News and Notes: November 2025

A Few Favorite Things

• Even down here in Louisiana, we caught the teeniest sliver of the Aurora borealis one evening. It was magical!

See that little glow of pink in the distance? We wouldn’t have been able to find it without our cameras! But it was so worth the search!

• I’ve never been much of a “bookmark person,” but I am loving these book darts from Modern Mrs. Darcy. On these lazy holiday weekends, these are saving me so much time (not to mention, sanity!) when I need to find my place again!

• I upped my dessert game this Thanksgiving by making the Pioneer Woman’s key lime pie recipe (though I subbed meringue for the whipped cream), a gooey chocolate chip cookie pie, and a batch (flock?) of candy turkeys (however, I couldn’t find candy corn anywhere and subbed Mike & Ike’s instead).

• I finally finished my middle kid’s baby book…nine years later. Shoutout to the Baby Notebook app, which made the process easy and painless!!

On My Bookshelf

Here are just a few of the picture books we loved this month:

Looking Back

• My essay “The Us List” won an honorable mention in the Exhale Creativity Circle of Trust contest and was featured on the Coffee + Crumbs Substack. (Check out the other winning entries by Reem Faruqi, Stacey Bronec, Lauren Chapman, Dani Eberbach, and Joy Nicholas.

• Nightingale, the journal of the Data Visualization Society, published my essay “In the Shadow of Edmund Halley: Solar Eclipses, Citizen Science, and Qualitative Dataviz.” It was fun to revisit this project one last time!

• The November/December issue of Literary Mama is live! I loved getting to work on the two featured profiles, one with Julie Brill and one with Jocelyn Jane Cox.