with all the windows open and music on, which just makes for such a great afternoon.

Next time

I hope to have some renovation updates! I haven’t picked out flowers yet, but I realized that I need to wait a bit since I’m not planting from seed, so I’ll share updates on that next-next time. My son will have his birthday the day before my next post, so DRIVING will be top of mind for our household.

Thank you for spending this time with me! I’ll see y’all in two weeks!

PS: If you’ve made it this far and you’re not a subscriber, one - wow, thank you, and two - subscribe! You’ll get wide-ranging musings just like these every two weeks.

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• More Substacks are landing in spam than usual, and mine is no exception. Make sure I’m on your safe senders list so you continue to receive my posts!

• Over the next few posts, you’ll notice some changes to the visuals (if you ever visit my Substack homepage). The only AI-generated content you’ll get here is the little thumbnail picture that accompanies each post, and I have been using ChatGPT to create that. However, I’m switching over to Claude, and I’d urge you to do the same. Did you know that the president of OpenAI (the creator of ChatGPT) is the largest individual Trump donor? Alternately, did you know that Anthropic, which runs Claude, is actively advocating for AI governance and oversight?

  • If you’re curious to read more, here’s a New York Times gift link - Anthropic Donates $20 million to Super PAC to Counter OpenAI.

  • And one, two, and three articles about OpenAI’s political spending.

And now - let’s go for a walk.

Smell the crisp air

Join me for a walk in my neighborhood. It’s unseasonably warm today, and I can’t help but feel like this is how Georgia hooks you. It’s the same thing in the fall - a few mornings of crisp air and you start to believe it’ll stay cool. Now, in the spring, it’s the opposite - hopeful gasps of heat paired with the crisp air and blue skies make you believe the cold is over.

We’ll be wrong every time, but the hope is addictive, and we cling to it with conviction as we wander down the street.

Old trees shoot into the sky on both sides of the road - I wish I knew what they were, but the only ones I can reliably call out are the towering pines. One tree, close to the roadside, has the very first buds of what I assume will be leaves, but could also be flowers. They’re so pale that I can’t tell if they’ll be green or yellow. The buds are covered in a pale fuzz and it looks so soft I want to reach out to feel them, but don’t want to disturb their slumber.

The heat is echoing back to us from the black asphalt. This road has been repaved recently, but just this bit - it seems they’re always repaving in patches here. The warmth combined with the steady trot-trot-trot of our steps is lulling us like a meditation - it’s difficult to be properly focused on much of anything at all when the sun is shining just like this and winter is surely ending.

The birds aren’t lulled at all thought - they chatter and sing with ferocity, trying to drown out the bird next door. It’s like they’re competing to be America’s Next Top Bird. But since we can’t understand what they’re saying, we can just appreciate their commitment and laugh. Wouldn’t it be cool to know all the bird songs, we say. There are so many types, and they all sound just a bit different.

It takes exactly 10 minutes to get to the second stop sign, at least when the dog is with me. The first stop sign is at the end of my street, but I like a twenty-minute walk, so I always turn left and make it to the second stop sign before I turn around. I appreciate that you are on board with this.

We turn around.

The brief moment before we turn back onto my road is characterized by green - ivy all over the roadside, bouts of trees clustered right next to the road. When we make the turn, the sun is in our eyes.

I’ve persuaded you not to wear sunglasses because it’s important to get sunlight directly in your eyes for a few minutes a day. The sun is reaching out her arms and brushing soft fingertips across our cheekbones, but it’s important to squint a little, or she’ll jab a finger right in your eyeball.

The wind whispers past as we get closer to home. The last stretch is flat, but the driveway is a sharp incline, a last bit of effort after our breezy walk.

This is a reset, a reminder and an opportunity to be present, to soak it all in.

Some days, I think it’s the most important 20 minutes of my day.

The wonders of a walk

The lie you will tell yourself is that taking 20 minutes for a walk in the afternoon is detrimental to your productivity. Those are the 20 minutes, surely, in which you’d have your great breakthrough, if only you’d just tether yourself to your desk harder.

But you know it’s a lie, and I know it’s a lie, and yet it’s still so hard to unvelcro myself from the keyboard most days.

Some days, I resent the first few minutes of the walk. Taking a stupid walk for my stupid mental health.

But I’ve started to see it as irreplaceable maintenance - not just for my body, but for my BRAIN. I’ve started referring to it (only to myself, but here we go) as time for my brain to brush its teeth.

Gross, I know, but it’s a metaphor that’s working for me. My brain needs a screen break, and I truly believe that getting out and gently moving for a few minutes increases my productivity for the rest of the afternoon when I get back.

For some of us, resting IS the work. It’s often much easier to sit at our desks and bash our skulls (and occasionally our fingers) against our keyboards then it is to set the boundary with ourselves and take a break. But our brains need space to be creative, to problem solve, to step back and see the big picture.

When I go for my daily walk, I don’t listen to music or podcasts. I try to pay attention to the sensations and sounds of the physical world. No matter my mood when I start, I usually feel lighter by the end. I end up viscerally feeling what Kendra Adachi (The Lazy Genius) means when she says, “Good is here right now.”

I’m not telling you to ignore what’s going in the world to go touch grass. I am telling you to remember your place in the world for just a few minutes - even one or two - every day, and feel the sun on your face, and listen to the birds. Good is here right now. Good is here, RIGHT NOW. Good is HERE. Right now.

Rooted in the here and now

Staying rooted in the physical world was one of my goals when I returned to work. For me, returning to work means returning to eight hours in front of a computer screen. I also really love working, and I love being a product manager, so limiting it to just eight hours can be a bit of a challenge. Work is a siren song, a socially acceptable way to spend your time and also untether yourself from all the other things that matter and make you a person.

I still want to do it all. I want to go to work and be irreplaceable and make a meaningful impact on our company and our customers. I want to go home and be a present parent and partner. I want to be a good friend and a good neighbor and a good citizen. I want to go out with my friends and read every book ever written and plant flowers for the spring. I want to go for walks and remember how wonderful it is to be outside. This is just the tip of the iceberg of all the things I want want want.

Work is just a fraction of that, but y’all - it’s so fun right now. This is a blessing - not everyone loves what they do, I’m aware. But I’ve also just wrenched myself away from my work computer (ironically, to go to my personal laptop to write this), and my entire body groaned from being in the same position for hours. I need to remember my place in the physical world, the needs of the body, the breaks for my brain, in order to continue to do work I’m proud of, and to be able to show up as a whole person to all the other things I care about.

What makes me feel like myself?

I’ve been careful to prioritize the activities that make me feel like myself - most notably for you all, writing.

Writing this blog makes me so happy, y’all, and I do mean it when I say thank you for spending your time with me. I’m well aware of all the other things you could be doing, other than reading this, and so that fact that I’ve made it on to your docket is a tremendous privilege.

So I prioritize writing, and I also prioritize (though perhaps less successfully) a commitment to not hurrying.

I am not a mouse, scurrying about. I am not the Mad Hatter. I am also not doing a single thing that saves lives or launches rockets, so what on earth is so important that I’m trying to rush towards it? Imminent death?

No, hurrying is not a benefit - it just makes me grumpy, and irritable, and mean to anyone who’s in my space. Rushing my children along usually results in something being left behind, and terse words, and generally, not a good vibe. Rushing activities that I enjoy in order to get to the next thing on my list is only robbing me of joy.

So lately, I’ve been thinking about the trade-off between efficiency (do this as fast as possible) and peace (do it, or don’t, but be calm about it). I want to choose the path to peace as often as possible.

Here are some examples from the past week:

• I had a call with a friend that butted up against the time that I needed to pick up my daughter. So I got to her school half an hour early and talked to my friend. No trying to rush through packing the car, or driving while on the phone - just peacefully sitting in the parking lot, chatting. I was fully focused on our conversation (until a gaggle of 13-year-old girls piled in the car), and not worried about what needed to happen next.

• I did not rush the kids that were participating at district competition to get set up and prepared - the organizers were not in a hurry, so neither was I. (This was a time where my travel rule - Always bring a book - really came in handy, though I will admit my very smutty book was perhaps a poor choice for a middle school event.)

• I’ve set up a morning routine that gets all the must-dos done, and leaves 20 minutes for reading before I start work. Reading is the reward for all the things I’d rather not do at 6 am, but need to do in order to feel prepared for the day.

It would be more efficient to do “productive” tasks before talking to my friend or to start work 20 minutes earlier - but I’m choosing to take care of myself in these small ways instead. I’ll take the (likely overblown anyway) productivity hit.

Home is where the heart is, and my heart is in the mountains

All of this emphasis on peace has been helpful for balancing my absolutely full-throttle-wide-open enthusiasm for our new house. That’s right - last month, we closed on our new house in Colorado. Stephen and I got to fly out for the closing and take ownership of the keys in person, which was just delightful. I feel like unlocking the door for the first time as the owner is such a symbolic moment.

I was obsessed with this house from the moment we walked in the front door. There is something about it that made my shoulders drop when I walked in, like I was letting out a very long breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. It felt like home.

I’ll post a few pictures, with the caveat that the seller’s agents took some… liberties with photo editing software. The peachy-yellow walls are, in the words of our realtor, “the color of concentrated urine.” They are also all textured - swirls on every wall.

But in its bones - the house is perfect. Just look at the size of that window!

But every house has its secrets, and our new leading lady is no exception. Right before closing, we discovered the stagers had covered up a rather egregious outlet in the middle of the primary bedroom floor - weirdly embedded in the carpet in a way that makes it feel distinctly like a fire hazard.

They’d also put a false front on the fireplace in the kitchen - a disappointment, in that I quite liked the gray stone they chose, but not a big one, because it was hiding brick, and I like brick. Just a weird choice, you know?

The first big surprise (for the ones I just mentioned are but minor hiccups) came just a couple hours after closing.

Product managers love scope creep

Let me rewind, to help set the scene. We already knew that we wanted to do some renovations to the kitchen and primary bath before moving in.

The kitchen is an odd shape - it appears that the previous owners made the garage bigger, and stole some room from the kitchen to do it. The result is that the kitchen is quite narrow, and the floor plan would make it difficult for two of us to work in the kitchen at the same time. Now that all four of us cook, there are a fair number of times when multiple people are in the kitchen.

The bathroom is also an odd layout - also long and narrow, but surprisingly spacious. It’s also very brownnnn. The countertops are brown tile. The floors are brown tile. The tub is surrounded by brown tile. Do you get where I’m going? It could be so pretty, with just a little facelift.

I found a badass designer just up the road in Denver, and she agreed to meet us at the house right after closing. Her background is in construction management, she reviewed my six-page project brief with enthusiasm and not fear, and promised to send me lengthy emails with every detail. I was (and continue to be) obsessed with her immediately.

