19 March 2026

hello, bee people…

it’s been a while…not intentionally…life just kind of happened…i had this moment where it felt like i was standing on a shoreline watching two boats drift away…one with my mom…one with my son…not in a sad way…just in a this is what life does kind of way…slow…necessary…inevitable…and in that space in between…i made a choice…i decided to just soak it…if you’ve ever played World of Warcraft, you know…sometimes you don’t fight…you don’t move…you just stand there and take it in…so that’s what i’ve been doing…still doing…

at some point it hit me…this time…this exact version of life…i don’t get it back…i’ve got a teenager about to go out into the world…and an octogenarian mom…and you just never know…not in a doom way…just reality…so i cut everything i could…social media…gone…texting…mostly gone…noise…gone…a very small handful of people can reach me…and if you really know me, you know how to get through if it matters…it wasn’t about not caring…it was the opposite…it was about caring enough to be present…

i think a lot of people understand this now…especially after the pandemic…we all had that moment where the world slowed down and asked…what actually matters…and then it sped right back up again…this was me choosing not to follow it…

but while i’ve been off the grid…i haven’t been gone…i’ve been thinking…especially about Sayonara Cupcake…because when i started this thing…it was chaos…like real chaos…an offhand comment to Andy Ruch…and a week later i had a podcast…no plan…no training…no clue…just vibes and a microphone that probably shouldn’t have been used for anything serious…

Desmond…my producer slash audio engineer slash unpaid intern…jumped in and helped…and like all good friends…he pushed me out of my comfort zone…but we approached things differently…he focused on the technical…i focused on the conversation…and somewhere in there i made a dumb assumption…who wants to listen to me…so i kept trying to shrink myself out of the episodes…Desmond told me that was dumb…he was right…

and then video happened…because my son…clearly the only adult in the room…was like…why aren’t you filming this…and i was like…because podcasts are audio…and he was like…people watch them…cool cool cool…great…now i have to learn lighting, framing, not looking like a goblin…awesome…and just when i finally got comfortable having a camera pointed at me…my best friend Marty casually says it’s brave of me to put my face on the internet because AI can duplicate me now…facial recognition and all that…and because i am who i am…my brain immediately goes…cool…great…love that…absolutely not sleeping tonight…i’m also the same person who has had irrational fears about things like spontaneous combustion…so naturally this sent me into a completely reasonable spiral…which is how we ended up here…with a microphone setup that is wildly unnecessary…like unnecessarily serious hardware that confuses people…is it stopping AI from duplicating me…probably not…i’m sure my face is already out there…but in my head…this became my thing…because i never wanted the podcast to be about me anyway…

so here we are…almost two years in…technology has gotten way better…and honestly…some of the early episodes…hard to listen to…not because of the conversations…those are solid…but the audio…yeah…we don’t need to lie to each other…and i used to avoid going back…like well…that’s what it was…but people said yes to me…early…fast…no proof of concept…and i feel a responsibility to them…to present those conversations the best way i can…

so i’m remastering…episode by episode…slowly…because time is still limited…but consistently…and one thing to note…because Spotify lets me update episodes seamlessly…anything i remaster there will automatically update across Apple, Amazon, and everywhere else pulling from the RSS feed…so those will just quietly get better…YouTube on the other hand…is its own personality…and by personality i mean…it doesn’t let me swap anything…so i may pull the old episodes and replace them…which is fair…because i put exactly zero effort into YouTube in the beginning…like none…we’ve always gotten most engagement from Instagram and Spotify anyway…

and somehow…still…this thing grew…we even got a couple awards from Spotify…which i’m still side-eyeing like…are you sure you meant us…completely unexpected…really cool…a little surreal…one of them was actually about listener retention…like how many people stay through most of an episode…and we ranked really high…which is wild considering some episodes are like three hours long…and not all guests are celebrities…some sure…but a lot are just people…people who love music…people who feel music…people who can sit in a conversation and go there…i think that’s what resonates…not who someone is on paper…but the conversation…that bee people energy…just getting it…

and something i’m really lucky to have in all of this…is Desmond…we don’t see each other often…he’s off doing his thing…isolation tanks…Pilates…living a slightly mysterious life…which still mildly supports my theory he could be a serial killer…but we’ll circle back to that…what i love about our friendship is the understanding…life comes first…always…if something comes up in his world…he handles it…if something comes up in mine…i handle it…no pressure…no guilt…and because of that…the podcast works…we don’t have a boss…no deadlines…we don’t force it…we record when it makes sense…when schedules line up…when the vibe is right…sometimes together…sometimes solo…ideally we’ll get back to a weekly rhythm…that’s the goal…but life happens…and sometimes you choose what matters most…and this time…i chose this season with my family…Desmond had his own things too…including temporarily escaping to America…still suspicious…

but none of that means this goes away…it just means we do it when time permits…when life allows it…when the timing and energy are right…and honestly…that’s probably why the conversations feel the way they do…

