Aloha, everyone.

To help you understand how I ended up starting this blog, I will tell you a short story. 

My mom was a workaholic. She worked as an accountant all day, then kept busy teaching tax law several nights a week. Don’t get me started on what tax season looked like. The years flew by and the next thing I knew … she was gone. She passed away just after I turned 30. The pain of losing her left a huge mark on me.

As I entered my adult life, I became my mom. I LOVE working! It’s my passion. I was a pastry chef during my 20s and 30s. I worked full time with several caterers and created my own wedding cake business. Like all workaholics, I worked 17-hour days and loved every second of it. However, after years of this, I burned out and got sick of making cakes.

After I got married in my mid-30s, my husband and I realized that we wanted to change our lives. We decided to move to Hawaii. We first spent 18 months in Vegas so that we could spend some time with our niece and nephews while they were little. We stayed in a beautiful condo hotel in Las Vegas and stumbled upon the continuous stream of social media training and LIVE internet marketing events offered in Vegas. I attended a different live event or course almost every week. Within a year, I had absorbed so much information that I was teaching online marketing to all my friends. Word of mouth spread quickly and guess what happened? By the time we moved to Hawaii, I was once again working 17-hour days on this new business.

After we moved to Hawaii, I was pulled in two completely different directions. One direction was my desire for a perfect dream lifestyle of visiting farmers’ markets, cooking wonderful meals, gardening in my vegetable garden, enjoying happy puppies running around in the backyard, baking cookies for my neighbors, and having wonderful friends over for afternoon tea. The other direction was my dream online business.

I really love working. No … I REEEEALLY love working! I especially love creating a plan, researching it, and orchestrating its perfect execution. The only problem is, I don’t like slowing down or taking any breaks because I feel that this slows my progress toward completing my project. I like to move fast! However, once I am into the project, especially the research phase, the level of detail—along with the size, shape, and scope of the project—grows along with my knowledge and understanding. This creates so much perfectly intertwined, detailed perfection that I can’t possibly complete the task within my allotted time frame. So, my life once again became filled with 17-hour workdays, which threw me completely out of balance. I watched my puppy and my husband heading off to the farmers’ market on Saturdays while I obsessively worked in my office. I realized that some things had to change.

I needed a business that was centered around all my passions. I love online marketing. I love food. I love travel. I love gardening. And I love teaching. The answer was simple … Postcards From Verbena. For a long time, I have been dreaming about a children’s story that I have been writing in my head since I was a little girl. I named my blog after the main character, Auntie Verbena.

My mom told me, “Work expands to the time allotted.” She was so right. I had to cut the time allotted for work and find a solution. That’s why I set out to redesign my life and find my passion. The pain of not having the dream life I wanted—the picket fence and beautiful flower garden, with time to cook and to read on the porch—led me to pledge that I would change my life. I started this journey to heal myself and my family.

If you have found that you need to find your passion for life as well, then join “Verbena’s Tribe” for incites and activities for helping you too to discover your happiest life. I am grateful to have discovered that life is not supposed to be a struggle. There is still time to do it all and have it all, starting right now.

With love,