She interviewed local contractors, selected a general contractor that was a good fit for our project after vetting his references, and had him meet us at the house a couple hours after closing. After she expertly walked him through every item on our wishlist, she mentioned that we were aware of some electrical work that needed to be done.

He asked to go look at the breaker box.

Friends, I was not worried. We are diligent - we had our inspection done, we knew electrical work was needed, I even obtained multiple quotes for the work that was identified in our inspection report.

But it seems that there was just one teensy, tinsy little detail left out of the inspection report. See, the house has the original breaker box from 1967. This is a bit unusual, because that is quite old, but all the wiring and breakers are in spectacular condition. However, the inspection report cautioned, the breaker box only pulls in about half the power that newer homes do. To upgrade the breaker box, we’d also need to pull in more power.

I didn’t quite know what that meant, but I got quotes for it, and we used it to negotiate with the seller. All smooth, or so we thought.

The contractor took one look at the box and said, “Sure, you can update the breaker box - but this wiring is not equipped to handle that load of power. You’ll have to rewire the whole house, or risk starting a fire in the walls.”

So, that’s big news. Rewiring a whole house turns out to be quite a big deal - holes in every urine-colored, swirl-covered wall and popcorn-coated ceiling. Hm.

Well, we don’t want fires in the walls, so I guess we’ll factor that into our renovation budget. Scope creep #1.

When it rains it… makes lemonade?

Butthe electrical was but a drop in the bucket, as we’d soon come to find out.

I’ve never been particularly interested in gambling, but I’m also not risk averse. I’d say I’m pretty middle-of-the-road in terms of risk - I don’t want to do any sports involving adrenaline, but I don’t fear confrontational conversations, for example.

I had asked about doing asbestos testing in the home during our due diligence period, and the seller declined. This is not surprising - in order to test for asbestos, the inspector will take little chunks out of the walls, ceilings, and joint compound in various rooms throughout the house. It’s invasive and slightly damaging - not a surprise that the seller didn’t want to sign up for that.

Most homes built before 1980 or so were built with materials that contain asbestos. It’s harmless when it’s intact - but can cause major health problems for workers that deal with it when it’s damaged - or cut open, such as during a renovation.

So asbestos testing was a must before kicking off our renovation project. About half the house has been renovated, so I wasn’t too worried - testing and, if found, remediating during a renovation is the responsible thing to do.

And everyone does the responsible thing, right? You can see where this is going.

We did the asbestos testing, and a few days later, I got a call with the results.

“Welp, there are some good news!” the inspector told me.

That is not how you start a call that has actual good news.

There are, in fact, three rooms in our new home that do not have asbestos: my daughter’s bedroom and bathroom, and the laundry room.

Every wall, every ceiling, the joint compound, the floors in multiple rooms - all of it is positive for asbestos.

That means we’ll be taking out every wall, every ceiling, every bit of drywall everywhere, and of course the floors in the affected rooms as well. Sometimes you gamble, and sometimes you lose.

To be fair, this isn’t *strictly* necessary. The home isn’t dangerous to live in - we just can’t do construction on it. We could just remediate the rooms we were planning to renovate.

For a multitude of reasons, that wasn’t the right move for us - we’d rather do a clean sweep while we’re not living there, and be able to disclose to any future buyer that the home has been fully remediated. We want to know that if we ever do need to mess with a wall or ceiling, there’s not a health risk. And then, you see, there’s the relentless optimism that turns all of this into a product manager’s scope creep ideal:

• Look, taking out all the walls solves our rewiring issue! Look how much easier that project just got!

• Oh, and the contractors are demoing the kitchen and bath for us, so that’s basically a discount on the renovation!

• And we’ll get to install the recessed lighting that I wanted to install in the basement…

• … and we’ll get to soundproof a few rooms…

• … and every swirly wall and popcorned ceiling will be no more.

So really, isn’t this just a gift? By the time we move in, the house will basically be brand new. And, once we’ve taken it down to the studs, we’ll know what’s behind every wall, under every floor. We’ll make it just the way we want it, customized for us.

I am an agent of chaos, and I am unafraid

The morning after the closing, Colorado Springs got a surprise snow - just a dusting, but enough to make everything sparkly and magical.

With this waiting for us on the other side, I don’t have any doubts all of this work will be worthwhile. I’m excited about it. The shed was our first big construction project, and it’s an incredible space to be in every day - imagine if our WHOLE HOUSE felt like that?!?

I’ve had the wildest feeling some mornings, like a pull in my chest that’s trying to tell me I’m supposed to be in the mountains. It’s so odd - like being homesick for a place I haven’t even lived yet. And yet… I feel it in my bones, and I’m so excited for this new chapter.

And speaking of new chapters, check out my new garden:

Depending on the actual timing of our move - now a bit in flux, given the expanded scope of our renovation 😅- we should be there in time for me to put in some late summer or early fall crops.

In the meantime, I’ll be planting here, getting our current home ready for its next occupant. Catalogs are coming in the mail every week for seeds and seedlings - stay tuned to find out what I pick to fill all the beds for spring! Tell me what you’re planting:

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Lightning round: some fave moments from the past two weeks

• I think I might… maybe, just possibly… have graduated from physical therapy. I’m almost hesitant to say it, but after like… 20 months?... of consistent effort, I’m consistently able to do my day-to-day activities without pain. I don’t know if I’m going to attempt a return to running - it’s too early to make any grand proclamations there - but for now, I’m celebrating this big win.

• My children have been participating in events left and right, and my wonderful friends have been joining me to watch them perform/compete/participate in a variety of avenues. Thanks friends!

• One of my fave instagrammers (Kate Strickler, Naptime Kitchen) is doing this fun thing called FebruWEARy. The idea is that as you wear something in your closet, you stick it in a box in the back of your closet. At the end of the month, you’ll see all the winter clothes you chose not to wear for an entire month - making it easier to donate or give away those items. I’m giving it a go!

Next time

I have some Thoughts™️ on AI, based on my recent experiences working with it more. I’ve also been working on The Great Unsubscribe of 2026, part of my greater mission to keep my time and attention my own as much as possible (rather than turning it over to the great machine of capitalism). And maybe I’ll have picked out flowers for the garden!

Stay tuned for all that - and some very fun renovation updates, though those are a bit further out. Thanks again for spending your time with me!

Part of getting ready for work meant realizing that I’ve spent very little time wearing “real people clothes” in the past nine months. If you’ve seen me, I probably rolled up like this:

This is all well and good, but my closet has become… overwhelming. Over the past ten years, I have set multiple goals to upgrade my wardrobe, but I didn’t really know how to go about it. I’d buy a piece that I really liked in the store, but would take it home and find I didn’t know what to match it with. Or discover that it was itchy if worn for more than two hours, or a bit tight in a spot I hadn’t noticed in the store, or or or… But since I’d spent “good money” (as opposed to, I don’t know, bad money?) on it, these items have been guilt-rotting in my closet ever since.

Fashion history

Fashion is a bit of a sore spot for me. In my early working days, I had a manager use me as an “inspirational” example - “If someone that can barely put herself together, like Pia, can be successful, anyone can!”

I guess it’s a good thing that she meant my general state of dishevelment and not, like, my face, but I think we can all agree that she deserves a solid 3 to 6 months of moderate constipation for that quip.

That wasn’t the end of it though.

A manager I had several years later remarked that I wouldn’t be respected in the workplace until I figured out how to dress myself. I was mortified, but also didn’t quite know how to fix it. I was young and had two small kids, and my paycheck barely covered daycare. I had student loans. I was solidly plus-sized at the time, which made everything feel twice as hard: nice plus size clothes are priced at a premium (which still feels unfair) that I could not afford, and un-nice plus sized clothes are often unflattering, and not actually optimized to fit larger bodies. Stretching out smaller clothes does not a plus-sized outfit make.

There’s the added layer of being postpartum and generally not feeling great in my body, regardless of which outfit I was in; being in a difficult relationship and going to school at night and not really having time to go hunting for clothes; oh, and did I mention the finances of it all?

On the one hand, I respect that she said something - she was being honest and KIND. Our workplace was more conservative, and she was probably right - this is the kind of nonsense that gets in the way of good work being recognized. But on the other hand, I also wish she’d told whoever said something about my attire to go to hell. 🤷

The end result of it was a long slide of me trying really hard to look put together, feeling like I wasn’t doing it right, and deciding that perhaps this wasn’t the right kind of work for me to be doing if I needed to look some kind of way to be doing it. I remember going to a marketing conference and realizing that all the women - even if they were wearing jeans - looked so polished, and I, in my ill-fitting blazer and lumpy suit pants - was not one of them.

A freight train worth of baggage

You can see why I’m a bit sensitive about my attire. That’s not the only reason, or even the main reason, I headed towards startup land, where jeans and hoodies are the norm, but it certainly helped. After a couple of jobs transitioning away from marketing, I landed my first product management role. I had a conversation with my (male) boss about attire and asked him to approve my outfits for client visits. He looked at me like I’d grown two heads. We worked together for several years, under a female CEO who frequently commented on our female employees’ outfits. “Sometimes you just have to wear a high heel! How could she possibly think a sundress was appropriate for this occasion?!” Are we possibly seeing a pattern here?

I also have a real chip on my shoulder about the differing expectations for men and women. In many of the environments I’ve worked in, the menfolk can show up looking like they got drop-kicked off the back of a Budweiser truck straight into the office, and no one mentions it. Wear the same shirt four days in a row, smell like BO, let your hair get so greasy it stains the back of your chair - SURE, so long as you’re doing good work!

But if I show up without makeup on and in cheap pants, I’m the problem?

Thankfully, evolving workplace expectations have greatly helped me out, sizing has gotten more inclusive, I haven’t worked with foul men in a long ass time (thank the sweet lords), and I’ve made friends who’ll tell me the truth about my outfits.

But here’s a secret. I’ve never stopped resenting the unspoken expectation that I should somehow magically know how to “put myself together.” The desire to be able to walk into my closet and just put on clothes and know that they will fit and look nice and then NOT WORRY ABOUT IT ANYMORE has never left me. I rebelled on the hair and makeup front ages ago - but my closet has remained a source of dread.

A domino of clothing-related events

I’ve held on to my various feelings and baggage and dread and anger about clothing for a long time.

It’s only just recently occurred to me that maybe… I don’t have to?

One of the many gifts of my time off was that there was no outside pressure to look any kind of way. (Some will argue that that pressure hasn’t existed for… a very long time… and they might be right. But, alas, better a late awakening than eternal darkness, am I right?)