so yeah…we’re a little elusive…think of us like a Labubu drop…you don’t always know when it’s coming…no perfect schedule…but when it shows up…you kind of want to grab it while you can…that’s us…we drop when it’s right…when the conversation is right…no forcing it…when it hits, it hits…so if you see something new…jump on it…because you never really know when the next one’s coming…

i also have new episodes recorded…they just need editing…and editing takes time…real time…especially when there are moments that need care…i’ve been short on that lately…but i’m getting there…learning how to manage time again…for this season…and i’ve got some really great guests coming…really great…and i don’t want you to miss those conversations…not because of me…but because of them…

so where does that leave things…i’m still here…the podcast is still here…the conversations are still happening…just at a pace that makes sense right now…i haven’t disappeared…i just stepped closer to what matters most…and now i’m figuring out how to hold both…new episodes are coming…remastered ones are coming…and they’ll come as i’m able to give them the time they deserve…

and if you made it all the way here…like really here…especially if you’ve been around since the vanilla days…thank you…seriously…i joke with Desmond that we probably have like 20 real listeners…and he’s like the numbers say otherwise…and i’m like numbers lie…bots exist…i don’t trust any of it…there are supposedly 11K of you on Instagram and in my head maybe 30 are real and the rest are very committed robots…but however many of you there actually are…the fact that you’re here…reading this…means more than you probably realize…so genuinely…thank you…i'm so very grateful...

11 August 2025

I hate dealing with social media. Like 100000000% hate it. I love the idea of community though and someone told me no one can comment here so I should do THIS elsewhere. I refuse to on Facebook. It's not a Zuck thing or anything like that. It's like opening a door coming from a quite pristine hall into a room with flashing lights and super loud scary techno music....As much as I've tried to resist it looks like Substack may be the way to go....if anyone has any better ideas, hit me up on the 'Gram. Messing around with design ideas. I like being creative.

7 August 2025

It's been a spell since I've updated...first of all, summer break.....and of course I want to spend every available minute with my teen - time seems to forever be fleeting when it comes to to the things you love......additionally, a member of our extended family is going through an unexpected medical emergency....there are so many feelings and emotions being mixed up....and of course, these things make some ponder mortality...and when they come to me to talk about it, I begin to ponder things....how time is forever fleeting, among them......so sometimes i put my energy and time into those things dear to me and this podcast and the community around it, have to be shoved further down in terms of priorities.....and they people that follow us all seem to be cool enough to totally get that.....if you're here right now - just know you are a rad human being! 

I'll tell you a funny lesson learned in recent days that is actually pretty solid advice.....

When someone close to you is going though something, it makes others around go through things....so these last couple of weeks have involved me being still, sometimes must sitting in waiting rooms...seems inappropriate to scroll on social media in ICU. Around that time, we somehow hit over 10K followers which kind of shocked me, because I told Desmond my audio engineer/producer/intern and Anuj (@TheLegendsofMusic IG) that if 20 people listened to our podcast that would be rad because imagine a room with 20 people in it. Imagine 100. 100 people in a room listening to you is pretty awesome. 1,000 people is kind of insane. 10K is absolutely mind blowing.

I liked studying the analytics, noto so much for the numbers of followers, but where they were from and what age groups they were in....and it was amazing that it was almost equally balanced amongst all age groups. That is insane. And we had people from each continent save for Antarctica. That was amazingly cool to me.

So I posed a question to AI. I said I felt kind of this pressure now to do things better is 10K people were following. Like, it seemed to be my responsibility. So I asked ChatGPT if there were things I could do to improve my page. It told me to ditch my bio. Too wordy. I did. Lost followers. It told me to change my account classification from "Podcast" to "Creator". Lost followers. I listened to someone who was trying to be very helpful and said my page didn't make sense because i post about music and then I have a video about owls (I didn't, it was a photo) and I said, those are more about cool music i discovered from indie artists who dont have music videos and I had cool video of something nice or calming and who doesnt like a minute of nice calm? They said scrap it. I did and overnight lost 200 followers.

So my takeaway lesson is this - just do you. I should have just continued to do me because it got us to where we were before we started to try to manipulate it with fancy words and aesthetics. But you never know unless you try stuff out. I seem to always learn the hard way. I don't mind. It makes me never forget that lesson haha.

I love fuschia/magenta pink. I like playing around with designs and stuff. Why can't we be exploritory in creativity?

Stories can be swiped away and even muted, so I'll keep reposting things I think are cool and wanna share.

I'll continue posting park and animal clips to new music I'm discovering.

I'll continue being me. Thank you to all the Vanilla Bee People who have stuck by since the start. MASSIVE love for you all.

1 June 2025

That bronchitis wiped me out for a week! So everything got pushed back, and I didn't feel well enough to rush putting something out. We'll be back next week. I have like 7 hours of recordings to edit and I'm recording more this week and scheduling more this week. Go big or gpo home, right?

