• Life

    Pandemic & Mental Pandemonium

    Well, I was going to title this blog, “What in the Actual F**k?” but I didn’t want to scandalize my readers.  Honestly though, that’s what it should be titled. I know that’s how most of us are feeling. What started with a sense of awe at escalating world events, and “Whoa, this is really happening” has slowly morphed over the last (quarantined) weeks into alternating waves of lows (disbelief, anxiety, and fear) and relative highs (optimism, sense of well-being, “this could be much worse/we’re going to be fine.”)  For me personally, the last 6 or 7 weeks have been tough. I recently re-read my post from early March and laughed…

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  • Life

    Where the heck have I been?

    WHOA. It’s been a year and a half since I last updated this thing, and that feels like a definite failure on my part. I started this blog with such high hopes of fanning my creative fire and sharing my point of view. And then, ya know… life happened. A quick caveat: I don’t want this blog to turn into a journaling exercise – I want to share special moments and trips and interesting perspectives without this reading as a timeline of life events. However, with such a long time between posts, I feel like a bit of a catchup is necessary: My very last post was on the heels…

  • Health & Beauty

    On Fitness and Fatness

      One of the first things I promised myself when I decided to start this blog is that I wouldn’t spend an inordinate amount of time talking about weight and weight loss. And I am still committed to that. But being authentic and honest here means being open about something that has been a relatively large part of my life…fitness and fatness. For as long as I can remember, I was chubby. As I got older, sometimes it verged on smaller, more “curvy” than chubby, and other times it just verged on “fat”. I’ve been up, I’ve been down, and I’ve been everywhere in between. I was on Jenny Craig…

  • Life

    When an Empowered Woman Feels Powerless

    I was always planning to write about the following experience, but with today being International Women’s Day, it felt like today needed to be the day! To give the story some context: I recently switched careers (proof you’re never too old to follow a dream!) and got a job working in marketing at a startup/small business. The CEO is a an older white guy, and my other boss, the VP of Marketing, is a woman just a few years older than me who happened to get her sh*t together a lot quicker than I did. She is strong and sweet, beautiful, and more importantly, extremely smart and knowledgeable – my…

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  • Family & Relationships

    Stories, Truths, and Videotape.

    *First ever blogger editor’s note: I know I said one of the goals for this blog would be making you laugh. I promise that’s still true. It’s just not gonna be this one. Or maybe even the next one. But probably, maybe, at some point. So last night I did something. I did something that others might think is weird, possibly even morbid: I took a few hours out of my Sunday and videotaped an interview with my parents. I sat my mom down first, asked her a list of questions, and videotaped the answers. Then I videotaped her and my dad together, and then just my dad solo. First…

  • Life

    Welcome to a Sweet Piece of Ash!

    Welcome to all (3 of) you reading this right now! I’m the Ash(ley) in the aforementioned title. I’ve been wanting to start a blog for the long time, but didn’t know what kind of voice I’d have since I’m not a mom or a fashionista or a fit chick. And then I realized that that’s maybe exactly why I should start one…because there are endless great mom blogs and fashion blogs and fitness blogs, but only 1 me. Now, that’s not to promise I have a particularly interesting or different take on things, but I promise to always switch it up, be real with ya, and do my best to make…