I started to notice the outfits I gravitated towards, and which shirts I was constantly reaching for… and then putting right back on the hanger. I bought a pair of pants I really really loved - which highlighted how much I didn’t love others.

I started to realize that there were days I looked in the mirror and felt like, “Hell yeah. I look like me.”

Then, a number of things happened:

• A podcast I love recommended the closet cleanout episode of A Beautiful Mess. I popped into their feed, and immediately downloaded a couple of other wardrobe-related episodes they had as well.

• My favorite decluttering podcast did a deep dive on why we hold on to clothes for far too long and it was ENLIGHTENING.

• I found out that I’d be going on a business trip (TO PARIS) shortly after starting my new job - and what better excuse to spruce things up a bit?

A plethora of learnings

Y’all. Revelations left and right! Here are a few of my favorites.

In this season of life, I control the thermostat

No, really - working in an office meant dressing for the mercurial climates of whatever the building decided that day. As a result, I generally wore many (MANY) thin layers so that I could adapt from whatever temperature between 50 and 85 degrees the Office Gods served on that day. This is… miserable, and also no longer relevant to me. I was in my closet wondering why on earth I didn’t own a single really thick sweater when it’s below freezing (even in our moderate Georgia temps) for at least a couple of weeks a year.

There is no reason to hold on to clothes that make you feel bad about yourself

Yes, those clothes were money once. Yes, they might still be perfectly good clothes. They might even fit you. But you know what? Why on earth would you put yourself in a position to touch, reflect on, and interact with something that makes you feel shame and probably some amount of guilt every time you see it hanging in your closet or shoved in the back of a drawer? Don’t do that to my friend.

Dress the body you have now

For anyone with body-change-related goals in the room - be honest with yourself. Will you really want these clothes even if you achieve a different size? Will they be fashionable and flatter your favorite parts of yourself? I had to come to terms with the fact that even when I am a different size, I am not a dramatically different shape. So why am I hanging on to clothes that would be so cute on someone that’s 6 inches shorter than me, or with narrower shoulders, or longer legs, or or or?

And if, perhaps, you do have a specific goal and you know that you will be a specific shape… would you still want this item, or would you want to celebrate with something updated that’s more in tune with your current or future style?

Constrain choice by learning your colors

You can pay anywhere from $300 to $750 (oh my LANTA) to get your colors done professionally… or you could upload a photo of your face and let Claude or Gemini do it and get 80% of the way there. (This is my first heads up that OpenAI is a major Trump donor, so if you’d like to support a lesser evil, switch to a different option! )If you have no idea what I’m talking about, but you’ve seen phrases like “soft autumn” and “cool summer” and “deep winter” next to pictures of a color palette - that’s what I’m talking about. The idea is that your natural coloring (hair, eyes, and skin) lends itself to a certain color palette that will naturally make you look more alive. And who doesn’t want to look as un-dead as possible?

Indeed, upload a photo of your face in natural light with hair down to the government overwatch program AI overlord of your choosing (but not ChatGPT!) and ask it what your season is and which colors are most flattering on you. Then take a look at your “sister seasons” (the seasons on either side of your original pick on the seasonal color wheel), look up their palettes, and pick. It takes a little trial and error, but then you have a starting list of your best colors to take shopping with you, and if you’re like me, a little bit of constrained choice is actually very helpful.

Wanting more is sometimes a sign of having too much

As I was cleaning out my closet, I found things that had been buried or forgotten. I realized that all the stuff I didn’t like in my closet was drowning out the pieces I really wanted to wear. In some cases, I’d bought very similar replacements, thinking I’d lost something, only to find it in my closet during this cleanout.

This led me to asking how many clothes I really needed, and how many of each type of clothing (warm sweaters, light sweaters, casual dresses, formal dresses, etc.) I really need. I ended up reading a book recommended on one of the podcasts, and the author asks you to map out an average week. For example, in an average week, I am working, hanging out casually with friends, working out, and potentially going on one date night. Then, she has you map out how often you have abnormal events - like work travel, weddings, big trips, etc., and map out how many items you’d like to have on hand for those. We’re in a great time for rental clothing companies, and it was kind of delightful to consider that each “abnormal event” could be an opportunity to try something new via a rental service, rather than having to keep a rarely worn item in my closet year-round “just in case.”

#closetgoals

All of these revelations drove me to set a goal to end the year with only clothes I love and look forward to wearing in my closet.

I prioritized getting a few sweaters to wear in Paris that would pair with pants I already owned, decluttered, decluttered, decluttered, and then decided that would do for January. I’ve committed to revisiting my closet in Q3 and Q4, once we’re in Colorado and I have a better sense of what the climate is like.

I’m already finding that the more I get rid of, the more things I find to get rid of. It’s like on my first sweep, I only saw the egregious offenders - the items that really made me feel some kind of way. Once I got rid of those, I started to see things that I liked ok, but that were worn through, or fabrics I didn’t really love, or just meh in one way or another. Now I’m starting to let go of things I liked once and have fond memories of, but that aren’t as relevant in my current season of life. Those items have done their time and served me well - may they go on to make someone else very happy.

It’s amazing how much lighter I feel having donated, gifted, and otherwise released so many old clothes. It’s like I’ve let go of some long-held guilt and resentments, sent dread packing along with my donation boxes.

How’s your closet serving you these days? Is there something that came to mind that you’d like to get rid of?

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Lightning round: some fave moments from the past two weeks

• OH MY SWEET BUNS, can we talk about Heated Rivalry?!? We cannot, because this is not an M-rated production - BUT. (BUTT.) I haven’t been this emotionally affected by a TV show since I watched episode 3 of The Last of Us, and I wasn’t expecting it, because it’s wrapped in a yummy, hockey-flavored, layer o’ smut, but THE FEELS, y’all! Oh my gosh, the yearning and the loving and the lusting - I’m obsessed. AND THE MUSIC. Don’t even get me started.

• Reading has been really delightful recently, and I am here to double down on Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo, and you might as well immediately grab the second book in the duology, Crooked Kingdom.

• My son is playing in the orchestra for his high school’s performance of Mean Girls the Musical. I can’t wait.

• It’s about to be water polo season again for my daughter, and you know I’ve got my fan spirit at the ready!

Next time

Is it possible… that we maybe bought a house? It just might be, and we just might have some snapshots of and some hopes and dreams for that very house in our next episode. Is it possible… that house has sent some surprises our way?

If you’re on the edge of your seat to hear about those things, subscribe here:

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Until next time, thanks for spending this time with me!

I think what speaks to me about goals season is the blank slate of it all - everything feels possible. You can just set the goal (and then we skim over all the hard work necessary to achieve it), and then wheeee you’ve achieved a thing and become a whole different kind of person! That’s the fantasy, anyway, and while I don’t buy into that anymore, I do still buy into the hope and energy and dreaming behind it.

It is a time of temptation, though. We’re tempted to believe that this unsustainable change, this expensive gadget, this fancy workout routine from an Instagram model is going to lead us in the right direction. The language of achievement and maximizing the productivity of every minute, every breath, every atom in your entire being is everywhere.

Y’all know I’m not here for any of that.

We are not here to suck the joy out of every moment by focusing on productivity as our scoreboard for how we’re doing.

You are already wonderful. You are allowed to make changes if you want. Start from a place of recognizing that you are whole and delightful just as you are. Then consider what you need to add and subtract to make incremental tweaks to that lead you in an authentic and joyful direction.

Extricating yourself from the goal-setting fear machine

So much of the goal-setting hogwash that gets thrown around this time of year is rooted in fear: the fear of being fat, the fear of being undesirable, the fear of being broke.

Even if you are fat, undesirable, and broke - is that really the worst way to be? Look at some of the people in the world right now, and you know all the people that I mean, and try to tell me with a straight face that you’re the worst. Please.

The goals (and often, products) that are sold to solve these problems are unlikely to make you happy. Why? Because an unsustainable diet won’t change how you feel about your body, lipstick won’t fix how you feel about yourself, and spending money on an outfit you can’t afford won’t help you get your life together.

This is actually… neutral news, once you’re aware of it. Once you wake up to the fear-mongering that happens this time of year (and like, all the time) - you can decide to plug your ears and figure out how much of that, if any, you want to have in your life. The road to joy is not paved with fear.

Ok, so since we want to be on the road to joy - how do we approach goals?

How to set goals that make you happy

Start with the good

What’s already working? What’s making you happy right now? What are your favorite parts of your week? What would you need to do to make space for more of that? What are your favorite things about yourself? Are there practices that you could implement that allow you to reflect on those qualities regularly?

Consider the season of life you’re in now, and the season of life you’re entering

You might notice that I chose to publish this post in mid-January. That’s because when we set goals on January 1, we’re all high on sugar cookie dust and stuffed to the gills with the wonder of the holidays. By now, reality has reasserted itself, which is actually a much better time to evaluate your bandwidth.

Setting goals that make you happy means acknowledging where you are right now - the limits and constraints, even happy ones, of the life you’re actually living. Are you caring for a newborn and an aging parent? Mayhaps now is not the season to “get in your best shape ever.” Maybe it is the time to lift heavy a couple times a week to make your care-taking chores less hard on your body, or maybe it’s a season of making sure you take a 10-minute walk every day just to stay sane.

Only you know all the intricacies of your current season. Think about:

What are the big rocks of life in the next 6ish months?

Are you welcoming a newborn, or sending a kid to college? Do you have an aging pet or parent? Do you have a really stressful season at work coming up, or is this your downtime? Basically - what’s the landscape of life today, and what’s around the corner? And practically speaking, what do you already have booked? Work trips, vacations, your best friend’s birthday - get it all mapped out so that big events don’t sneak up on you. Sneaky surprises = derailment of happy goals.

What does your day-to-day energy expenditure look like?

Are mornings really hard, but evenings are more open, or vice versa? Could you take 15 minutes during the day to go for a walk? What are the flows of all the other people in your household? Have you scheduled your daily meditation moment for right around the time your kids get home and start clamoring for snacks? Are you already overwhelmed by the day-to-day, and the thought of adding one more thing kind of makes you want to die? If so, consider subtraction goals rather than addition goals.

Consider subtraction rather than addition goals.

Our impulse is generally to set goals that add things into our day. There’s nothing wrong with that, but depending on your season of life, you may have very limited room for addition. Examples of addition goals: I’m going to add a workout every week, spend more time cleaning my house (said no one ever), cook every night, etc.

Subtraction goals are more like: I’m going to subtract cooking on Mondays, because those are really busy for me right now. I’m going to get takeout/ask my partner or child to cook that night/do a meal swap with a friend and she drops off that night. I’m going to step down from the PTA/HOA/other stressful time-consuming organization because this is not the right season for me to give my time. I can always start again in the future. I’m going to cancel my gym pass at this gym because the trainer on Tuesday nights says things that make me feel bad about myself.

