One and a half miles. That’s how long it takes me to start enjoying my workout. Which, at my pace, is no small thing. If I’m running, that’s at least 15 minutes. If I’m walking, it’s 20 to 30, and for every one of those minutes before that point, I am not smiling, glowing, or floating on a runner’s high. I am simply… doing it.

Somewhere along the way, adulthood picked up this idea that friendship is supposed to look like a perfectly assembled group photo: a tight‑knit crew that brunches every weekend, takes annual trips, and moves through life as a single, smiling unit. Social media reinforces it, sitcoms normalize it, and suddenly the absence of a “friend group” can feel like a personal shortcoming rather than a simple reflection of how most people actually live.

As many of you who follow me on Instagram know, I’ve been doing some renovation work lately; the kind of work that requires tools I don’t normally reach for and decisions I can’t undo with a simple CTRL Z. At one point, I needed to cut a large piece of drywall. So, I measured, I marked, and I cut. And then I realized, almost immediately, that I had cut the entire thing backwards.

All Winter around 7:30am, I strolled into the gym looking absolutely ridiculous in my hat, scarf and giant coat, doing everything in my power to keep the cold New Jersey winter from touching my soul. But I somehow made it through, day after frigidly cold day, because I finally found the formula that works for me.

One of my favorite modern conveniences is my Ring doorbell. I love knowing exactly when my packages arrive, and I really love pretending I’m not home when someone knocks and I’m not in the mood for human interaction. While any introvert out there probably also uses their smart doorbell in this way, we all know the real purpose of technology like this is safety. And long before smart tech and Wi‑Fi, that idea started with a woman whose name most people have never heard: Marie Van Brittan Brown.

In the mid‑1960s, as a new graduate student at Cambridge, Jocelyn Bell helped build a radio telescope by hand: 120 miles of wire and cable stretched across a four‑acre field. Once it was operating, she spent long days examining the telescope’s chart recordings, scanning for the subtle scintillation patterns her team hoped would reveal distant quasars. Amid the routine “bits of scruff” in the data, she eventually noticed something different: a signal that repeated with uncanny regularity. That tiny, rhythmic pulse would become the first recognized pulsar, a discovery that transformed astrophysics.

In the early days of computing, long before machines hummed in server rooms or lived in our pockets, a “computer” wasn’t a device; it was a person and more often than not, that person was a woman. Women filled rooms at observatories, government agencies, and research labs, performing the painstaking calculations that powered astronomy, ballistics, engineering, and early data science. This is something I already knew about because of great movies like Hidden Figures, but something that I didn't hear about until recently was the term used to describe their output.

There are many moments when we hear about the first time a woman did something. Or I suppose it would be more accurate to say the first time a woman was allowed to do something. My entire life I grew up hearing about people like Sandra Day O'Connor (first woman to serve on the United States Supreme Court - 1981), Sally Ride (first American woman in space - 1983), and Aretha Franklin (first woman inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame - 1987). And to this day I continue to…

Lately I’ve noticed how quickly I can slip into a negative headline about my day. I’m stressed. I’m overwhelmed. Today is hard. But then, if I find the strength to pause and zoom out, even a little, I realize… the day has actually been pretty good.

It’s wild how fast a single thought can rewrite the whole story: One email took longer than I wanted or one conversation felt a little off leads to one moment of tension and suddenly my brain wants to stamp the whole day with a headline: “Today is hard.”

I just finished writing a Sunday Starter and ended it with needs a better ending. I did it because I knew the ending wasn't great, I knew it needed something different, but I also knew that now wasn't the moment to fix it. If I had sat there crossing out my work, rewriting, and moving things around I would have been here another hour with little to show for it. Instead, I chose to accept momentum over mastery and followed the next idea.

Does anyone else have the awkward flaw of oversharing? This happens to me when I am feeling uncomfortable; maybe I just got to a party and I'm meeting people I don't know that well and my fear of silence makes me give details that no one wanted or needed. I'm sure I'm not alone in this and many of you have also played a conversation over in your head wondering why did I talk that much!?

