I’m an optimist. Always have been and probably always will be. But recently, I have been uncharacteristically pessimistic about one thing: this dang pandemic. When it started for us here in the US, I was consulting with a running retailer and race management company. They had a late-May race that…
For those of you who know me personally, you might know that my husband, Richie, is losing his vision due to optic atrophy caused by a rare genetic disease. Since he was diagnosed about a year and a half ago, he has devoured books by people who have lost their…
Are you a morning person? I am. I have trouble waking up, but once I’m up, I’m ready to go. My energy lasts for a while as I power through my morning walk and workout, taking care of some personal tasks, and then starting my workday. In my morning meetings,…
I’ve told you about a time I created more work for myself when I cheated on an essay assignment in high school and a time I let perfect be the enemy of good on what should have been a fun project in middle school. Now I’m back with another blast from…
I took BASIC programming in high school. I wasn’t very good at it, but something that I think about a lot are the IF…THEN structures. Basically (heh), an IF…THEN structure allows you to tell the program that if a certain condition is true, then it needs to execute a certain…
I recently read this thoroughly enjoyable GQ interview with Jason Sudeikis. I recommend reading the whole thing, even if you don’t watch Ted Lasso (I sadly don’t thanks to a lack of Apple TV), but I wanted to share this part: [Sudeikis] acknowledged it had been a hard year. Not…
There’s a part in Steve Martin’s novella Shopgirl where a character (Ray Porter, which Steve Martin plays in the film adaptation) is navigating his kitchen, preparing a meal in the most efficient way possible. (I tried to find it to paste here—no such luck, sorry! Just know that it is…
I was fired from my first job. I was 16, and I worked as a receptionist at my dance studio. I would check tiny ballerinas in for class, collect tuition from parents, and occasionally sell a leotard or a pair of tights. It was a great job for a high…
If you’ve ever had an a-ha moment, where the answer was suddenly clear or you came up with a brilliant new idea, it might have seemed like a lightbulb switched on right over your head. But what had to happen to get that bulb to light up? For me, it…
What have you taught yourself to do? Really on your own—no instruction, no classes. Maybe it was something big like how to play the piano or ride a bike, or something small like how to do a VLOOKUP in Excel (small but mighty!). That question came to me the other…