What’s stressful and overwhelming in your life right now, and which of those are things that you can reasonably take off your plate to make room for the ones you can’t? Babies may be stressful, but I’ve heard the return policy is terrible. Volunteer shifts that drain you, on the other hand, are easier to hand off to make room for baby season.

Ask for help, and get creative about the help you ask for.

There are a lot of things that you can get help for just once. For example, maybe you’ve been trying to clean out a basement for forever, and you just really feel like you need to be the one to complete this project, and you’re like, definitely just about to get to it. What if you looked for a Task Rabbit and hired them for just a few hours? What if you asked your pathologically organized friend to help just one time? What if you got a laundry service to do your laundry just this one week? Signed up for a frozen meal service to deliver healthy meals for just one month? Did you know that you could hire a personal trainer for just a couple of sessions to help you get familiar with the structure of a workout and build a plan for you?

Depending on your season of life and your constraints, you may very well just need a little help right now. It doesn’t mean you need to sign up for frozen lunches for the rest of your life. Your pathologically organized friend (I know you’ve got one) doesn’t need to move into your house. I love to solve a one-and-done problem, but that’s just not what most problems are. I spend a lot of time chanting, “Now is not forever” to myself - not in an ominous way, just a reminder that I can optimize for right now without having to think about whether I’ll still enjoy frozen lunch 25 years from now.

Think about where just 2 or 3 hours of assistance would feel life-changing. Then, ask a friend if they know someone who could help! This is the other big hack - you might have a friend who would love to help you clean out your freezer or take stuff to Goodwill or whatever it is that you want to accomplish. You won’t know till you ask.

Consider all areas of your life, then make room for fun.

Most people are familiar with setting work, health, and financial goals. That’s great! You can set those too if you want to. But what about your relationships, your friendships, your family? Your hobbies, your passions, your interests? Your home, your spirituality, and on and on. In short: what are the areas of life where you want to spend your time this year, and what goals could help get you there?

These are often fun goals. In 2017ish, I set the goals of hiking 12 new trails, and cooking 12 new recipes. I loved that - they were goals that encouraged me to explore and dive into novelty, in a way that was within reach for me in that season.

This is not an excuse to add in a should goal. For example: I should read more, even though I hate it, so I’ll set a goal of reading 50 books. Why? So you can be miserable 50 times - actually, like, a billion small moments of torture, because there are many pages in 50 books? I LOVE to read, but if you don’t, torturing yourself weekly by turning some pages doesn’t earn you a prize.

There are like a million things out there - don’t pick something you hate. If there’s something you think you might enjoy, setting a small goal in that direction would be a fun way to explore it. For example: I’ll take one class in mahjongg, or ceramics, or Crossfit, or barre, or underwater basketweaving. I’ll read one book, sew one awkward square, swim one lap. Now is not forever! You don’t have to commit to a lifetime of this thing just to try it!

How do you want to feel?

We’ve reached the stage where you likely have a rough list of goals you’d like to pursue. You’ve considered your constraints, your energy levels, and your season. You’ve thought about the help you’re going to ask for.

Now it’s time to filter down the list, using this question: how do you want to feel?

How do you want to feel this year, in this season? Do you want to feel calm, or energized? Do you just want to feel a little less overwhelmed? Do you want to feel deeply connected to your partner or your closest friends?

Optimize for the feeling you want. If you start looking at a goal and immediately feel dread, consider… taking that one off the list.

That can be tricky: am I feeling dread because it’s a big, audacious goal and I’m excited about it, but I also feel dread? Am I feeling dread because I’ve pursued this goal before and didn’t make it?

For those feelings, perhaps the goal is right, but the scale is wrong. Is there a way to make the goal smaller? Can you try reading one book each in two new-to-you to explore if reading might be something you’re interested in? Can you try a couch-to-5k program instead of a half marathon?

You can also try a habit goal instead of an achievement goal. Rather than, “I will run a 5k in 8 weeks” it’s “I will block off 30 minutes 3 times per week to walk/run.” Some more examples:

• I’ll read 10 pages every night before bed. (Or 1! You do you!)

• I will roast a tray of vegetables every Sunday to eat throughout the week.

• I’ll still drink 3 lattes a week, but make them half-caff.

For some people, small goals aren’t as motivating. That’s ok - you know what’s right for you. Set the goal that you’re excited about.

And finally: make sure your goals are in alignment with one another. Sometimes we set goals that end up at odds with one another. We want to take a once-in-a-lifetime trip, and save more than ever before. We want to spend our maternity leave enjoying our first baby, and also getting in the best shape ever (all the parents give a tired laugh). We want to host a monthly cocktail club with our friends, eliminate social media usage, spend more time with our kids, and and and.

Consider what’s really most important right now. Maybe you want to take that trip while your parents are still healthy enough to go with you. In that case - throw the f$%^ing budget out the window. Or maybe you’d enjoy the trip more in a few years when your kids can go with you. In that case - tighten those purse strings. Narrow down to the things that will work together to make you happy, just as you are, in this season of life.

Closing advice on goals

If there’s one thing that I believe will make all of us happier, it’s being realistic about our capacity, and trying to set goals that allow us to have whitespace in our lives. Whitespace, or margin, allows us the bandwidth necessary to course correct when life inevitably throws us curveballs.

I am the worst at this.

But I’m getting better. My time off has helped me get much more in tune with my own seasons.

There’s a balance between “life is short, so I want to pursue this goal NOW” and “life is long, and I don’t want to hate myself this year by trying to do everything at once.”

I keep repeating to myself: There are only so many hours in a day. It’s not always the right season for the goal. Now is not forever. Now is pretty amazing.

What goals look like for me this year

It’s not the year to get “in my best shape ever.” Making sure I’m moving this current body will be perfectly fine. It’s a maintenance year.

It’s not the year for me to set big goals for getting back into running - no fall half marathons, not even a 5k PR.

This also isn’t going to be a year where we hit giant savings targets. We’re buying a house, likely supporting two mortgages for some period of time, and moving cross-country. All of those are expensive things, and we can plan for that. We could choose to also set an unrealistic savings goal on top of that and then beat ourselves up for not hitting it, or we could accept the season we’re in, plan our expenditures carefully, and set up some buffer in the budget for all the unexpected hiccups along the way. That latter option feels much kinder to me.

(If you’re early in your career, take note that saving early makes a lot of these decisions a helluva lot easier! Not saving a lot this year stings less because we’ve been responsible savers in the past.)

No big trips outside of what we have planned already. This one’s kind of a joke, in the sense that we have a whole lot of trips already planned. Stephen and I will be spending the first half of the year trading places in Colorado, moving the whole fam at the end of June-ish, and then we’re going on our big family vacation in July. And then we’ll be back in Atlanta for the holidays, SO. You know, no big trips in addition to ALL OF THOSE trips.

No promotions that either of us are working towards, since Stephen just got promoted and I’m starting a new job.

Probably not a year of new hobbies. Right, Pia? This might not be the year I learn how to play mahjongg.

It’s a foundation-building year.

So here’s a smattering of the goals I set for the year:

• Learn my new job, and do it well.

• Intentionally move my body for 20 minutes every day. A walk, lifting weights, sprinting around our kitchen island while yodeling into the void - whatever sparks joy that day.

• Have a family meeting every Sunday to get on the same page about our meal plan, who’s cooking every night, and all family events and logistics.

• Buy gifts locally. This is not the year for me to focus on buying every single thing locally. That sounds stressful. But buying gifts locally feels good to me. It’s a way to support our local businesses, and give wonderful, unique things to the people I care about.

What are the goals you’ve set so far this year? Which ones are you most excited about?

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Lightning round: some fave moments from the past two weeks

• I started reading Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows and I am completely enthralled. It’s the second series in the Grishaverse, and I skipped the first one because Six of Crows is my book club book for the month. But it’s so good that I already picked up the second book in the duology, and will probably go back and read the first series.

• We discovered a new harissa chicken and sweet potato recipe that we’ve made like.. Three times in the past two weeks. It’s so good, y’all.

• We ALSO made a ginger garlic chicken ramen recipe from a new cookbook we got, and it was wildly easy and delicious. I don’t know, what can I say, it’s been a good couple of weeks in food.

• We’ve been decluttering as a family and we cleaned out our coat closet. It’s so good y’all, it’s so cleannnn.

Next time

I look forward to joining you all again in two weeks. I can’t believe it’ll already be February! I’ll be sharing some highlights from recent trips, possibly some thoughts on how to start a new job without losing your mind, and All My Thoughts on Clothes.

If you’re on the edge of your seat to hear about those things, subscribe here:

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Thanks for spending this time with me! I’ll see y’all in February!

I experimented with a few different things. I had a million bullets of all the things that happened every month, but y’all have been following along for most of a year (!!!), so I didn’t feel the need to rehash everything.

So, I decided to pare it down to a smattering of highs and lows, and some of my favorite and least favorite books throughout the year.

Let’s dive into our time machine and head back to the start of 2025!

January

Oh man, the first photo that popped up was a picture of our big guy.

January was also when my crochet obsession began.

And we lost a tree in our backyard in an ice storm.

Fave book: Tie - A Jingle Bell Mingle and Money for Couples. Sometimes I have a hard time deciding between a fiction and a non-fiction book, so these both get to be January faves!

Least fave book: None.

February

We built the shed!

Celebrated our 5 year together-versary and cleaned up on (ridiculous) prizes at our cocktail making class.

Pretty sure Stephen never wore this hat again, because how often can you wear a hat that says “Dickel” on it?

Look at this dog. He’s perfect.

Also, I got Stephen and Xan obsessed with crochet.

Fave book: Unbound. The audio version is impeccable due to the fact that she has a perfect voice.

Least fave book: Onyx Storm, with a fiery passion. I’m still mad.

March

A rare black cat photo.

I drank a glass of wine outside, and it was good.

We went to a “Bourbon and Batter” class as a date night. They gave us a bunch of bourbon, then taught us how to decorate a cake. Given the amount of bourbon consumed, I’m still proud of this result:

New vocabulary I’d like to incorporate - “don’t have a rack attack.”

Oh yeah, and I turned in my notice to quit my job.

Fave book: Parable of the Sower - man, this was INTENSE. I couldn’t sleep after reading it. Octavia Butler is unparalleled.

Least fave book: Quicksilver - DNF. Felt like a ripoff of ACOTAR.

April

The birth of this blog!