Hanging on the front door of the Stitzel-Weller Distillery are five keys. These keys were once used each morning by the original property owners as they walked the grounds, unlocking the different facilities on the property. When they finished, they returned to the front door and hung the keys back up as a symbol of hospitality; a quiet signal that the place was open, and so were the people inside.

I am writing… I am in a coffee shop and I'm writing… I'm in a coffee shop AND I'm WRITING… Now sing that like you're Will Ferrell in Elf and you'll know what was just going through my head. About 30 minutes ago when I sat down to write, the words came pouring out of me so quickly my poor little hands could barely keep up. Then, I hit a block. No new ideas. So, I took a few sips of my black Americano, which was finally cool enough to drink, and I almost switched gears to start reading. Almost. Then I remembered that the best way to write a book is to write a book…

On New Year's Eve I was scrolling through social media when I saw a post from Mel Robbins. It was about this tradition she had done with her husband for 18 years. Every year, before embarking on a new one, they would sit down together and go through 6 questions. She had put together a free workbook with the content and so I decided to download it and take a look. After skimming through I thought some of the questions would be fun to discuss and so I texted the PDF to my husband. My actual text went as follows…

As part of a way to focus on writing in 2026, I've been participating in the Writer's Digest writing challenge. On Day 3 we were asked to write a love/hate list, an exercise inspired by Katie Bernet's article I Quit Writing, and then I wrote my Debut Novel. I of course did what anyone would do: lurk on the comments already made by other writers to generate some ideas. When I read through the lists, I realized there was very little I could whole heartedly say I loved because most things I love are not always lovable.

I've been trying to write for about 5 hours now. Instead, I've updated my website, posted about an upcoming event on social media, cleaned up all four of my inboxes, and did a writing challenge, which did not really involve writing but rather making a list of the things I like and hate (more on that next week). So, as you can see, I've had an extremely productive day doing all the things that were not my priority and failed to do my biggest goal for the year: write for 30 minutes every day.

I came to Halo Roasters today, my favorite coffee shop down the road from my house, to write. Over the past few weeks Andrew and I have been talking about our 2026 goals. While he always likes to have goals around learning new things, expanding his ever-growing list of practical skills and boundless knowledge, I keep coming back to my first love: writing. I want to try to find a publisher and agent; I want to give a writing career a real shot. Not just something I do as a hobby and earns a little extra pocket change; I want to be able to fully focus on it.

Last weekend we were on a tour of Stitzel-Weller Distillery where they have 29 houses filled with 380,000 barrels of whisky. According to the tour guide, that's not even a large amount compared to other locations used for the aging process. I've tasted 30-year whisky before but what I never really thought about until that moment was how long 30 years actually is.

The story I’m about to tell you has everything: laughter, suspense, tears… it even has neon signs. It starts in the United Lounge at Newark Airport when we were doing what you usually do when your flight is delayed: we settled in, sipped some free wine, and bonded with strangers over the shared travel experience. As we were talking about the delays with the young woman sitting next to us, I relayed my experience from when I used to travel every week for work. I told her that I learned there is no point in going to the gate until you get the It's time to board text message. She had already gone there once and came back when it was delayed another hour; just stay here I told her, I never go until the app updates. They always tell you when they're boarding. It was in that moment when the universe decided to one-up Allanis Morrisette and delivered the mother of all ironic moments…

Last week when I messaged all of my friends asking about their favorite holiday traditions, the most interesting response was actually the very first one that I got. It was from a friend of mine who said he had no traditions; this immediately sent me into therapist mode (I'm not a therapist) and I asked how he felt about that. He said he didn't mind not having them, because he's never been particularly nostalgic. As someone who still has her childhood jewelry box on her dresser, I could not relate, but I respected it because I have seen the dark side of traditions: the traditions trap.