A very fun trip to Nashville with friends, in which we saw the Handsome pod live, and sang karaoke with a celebrity. Those photos are sacred, so here’s a suitable representation of my karaoke performance:

This is the beginning of the garden, and the beginning of my stick lady era.

Also, I saved this and I still love it:

Noteworthy event: I started this blog! Gah, thank you so much for following along! I know I say it in every post, but it really does mean the world to me and bring me so much joy!

Fave book: Do Nothing, with a respectable nod to Laziness Does Not Exist

Least fave book: Court of the Vampire Queen - what in the ludicrous bottom-of-the-barrel-smut. Y’all, I read some wild stuff, and this was just bad. Not a single thing to redeem it. It wasn’t even hot. I don’t know that I even believe that Katee Robert wrote this - her Olympia series is FIRE.

May

Y’all remember when I thought I was only going to have three plants?

I love that I thought I was only going to have a few plants, but also put together a series of these giant beds. Way to know me, me! self high-five

My husband graduated from his grad program, and is not in school for the FIRST TIME in the entirety of our relationship. Somehow, I manage to take NOT A SINGLE PHOTO at his graduation. Oh wait, here he is:

Fave book: This month was a BANGER on the book front. Tie here for First-Time Caller and Get Up.

Least fave book: I guess The Blue Hour, only because it was more forgettable than the others? But I don’t even think it was bad.

June

We said good-bye to our cat. Sigh. It’s not the same without him. On a lighter note, I stand by this photo and caption I chose for his good-bye post.

Finally, a home for all those sticks.

We went on a truly great summer date at a local improv theater and stayed out very late because the kids were at camp! Ahh, what a time to be alive!

Notable event: I started taking a writing class.

Fave book: Started the Nevermoor series reread! Loveee it!

Least fave book: None! All hits.

July

My daughter doubles down on crocheting a massive goose. While in the creation stage, it looks notably… NOT like a goose.

I saved a lot of screenshots from Reddit about fish fertilizer. And holy shit, did it work, so huzzah!

We went to VERMONT and I loved it! And what I loved most of all: the really confusing towel art.

Fave book: The Wedding People - one of my favorite books we read at book club this year. So well written, such a great concept. Loved it.

Least fave book: I loved Megan Bannen’s series (does the series have a name? I don’t know!) that starts with The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy. I was a little underwhelmed (and really sad about it) by the last book in the series, The Undercutting of Rosie and Adam. It was fine. I still liked it. But it wasn’t quite up to the same level of die-hard obsession for me as the first two.

August

We returned from Vermont to baby eggplants and glorious hibiscus and baby sunflowers.

We got our mill! I’m still obsessed with it.

I built what I thought was a ludicrously tall bean trellis. There’s no way beans will grow that tall.

Fave book: Ok, four way tie, because every book I read this month was a banger: The House in the Cerulean Sea, Rich Girl Nation, Silverborn (Nevermoor book 4 finally arrived!!! And it’s a delight!!!), and The Wealth Ladder.

Least fave book: None. Hit after hit after hit.

September

If I fits, I ships!

I discover a salad I realllly like at our local burger place.

The Keeper of Time.

.I almost drowned in tomatoes, dear god. And now I miss them! Isn’t that just the way it goes?

I saved a lot of screenshots of a girl with a throat tattoo. It is a throat tattoo if it’s just in the front, right? Neck tattoo sounds right, but it is on her throat. I digress. Clearly thinking about this that much means I may not be quite cool enough for a throat tattoo… yet.

(Maybe the throat is just the inside, and the outside is all neck? Hm.)

Fave and least fave book: Well, I didn’t finish any books this month, too busy contemplating what is and isn’t a throat, so. Whoops.

October

I cooked food that required many pints of tomatoes.

I decide to get a non-throat tattoo. I email my tattoo artist: just a teensy tinsy little ghostie, black and grey, like this inspiration photo:

Our house gets deep cleaned and the contrast makes me realize we are disgusting. I repress that thought by staring into these eyes.

I get my ghost tattoo. It is not teensy tinsy. It is not black and grey. I’m so glad my tattoo artist knows what I really mean when I say things 😂 Gahhh, I love him!

Fave book: Tie - Play Nice and A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping. This was a lovely combo to be reading. I don’t read much horror, but Play Nice wasn’t too scary for me. It was a really thought-provoking read - it generated some of the most book club discussion! And then A Witch’s Guide was soooo cozy and cute and playful, but touching on some real life themes that I found very compelling.

Least fave book: Only read two books this month, so none!

November

There was a cool bird by the pool.

The cycle of yapper’s regret. You feel me?

I beat my high score in my favorite video game, and immediately leveled up in life.

We went to go see Colorado Springs. It was aight, I guess.

Amen, sister.

Fave book: Man, I was really on a great streak at the end of the year. The Bullet that Missed (Thursday Murder Club series) and The Night Circus. I love the Thursday Murder Club - the characters are so rich and well-rounded and the story is cozy and engaging. I cried like a baby at the end, but it’s so worth itttt. The Night Circus - completely different from anything I’ve read in a while. A world spun out of magic and crystalline sugar, so beautifully constructed you can’t imagine how it was made.

Least fave book: The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party - did not finish. Would not recommend. The depression reappears every time I even think of it. Yergh.

December

I stayed in a cabin in Virginia with one of my besties and watched the most beautiful sunrises.

My children had a myriad of band concerts and band parades and other band-related events. It’s amazing to watch them grow as musicians.

Also, my daughter DREW this. WHAT. So talented.

My third child was voted “Most Likely to Steal Treats” in his yearbook. They’re not wrong.

We cooked so much food: we make sweet potato casserole with our sweet potatoes! We make Christmas lima beans with our… Christmas lima beans! I make my infamous Christmas cinnamon rolls and savory rolls.

Fave book: Violet Thistlewaite is a Villain No More. I got this book at our book club holiday book club and loved it. It’s cozy, plant magic, but goes surprisingly deep. It explores how to recover from failure, and how hard it is to be a different person than you’ve thought yourself to be. So fun. Some worthwhile runners up this month as well: The Heartbreak Hotel and Conform.

Least fave book: The Christmas Murder Game - second month in a row that our book club had a flop! The other book was at least well-written, it was just depressing. This book was depressing because of how poorly written it was, as well as how spineless and hate-able every single character was. Blergh.

Pia’s number one book of the year

Non-fiction: Get Up! by James Levine

In order to decide which book would take the top spot, I reflected on which book I spent the most time thinking about this year (and, if we’re being honest, yapping about). I also wanted to pick a book that deeply impacted me in a way that inspired change.

Get Up! takes the cake. I’ve spent so much time thinking about how much time I spend sitting, and slowly implementing a variety of the micro-movement habits James recommends. His sense of humor and positive energy throughout the book also stuck with me, which is important, because goals to move more often carry some amount of shame or guilt (i.e., just get up and move, YOU ABSOLUTE SLUG). James’s book is funny, written from a substantial amount of personal and professional experience and expertise, and has truly changed how I live my life and how I think about movement on a day-to-day basis.

10/10, highly recommend. And if you’re not up for a whole book on the topic, check out this podcast interview he did on one of my favorite podcasts, The Art of Manliness: The Power of NEAT - Move A Little to Lose A Lot.

Lightning round: some fave moments from the past week

That wraps up my thoughts on 2025, and now we’re already a week into 2026! Here are some highlights from the past week:

• I am every meme, every gif, every reel about the woman who’s suddenly hit magic cleaning energy and is frantically cleaning her house out right now. I’ve given so much away on our local Buy Nothing group, brought about 40 carpenter-sized bags of stuff to Goodwill, and thrown out a bunch of old, broken stuff. It feels amazingggg.

• My husband and I did our annual planning day in which we take a full day to reflect on the past year, celebrate, and then look ahead to goals and dreams for the next year. There was a lot to talk about and a lot to celebrate this time!

• Oh, also, I started my new job. Wheeee!

Next time

Reminder that I’m now publishing every two weeks, so the next time you hear from me will be January 19! I’ve got some thoughts around fashion, New Year’s goal setting, and how to approach a new job. But we’ll see what else happens in the next couple of weeks!

Until then, thanks for following along through my sabbatical chapter, and now onwards into a whole new world - new job for me, new job for my husband, and a move to Colorado! If you’re not a subscriber yet, subscribe here:

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And drop me a line with something you’re proud of yourself for in 2025:

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I take birthdays seriously. With my birthday being right before Christmas, it was impossible to have birthday parties as a kid, and even now, with all the intentionality in the world, it’s hard to carve out time amidst the myriad school events and Christmas parties and New Year’s gatherings.

But I love to celebrate a birthday, for myself and for my loved ones. It’s a milestone, a reflection point, and a celebration all in one. I don’t take them for granted.

For my birthday this year, I’m leaning into all my favorite things: planning, journaling and reflecting, goal-setting, strong and sparkly New Year’s vibes (a holiday I claim as my own in addition to my birthday), and time with my favorite pets and people.

A big part of my planning right now is getting ready for my new job, which starts in the new year. Mostly, I’m just hyped and bopping around, clearing out my list of home to-dos and health to-dos so that I can start the year with a clean slate and a clear head.

Since I’m so jazzed, I thought I’d share with y’all some of the reasons I’m excited about going back to work.

Why do I work?

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last 8 months reflecting on what does and doesn’t bring me energy and joy, and a fair bit of time over the last few months reflecting on what I get from work that I’m not getting from my day-to-day life outside of work. I’ve thought about the role that I want work to play in my life now, and what kind of work will help me fulfill that goal.

For a lot of people, work is a means to earn a living. That’s where most of us start out, at least, but as we climb the ladder, we get to reexamine what work means to us, how we want to work, and the kind of work culture we want to contribute to. We get to decide who we want to be, and the workplace is just another place to practice being that kind of person.

My passion for career-building goes beyond a single job or even a single career track that I’ve been on. My career has allowed me to show up for myself, my family, and the people I’ve been lucky enough to mentor, coach, and otherwise impact in the workplace. I’ve built lasting friendships at work. I’m lucky enough to work in a field that I’m interested in.

When I started interviewing a few months ago, I started talking to a wide variety of companies, looking into a broad array of product management roles. I wanted to see what was out there, see what was drawing my attention and enthusiasm, and let that help me narrow down what I want to do now. What kind of impact do I want to have on a company, on a team? What kind of work do I want to sit down and pour myself into every day? What do I want to learn and who do I want to grow into?

In the last few months of my previous job, and during a product leadership coaching program I participated in during the first half of the year (shoutout to Kate and crew!), I took copious notes about what brought me energy, and what I found draining. I looked at aspects of previous companies I’d worked at, previous roles, previous fields - what worked for me, and what didn’t. I took notes on previous executives and leaders I admired - and those I… didn’t - and made a list of characteristics I would look for in leaders at a new organization, and characteristics I wanted to embody in my new role. I looked at aspects of various hobbies that could transfer into my work - what feelings did these activities spark in me, and what kind of roles would allow me to have more of the good feels.

You might take away from that that my primary role for the past few months has been navel-gazing, and you’re not wrong. The time to really think all this through has felt both necessary and delightfully self-indulgent.

Here’s where I’ve landed in terms of what work means to me in this season.

Work is a part of my identity, not my whole identity

It’s no secret that I think pretty much everyone should engage in the practice of decoupling their value as a person from their work.

I’ve been on this path for a long, long time at this point. I’ve seen people who’ve sacrificed friendships, family, their health - their whole sense of self - on the altar of work. I’m sure you’ve seen the same. I’ve also seen what happens to those people when work is taken away from them - whether because their health fails them or the economy does. It’s not pretty.

My sabbatical allowed me to really stress-test how far I’ve come on my personal journey- would I feel lost and adrift without work as an anchor, or had I successfully diversified my interests and personality enough to be whole without it? As one of my friends said to me once, “You like working more than anyone I know.”

It’s been a raging success. I don’t have to fear future retirement, or quiet moments alone. I can fill my time with fun and hobbies and people I care about, spend time with my thoughts, and exercise creativity, discipline, and joy in a variety of avenues.

My favorite planning practice looks at many sectors of life - physical health, mental health, finances, career, hobbies, marriage, friendships, family, and spirituality - as a way to ensure that life is rich, authentic to yourself, and consistent with your core values. My life is flourishing in multiple categories - not just work.

That flourishing has created the space for me to look at what unique contributions I can bring to work that helps further my purpose and my values. Work is not my whole identity, but it is a part of my identity. So what does work bring that the other facets of life don’t?

A new challenge, a new goal, a new source of energy

Man, do I love sinking my teeth into a new challenge. The balance of working in my core competencies and simultaneously stretching and learning new things is my absolute sweet spot.

I love working towards a concrete goal. To my point above about smaller teams, in this org, there’ll be a direct throughline from the actions I take to team and company results. I love being able to see my impact.

When I was making my list of things that gave me energy at work, and the list of things that drained me, I remembered how much energy I had at various points in my previous role. This is the concept of the energy flywheel (on which I once read a blog post… somewhere… that I can no longer find.) The idea is this: there are some activities that you do every day that bring energy back to you. You finish the activity with as much or more energy than when you started. Then there are some tasks that drain you - every job has them.

The goal is to design a role that has more energy givers than energy drainers, so that you end your day fulfilled and with enough energy to bring your favorite self back home to your family and non-work pursuits.

A few things came up for me as strong energizers: great collaboration sessions with my partners, sessions in which I got to mentor other PMs, and times where I felt like I was building something great. That last one touches on something I value deeply: craftsmanship. I care about delivering a product that customers love, building something truly excellent from a quality, usability, and usefulness perspective. Just thinking about it gets me jazzed all over again.

I also get to test out new approaches and technologies, nerd out with other PMs and designers about the work we’re doing, and share new findings and insights with larger PM network.

Work is a team sport

Some of my favorite moments at work have been moments of creative partnership with designers and engineers. Being part of a team that’s working together towards a common goal is fulfilling. One of my favorite parts of a new job is when the pieces click into place and I realize exactly where my strengths fit in, where I add unique value to a team.

In my new role, I’ll have the opportunity to flex my planning and organizational skills, adaptability, and creativity. I’ll be able to test and experiment, collaborating with others, measuring results, and optimizing together. I hope to help build and support communication structures and feedback loops across the organization.

Because it’s a smaller organization, every person makes an outsized impact. While there are certainly larger companies that have worked hard to maintain camaraderie on teams, in a smaller company, the “we’re in it together” feeling is maintained more organically.

A place to practice compassionate leadership

Work is a great training ground for exercising my values. It has always been my goal to lead with compassion, kindness, and humanity. While I aim to show up with those same qualities at home and in my friendships, work is a great arena for all those qualities, and a way to broaden their impact.

When things are tough in the outside world, being human at work is more necessary than ever. It allows others to bring their favorite selves to work, which builds a positive, authentic, supportive working environment. My leadership can contribute to that.

Contributing financially sparks joy

You may recall that personal finance is a hobby of mine. My sabbatical time was a great way to lean into our finances in a different way, and further strengthened our family’s communication about and co-management of our finances.

But let’s be honest, I like to buy nice shit.

We’ve scaled back our spending to be more responsible (and we’ve always been responsible with our saving and investing). Now, I want to be both responsible AND bougie.

I want to help fund our move to Colorado. I want to buy nice furniture and make our new house beautiful, comfortable, and cozy. I want to help pay for our annual Vermont vacation. I want to contribute to my 401k!

This is the vibe I’m trying to bring to 2026: joyful, powerful, impactful… and bougie.

Lightning round: some fave moments from the past week

• Stephen is back from his onboarding week in Colorado! 😍I loved hearing all his fun Colorado updates - we’re both getting more and more pumped about the move. The next six months are going to fly by!

• While Stephen was gone, I took on a fun little project: I restored the headlights on his beloved (ancient) Honda Civic, and replaced the headlight bulbs. Y’all, I felt like such a bad ass, and the results are impressive. It’s like the headlights actually work now 👏

• I made this soup and the whole family demolished it.

• My son had his district band audition and crushed it!

• My daughter is entering an incredible art era. She’s focusing on drawing faces right now (which to my non-artsy self seems like the hardest possible thing to draw) and her drawings are stunning.

Next time

Next time you hear from me, we’ll be in the New Year! I hope you celebrate widely, joyfully, and responsibly.

One of my favorite trends is for folks to share what they’re most proud of themselves for this year. So tell me, what’re you proud of in 2025?

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Thanks for being part of my community this year! I can’t wait to see what the next year brings for all of us!

This was a good reading month for me! We had so many breaks during jury duty that I managed to finish a rare-for-me 500 page read.

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It feels like perfect timing - December is usually a month of reflection for me anyway, and this December is bringing a lot to reflect on!

What’s changed this year

As I’m writing this, I’ve taken 8 months off of work. It feels like a lifetime. I’m a completely different person than I was this time last year, and I’m grateful for it. I’m happy, grounded, balanced, and itching for a new challenge - pretty much exactly how I was hoping I’d feel at the end of the year.

I feel like I’ve spent a lot more time with my favorite self this year. My favorite self is able to maintain perspective on what really matters, respond to stressful parenting moments with care and patience, present with the people I love. My favorite self is also able to recognize when I need to rest, to focus on activities I enjoy without getting distracted or rushing through, and is able to remember how I want to show up - not just what I want to get done.

Self-care and creativity

I’ve invested a lot in taking care of myself this year. In January, I made a number of commitments to myself. I committed to a new physical therapist, a new therapist-therapist, and a career coaching program. I was determined to change the course I was on and dig my way out of burnout. I wanted to show up differently with my children, my husband, and my friends.

I wanted to get back in touch with my creative self, too - so I set a goal to start a blog in Q2. And in April, I did. I cannot overstate how much I’ve loved being here, and sharing my thoughts with all of you!

I had the chance to experiment with several different creative paths - pottery, writing fiction, writing here, taking a few painting classes (see, notably, Ghosts with Butts), playing with interior design in putting the shed together.

I aimed to deepen relationships more intentionally, and without the easy structure of casual work interactions propping up some of those relationships. I wanted to lean into my extrovert nature and my deep desire for in-person connection (as much as possible). It isn’t always comfortable or easy, but centering friendship has made my life feel unbelievably rich. For me, it’s been the difference between seeing life in technicolor vs. a pastel haze - it requires intention and effort, but it’s so, so worth it.

And I wanted to experience growth and learning in a non-work avenue. I didn’t expect it to be quite so literal: I started a garden! Who knew that my son bringing home a couple of expired seed packets would kickstart a whole new hobby!

It’s hard to summarize the amount of change that’s taken place in my life and in my person. I feel settled in myself, comfortable. When I wake up in the morning and look in the mirror, I’ve had the thought more than once, “I look like myself.” And then I smile, because I’m happy.

What I want to take with me into my next chapter

An awareness of energy and capacity, and the willingness to rest

My eternal struggle. This world is a good one for me to keep practicing. In physical training, rest builds muscles and positive aerobic adaptation. I’m endeavoring to carry that over to the other areas of life: rest allows me to bring my favorite self to the moments that matter, at work and at play.

I aim to not confuse capacity and capability - I am a very capable human being, but I am not limitless. And if I give 120% to everything I do, the way I’ve been taught, I will not have anything left for me at the end of the day, and I will slowly dig myself into a hole known as the “burnout hell cave.”

Instead, I’m going to:

• Practice the Daily Big 3. This has been my favorite daily planning and prioritization system for years, and I feel my best and do my best when I’m sticking to it. It means prioritizing the 3 most important things I need to do today… not the 30 most important things I need to do today.

• Schedule time for rest. This is one of my most important 2026 goals.

• Ask for help when I need it. This could mean reupping sessions with my personal trainer, asking the kids to cook an extra meal one week when I’m spread thin, or asking my boss to help me prioritize the most impactful activities or areas of learning.

Presence - being where my feet are, in my body, free of distractions, focused on what I’m doing in that moment

I am happiest when I am where I am.

“Be where your feet are” has been a mantra I’ve adopted after reading it… somewhere. I don’t remember where, but it’s been a great nudge to notice where I am and what I’m doing, especially with a brain that loves to plan and organize and optimize. My passion for planning and optimizing means I’m frequently evaluating past actions, looking for ways to improve, and then looking ahead to the future and planning ahead.

That’s not a bad thing. Those are strengths of mine and activities I enjoy. But I need to balance them with presence:

• Am I listening to my kids when they tell me about their day, or am I daydreaming?

• Am I reading this book, or half thinking about something else?

• Am I setting aside the time to plan and daydream and lean into that part of my personality so that I can be present in the here and now the rest of the time?

Running on multiple tracks is something that makes restorative activities less restorative. I want to stay present with the people that matter most to me, and with the activities that fulfill me.

Groundedness - choosing my responses and keeping the bigger picture in mind

The pace of normal life, and especially the pace of work, can drive me towards hurrying, hurrying, hurrying. Hurrying, rushing, constantly being in motion is the antithesis of presence and groundedness, but it’s also the enemy of deep focus, quality work, and effective prioritization.

I want to check in and make sure that I’m not getting swept up in the fast pace. I like moving quickly, being decisive, and makin’ moves - but not at the expense of quality, my health, or my ability to step back from that pace at intervals throughout the day to connect with myself, my family, and the community I’m part of.

Here are some practical examples of check-ins/reframes I’ll be using:

• Did I feel like I didn’t have time to think today? If this happens more than a few days in a row, schedule more thinking time.

• Did I remember that an afternoon walk improves the quality of my work and my day, or did I skip it to “do more”?

• Was I snappy or irritated with someone in my personal life? Why?

• Did I ask my children to hurry? Did it make a difference, or did it just amplify stress?

Connection - living my value of centering friendship and community, as well as honoring my connection to doing the things that make me feel most like myself

I’m on a real kick about being human. The world at large is real obsessed with AI, you may have noticed. There are great use cases for it, and I think it’s going to help many industries take huge strides.

However, outside of work, I want to be a real-life flesh and blood human being. This is fortunate, because that’s what I am. I want to connect with other real-life people, in the real world. I want to be with people, spend time out in the world, and make an impact on the community I live in.

Friendship is one of the core pillars of my life. It’s an intentional choice I’ve been leaning into for several years, and one I plan to continue prioritizing. As the pace of life speeds up, it’s easy to fall by the wayside. Like any other relationship, friendships take work and active maintenance. Long-distance friendships take even more intentional effort, so that’s work I’ll need to take on, because it matters to me. Making new friends can be pretty daunting, but it’s also the reality of our upcoming move - I’ll need to set aside time to practice all of my “make new friends” behaviors at the same time I’m amping up on the friendship maintenance front.

Outside of other people, I also want to stay connected to the activities and practices that make me feel most like me. That involves all the practical self care - sleeping enough, eating well, working out, etc. - but also setting aside time every week for reading, reflection, and creative pursuits.

And speaking of creative pursuits…

What does this mean for the blog?

I suspect I may end up switching to a twice-a-month schedule (plus my monthly reading round-up!). While I will be doing interesting things in the near future, the things I will be doing will be more interesting to me than anyone else. There’s a bit of a hiatus on the gardening front until more spring plants go in, and some of the garden projects will be cleaning up and clearing out for the new residents of our home, which is bittersweet.

Given the way the holiday calendar falls, you’ll have one more post from me next week, and then I’ll see y’all in 2026!

Lightning round: some fave moments from the past week

• My dog, being so cute after being an absolute TERRORIST for several days.

• I just really love Durham. It’s rare that I get to explore a new place on my own, and I really loved having a morning to wander around and explore on my trip last week.

• The family is kicking off a new Stardew era - we’re all getting back into Stardew Valley. Highly recommend for the cozy vibes!

• I had my first work dream - big LOL. I showed up to my first day and immediately started working, getting really sucked into what I was doing, then realized halfway through the day I hadn’t shown up to any of my orientation meetings. 🤦

It’s been a wild ride this year, and I appreciate y’all joining me for it. Thanks for spending this time with me, and for all the time you’ve spent with me this year!

And if you’re not a subscriber, now’s a perfect time to subscribe! Click here to get all my new posts in your inbox:

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I do indeed enjoy all of those things. But there’s been a lot on my mind the past couple of months, and now that I’ve told as many people as I can in person, I’m ready to share more broadly.

We’re moving to Colorado this summer!

Also, I start a new job in January!

And I was supposed to have hip surgery the day before Thanksgiving, but didn’t!

And I got rid of my Wisephone and moved back to my iPhone. Well, that one’s fairly minor, but it’s related to the first two and I’ll probably talk about it at some point, but we all know that’s not what you want to hear about first.

How did Colorado happen?

Stephen (my husband, for those of you who are new - also, hi!) has been working towards a promotion for a while. We expected that it would be a couple more years before he was promoted - there aren’t many openings at that level in his current office.

So when his boss called in mid-October and mentioned there was an opportunity for a promotion now, but based in Colorado Springs, Stephen turned it down.

When he told me about it that evening, he was heading out for a run, clearly disappointed but resigned. “I just turned down a big promotion opportunity, such a bummer, but we can’t move, headed out for a run, bye!”

When he got back, I was like, “Why can’t we move?”

Anyone who knows us could list a few (dozen) reasons: the kids are thriving in school, we love our house, we love our neighborhood, we have a bunch of friends here, the garden, the shed, we’re close to my in-laws, etc.

All of this is true. AND - I think the kids can thrive in a new school, we will keep our house and rent it out so that we can love it and our neighborhood again in the future, and I’ve learned a lot about maintaining long-distance friendships from the long-distance friends I have now. I’ve also learned a lot about how to make new friends in the past couple of years, which are skills I’ll have to put into play in a new place.

So, we talked about it, and we decided it was worth at least trying for. Stephen started the interview process the last week of October. We expected this would take a while, and that we’d be able to go see Colorado Springs before Stephen accepted his offer, so we booked a trip for just before Thanksgiving.

And then the offer came surprisingly quickly - the first week of November - and we said, “We’re all in.”

The whirlwind last 6 weeks

Not gonna lie, I haven’t thought much about anything else but the move. For a week or so, Stephen and I were both waking up at 3 or 4 in the morning, holding hands, and talking through various aspects of the potential move. Thankfully our nervous systems settled pretty quickly and now we’re doing exactly the same thing, just not at 3 in the morning.

Once we found out that he got the job, we made an effort to start telling everyone in our lives. We want to see you as much as possible before we leave! And this is a big change, best shared in person. (So, uh, apologies if you’re one of the folks we didn’t get to in time 😬)

This is an exciting change for us, especially given the fact that this wasn’t even a distant twinkle in our eyes six weeks ago, but even good changes come with a level of stress. And for us, it also overlapped with…

The hip of it all

The timing of all the promotion interviews for Stephen and uncertainty around moving and then certainty about moving overlapped with another stressful series of appointments for me. I’ve been doing physical therapy for my hip since July of 2024. In full transparency, the first 6 months were ok, but I was seeing a brand new grad and I didn’t make a ton of progress. But then I started seeing my new PT in January of this year, and things got a lot better.

A lot better, but not pain-free, still. My PT’s been telling me I need to do more strength training on top of what I do with him, so I’ve been working on that. And then I stopped running, to give my hip a full break. That helped too (at least physically - not running has been a doozy for my mental health), but still - it’s not fully pain-free.

So in October, I went to see a surgeon, which kicked off a series of very expensive imaging appointments. I can now view the inside of my hip in just about every imaging format and from every angle you can imagine - X-ray, MRI, CT.

The scans confirmed one thing I already knew (labral tear) and one thing I didn’t (a bone deformity in my hip). For most people, labral tears are asymptomatic, and they’re able to get relief through PT. But PT can’t fix a bone deformity.

So I started researching the legitimacy of this apparent new diagnosis. (Always be skeptical, and always be your own advocate in our medical system.) I really liked the surgeon, but I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that I’ve had a bone deformity since birth that’s really only started giving me pain in the past few years. It does make sense - I’ve been more active in the past few years than I was in the past - but it’s not an easy thing to accept.

It’d be easier if the recovery weren’t so awful. 6 weeks of crutches, with absolutely no turning of the leg on the surgical side. Sleeping with your feet taped together. An estimated EIGHT MONTHS until I’m fully recovered, with multiple hours of PT per week.

EIGHT. MONTHS. You can practically grow a whole new person during that time, and that’s how long it’s going to take for one joint in my body to fully recover?

Anyway, I was supposed to have surgery the day before Thanksgiving, and I just… couldn’t. Every day I spent some amount of time just catastrophizing how horrible it would be to navigate my house on crutches. Then I’d calculate when I’d start my new job, and how many weeks till we moved, and when I’d be able to lift a box/see my dog/DRIVE/etc. (The calculations didn’t change much - the results were generally - “The same as the last time you checked, just minus a day.)

For now, the answer is more strength training, possibly starting running again but staying at a low volume and intensity, supplementing with the Peloton, and then revisiting surgery in a couple of years if I feel like it’s unbearable.

Back on the good news train

Departing Bummerville and hopping back on the good news train: I got a new job!

I’ll be starting in January, and I’m so pumped about it! I’ll be a product manager again, working on building useful, easy-to-use products for a much smaller company. My whole career prior to my last job was spent working in small companies, so I’m excited to get back to my roots, in a way.

I’ll get to focus on my favorite part of product management: building products that customers love. I tend to believe that if you stay focused on that, the results you want will follow.

Enough big news, check out this big lettuce

Lol. This lil guy EXPLODED when it started getting cooler. The two kale plants that have survived the squirrels are doing well, as are my broccoli plants.

I cleaned out the remnants of the tomatoes (finally) and the butternut squash. Next week, I hope to harvest the last of the Christmas lima beans, and then the backyard raised beds will be mostly empty.

Next time

Will I attempt another go-round with the squirrels and plant more beets? Will I get my flower bulbs in the ground? Only one way to find out - tune in next week!

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I’ll also share a bit more about what all the changes mean for this space (I’m not going anywhere, the blog will continue!), some takeaways from my time off, and what I hope to take with me into my new chapter.

If there’s room, I’ll also share some highlights from our trip to Colorado.

Thanks for spending this time with me - see you next week!

No, no, it’s not that bad. It has been a bit of a rollercoaster week though, and definitely a stressful one. It also created a lot of opportunities for me to sit with gratitude - for the opportunity to participate in our justice system, for my children, for picking up so much slack while I was jury-ing all week; and for my friends, who helped me stay sane along the way.

Professional juror/wizarding student

Jury duty has been a WILD ride. I’ve been reflecting on “a jury of your peers” being a real misnomer. These are people who, for the most part, don’t want to be there, are only your peer in the sense that they live in the same geographic region as you, and most likely have very little in common with you.

I, Hermione Granger, am at the edge of my seat, completely nerding out about every aspect of what is happening in the courtroom, the strategies the lawyers are using, how they’re framing the evidence, etc.

If I could raise my hand and ask questions, I would, and then my fellow jurors would quietly strangle me in the deliberation chamber for dragging things out. Several of the jurors kept falling asleep during various parts of the trial. It’s like an early morning college class all over again.

The weight of weighing in on someone’s future

All jokes aside though, it is taxing. It’s a long day, and the weight of playing a part in deciding someone’s future feels heavy. It’s what I’ve thought about every night as I go to sleep and what I wake up thinking about in the morning. Plus, this case is at the federal courthouse, which is much further from me than the county courthouse, so there’s a brutal commute both ways. That, combined with my husband being out of town for a few days, has meant a very tiring past week for me.

I’ve never really been a person that gets the Sunday scaries. I’ve been fortunate to have jobs that, for the most part, I was excited to go to Monday morning.

For those unfamiliar, the Sunday scaries refers to that feeling that happens when it’s Sunday night, you think about Monday, and your stomach just drops. You feel the dread rising up from the base of your gut, making you nauseous; anxiety twisting your stomach further while your heart starts to pound.

That’s how I felt when I woke up Sunday and realized I’d be going back to jury duty on Monday. Thankfully I had a busy weekend, but every time I had an empty moment, my mind would return to the details of the case, and I’d feel heavy and anxious and awful all over again.

I am thankful to say that we were able to complete our deliberations and arrive at a verdict on Monday afternoon. As a positive, I feel like all of us took our duty as jurors very seriously, and we stayed very respectful even as we disagreed about how we were interpreting various pieces of evidence, how we weighed the importance of that evidence, and our thoughts on various witnesses.

I feel good about the verdict we arrived at. My favorite part of the whole process was after the verdict was read, the judge came into the jury deliberation room and offered us a bit of Q&A time. He reiterated the importance of jury duty, and said he wished that more people participated, because of how impactful it is in terms of what you learn about how the justice system works. He didn’t share his opinion about the facts of the case, but he did share that he respected our verdict and called out some specific thoughts about why he thinks our verdict was balanced and fair.

Overall, even with the stress, it was a wonderful experience. I agree with the judge - it was an impactful experience, and I think many people would benefit from this “behind-the-scenes” view.

What’s saving my life this week

The Lazy Genius does these themed quarterly episodes that she calls “what’s saving my life.” The theme is based on a quote from… someone, I can’t remember who… but the point is that different things stand out as keeping you happy and sane during different seasons, and so she shares a few of the things that are “saving her life” in these episodes.

On my theme of gratitude this week, I wanted to share some of the things that I’m grateful for, that kept me upright and functional during a tough week.

• The fact that my kids can cook complete meals now. My kids cooked or picked up dinner every night while I was doing jury duty. Their help was the only thing that put a healthy dinner on our table every night, and also meant I had a packed lunch for jury duty every day. It feels like the culmination of so many parenting decisions to get to this point, and it feels amazing.

• My puzzle table. On the theme of being completely wiped out every evening, I wanted to hang out with my kids, but didn’t have a lot of emotional bandwidth to chat or engage deeply. The kids wanted to listen to an audiobook and puzzle with me, which made for such cozy evenings. The puzzle table specifically has made it so easy to work on a puzzle for a bit, then pack it away to finish on a future night, which I really appreciate. It keeps the cat from knocking off pieces and serving them straight into the dog’s mouth. And the angle means no more puzzler’s shoulder!

• The Girl Next Door podcast. This podcast host duo - they’re a crackling wood-burning fire on a frosty day, with a cup of your favorite warm beverage in hand - in person form. They’re just so lovely. I find their voices and their content both funny and comforting, and I’ve listened to a ton of episodes this week. I’ve selected episodes that tie into my next bullet:

• Leaning into my particular strengths and nerdy hobbies: planning, intention setting, and dreaming big. The Girl Next Door podcast has great episodes of the intentions they’ve set for every year, a mid-year check-in, and then a year-end wrap up. I love this kind of content, as a dedicated planner and goal-setter myself. And with a big birthday coming up soon, this has been on my mind a lot.

• My new PT. I’ve graduated into a new strength-building phase of physical therapy, and with that comes an additional physical therapist. (I’m keeping my other PT, because he’s amazing and specializes in a different thing, so I’m considering my new PT a bonus PT 😂) We are fantastically well matched personality-wise, and my appointments are flying by. I’m drenched in sweat, lifting heavy, and laughing and yapping the whole hour.

• Leaning into community. I have really intentionally invested in expanding my circle of friends and deepening friendships the past few years. I was grateful to have those friends to lean on this week. I also got some unexpected friend time this week: a friend I haven’t seen in a long time was visiting from Texas, and it was just such a delight to be able to hang out with her! My in-laws were also able to come see an event of my son’s, and I’m eternally grateful how much they prioritize spending time with us.

Lightning round: some fave moments from the past week

• I got to go for a long, sunny fall walk - just absolutely perfect weather.

• The sunsets have been SO BEAUTIFUL this week, and because I’ve been out and about, I’ve gotten to see them more than I usually would.

• With all the daily breaks on jury duty, I finished a whole book this week!

• I got to see my son play in a marching band performance, and it’s wild to me how much music he’s memorized and how much he’s improved this year. I’m so proud of him!

• My son has been doing allergy shots for several years now, and we found out that we may be able to stop next year! This would be phenomenally exciting, so we’re crossing our fingers.

• My little sweet potato curing station seems to be working well! I think I’ll be able to migrate them into our basement (the best place to store them, apparently) next week!

Next time

Next week I will be off for our Thanksgiving break. I hope you and your loved ones have a restorative, enriching, and all around delicious time together!

What’re you looking forward to this Thanksgiving? I’d love to hear about it!

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I can’t believe that by the time of my next post, it’ll be December! Thanks again for joining me for this edition of Pia on Purpose, and I look forward to catching up with y’all as we enter the Winter Holiday Season!

It’s not like I didn’t notice that it’s November now, it’s just that I forgot that November gets cold in most places, including, very rarely but sometimes, here.

I knew that it was just about time to harvest the sweet potatoes, but I wasn’t in a hurry to do it. There’s been a lot going on with children learning new instruments and tryouts for things and other various family happenings, and I just kept telling myself, “The right time to harvest is right before the first frost.”

Well, then that frost was suddenly upon us, and my son and I were digging up sweet potatoes in the dark to avoid the frost. This made for a surprisingly fun adventure, a treasure hunt of sorts.

Digging for potato treasure

I had expected that the potatoes we pulled up might be quite shrimpy, as I read that you’re not supposed to fertilize sweet potatoes… right after I’d already fertilized them. Apparently, fertilizing them can cause excessive vine growth, and not enough potato growth. Well, since that mistake was already made, I was at least emotionally prepared when the first potato we dug up was approximately the size of my pinkie finger.

But then.

Then came the behemoths.

These monsters are enormous. I tried to take a photo for scale, but the photo does not do them justice.

Here’s another thing I wasn’t expecting: when sweet potatoes vine, the vines will grow roots at intervals to anchor the vine to whatever it’s growing on/up. I didn’t realize that those roots can also grow sweet potatoes - this is where we found a bunch of smaller potatoes.

We just kept digging and digging, and now we have this delightful bounty. All this, from just 6 humble shoots! They looked like wet stems wrapped in a paper towel when they arrived, and I didn’t believe they’d even survived being shipped. And now all this!

A cure for all that ails… the potatoes?

The next step of the harvesting process is to cure the sweet potatoes. “Why?” you might ask, “What ails them?”

Well, nothing, that I’m aware of, but curing is a process that lets the skin harden a bit to make the potatoes keep longer in storage, and also allows the sugars to develop for better flavor. Who knew?

Ideally, you put the sweet potatoes into an environment where they have adequate airflow, 80-85 degree temperatures, and 85-90% humidity for somewhere between 5 and 14 days. If you grew your sweet potatoes at the appropriate time, you could even do this outside. Folks will lay out a tarp or a row of cardboard, set out the sweet potatoes, and rotate them a couple of times a day for a week or two.

I, you may recall, started my potatoes late - just like everything else I’ve planted - so I’ve missed the outdoor curing window. Which raises the question of how to create a curing environment that meets the temperature and humidity requirements, when it’s cold outside, and I don’t have any specialty equipment.

My first thought (also: the first thing I read on reddit) was to convert a bathroom into a temporary curing zone. Turn on a bunch of humidifiers and space heaters, lay the potatoes out in the tub, and let them have at it.

This makes sense - the bathroom is already set up to endure humidity and it’s small enough to heat easily with a space heater. But we have human beings that use every one of our bathrooms, and would any of us remember that the tub is full of potatoes before turning on the water?

Our bathroom has a separate tub, but after watching multiple people put space heaters into their bathtubs, I just started to get a squicky feeling that putting my ancient, kinda shitty space heater into our bathtub might be how I accidentally burn down our house.

I watched a Youtube video of a couple that owns a farm in Montana convert a chest freezer into a curing tank - trustworthy, but too hard. I watched a few Redditors claim that their sweet potatoes were “just fine” after some number of weeks on their kitchen counters - not trustworthy, but certainly easy.

I finally settled on an in-between solution: put the potatoes in plastic bags, in a plastic tub in the shed, next to the space heater with the heat cranked on high. Add a bowl of water for humidity, throw a towel over the whole mess, hope nothing burns.

I am feeling… half-heartedly optimistic that this contraption will suffice. I don’t think the shed can quite hit 80 degrees when it’s this cold out, and the humidity doesn’t seem to be humid enough, but I think it’s my best effort at this moment.

Cover the butternuts!

Part two of our race against the cold was the race to cover the butternuts. Butternuts do not like the cold, but I have one butternut left on the vine that is almost ripe, and I really wanted to try to save it. The temps will be back in the seventies later this week, and I really hope this little fella makes it.

We tied these tarps on as a cover, and hope that any amount of protection will help.

I’ve harvested the other butternuts. I lost a couple to worms, so these two lil’ fellas are all that’s left. (And their early-harvested brother, who has held up well.)

Civic duty derails garden progress

Some of my kale is doing really well! I’m so delighted! I really want to plant more in the empty sweet potato beds. I’ll take a fourth attempt at beets and plant some garlic there as well, though it may be a bit before I get to it.

Just look at all this empty real estate I have to work with now!

I got picked to be on a federal jury! I’ve always wanted to do jury duty, and now’s my chance. Federal jury duty appears to be a bit different. I was told I’d be on call for two weeks, and would potentially hear multiple cases during my two-week on-call period. I was selected for a first case, however, that may take most of the time, so it’s likely that I’ll only be hearing this one case.

Lightning round: some fave moments from the past week

• We went to the Stardew Valley symphony, and it was such a delight! So cozy! So charming!

• Love is Blind continues to spark joy, as well as great dating-related conversations with the teens.

• I started a new physical therapy regime for my hip, and I’m excited about it. It’s also being derailed by jury duty for the next couple of weeks, but I’m hopeful for this next phase of PT.

• I’ve had a friend date nearly every day for the last week! Friendship and community are core values for me, and I’m really proud and grateful for how I’ve invested in spending time with people in person.

Next time

I’m not really sure what I’ll have time to do before our next post, as I expect I’ll be jury dutying for most of this upcoming week, but I’m hoping to fill up the empty bed in the backyard, and start planting some bulbs in the front. I’m also evaluating some new perennials, so I’ll let y’all know if I pick anything.

Until then, how’re you spending your November? Any entertaining jury duty stories to share?

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Thanks again for joining me for this edition of Pia on Purpose!