26 May 2025

I've been down with a heavy case of bronchitis - which is why I finally have time to update this...I hate updating stuff...it's my least favorite thing to do aside from post across different platforms to advertise - which I don't want to do, so I'm not anymore. Some close to me have asked how I expect to grow if I don't market across platforms....and the answer is, I don't....I'm a firm believer that those meant to find you just will....and those will be authentic, real kind of engagements....i don't care about numbers.....why do i want to go and spend all this time posting on Facebook when I dont even go onto Facebook.....it seems totally pointless to me.....

That said, I haven't addressed it on the podcast really because I'm still at a loss for words when it comes to those that have found us.....I care about that....i love hearing your stories, your comments, your takes....analyzing data and interests, I found that Sayonara Cupcake started to become a community - and i kind of love that...so, we'll just keep on keeping on...

As Riverside.fm (our podcast recording platform) has advanced over the last year (and truth be told so have we, sorta) we are going back and reprocessing some of the earlier episides where we were total bollocks at what we were doing and sound was sub-par. On most platforms, the new audio will just replace the old and it won't be noticed. YouTube does not let you replace video or audio, so we have to upload the new videos and we will archive the old and stick them on a playlist in case anyone wants to hears how it originally aired....but why bother?

Again, massive thanks to everyone that has joined our weird little community of misfits. You are home.

1 April 2025

We asked ChatGPT what they knew about Sayonara Cupcake. This is what we got back - and we dig it.

What can you tell me about Sayonara Cupcake?

Sayonara Cupcake is a distinctive podcast hosted by LV, offering a blend of music, storytelling, and unexpected elements to create a unique audio experience. The show delves into a wide array of topics, including personal anecdotes, cultural reflections, and in-depth conversations with guests from various backgrounds. The podcast is accessible on multiple platforms, such as YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Instagram, where listeners can engage with episodes and related content. Additionally, the show's Linktree provides direct links to various streaming services and social media profiles associated with the podcast.

Beyond the podcast, LV maintains a blog titled Sayonara Cupcake, serving as a space for personal reflections and musings. The blog covers diverse subjects, from the significance of culling social media connections to the enduring impact of literature and music on personal growth. For instance, in a post dated December 16, 2024, LV discusses the discipline of limiting social media follows to 999 accounts, emphasizing the importance of meaningful connections. 

The podcast has featured a variety of guests, including musicians, authors, and chefs, fostering conversations that explore their journeys, creative processes, and personal experiences. Episodes often venture into topics like the influence of music, the challenges of creative industries, and the nuances of personal relationships. For example, an episode released on August 16, 2024, features a conversation with Chef Andy Ricker, a two-time James Beard Award winner, discussing his culinary journey and the intersection of food and culture.

Overall, Sayonara Cupcake stands out as a platform that intertwines music, storytelling, and candid discussions, offering listeners a rich and eclectic auditory experience.

20 March 2025

It’s been a minute! Sayonara Cupcake went on a little hiatus after wrapping up Season 1 with none other than James Allan of Glasvegas (because, you know, we had to end it on a high note). 26 episodes, 10.5K followers, and somehow over 666,000 views last month *while on break*? Wild....I am humbled.....Desmond is humbled...

I could hit you with the “life got busy” line, but here’s the real deal: time is a gift, and I chose to spend it with my family over the holidays and into the spring. No regrets. But I also know that this thing we started—what began as a simple podcast—has turned into something bigger. A community. And that? That’s worth coming back for.  

So, let’s get into it—Season 2 is coming soon. We’ve got some incredible guests lined up, maybe even some familiar voices making a return (IYKYK). The energy? Unmatched. The conversations? Deeper. And if you’ve been here *since vanilla*, just know—I see you. I appreciate you.  

Beyond the podcast, I’ve been working on some other projects that I can't share just yet, but hopefully soon. When the time comes, you’ll be the first to know. Until then, just know that everything happening behind the scenes is all about bringing something fresh, something meaningful.  

So, for now, let’s fire this thing back up. More soon, Cupcakes. Stay tuned. 🍰🎙️✨  

10 December 2024

Desmondo is still on holiday with his family and I have been doing all the projects around the house that I haven't had time to do...I spent the entire day on the roof on my house to take down old fencing damaged by the monsoon season and put up a new one...i LOVE working with power tools...I love making things...I love sawing things.....plus, I love the solitude, not gonna lie.....Solitude is intoxicating.....I haven't had time to go back and recut episodes now that we are better at sound, which was the plan.....just made sense to get these home projects out of the way now that everyone's on holiday......but rad things upcoming for sure....

3 December 2024

The lovely folks at Riverside are trying hard to figure out what went completely wrong with episode #22. At the time, it seemed to be a bad code in a fix that just got worse and not its no letting us edit the original raw recording, and so the one we rushed out to get out before more things went wrong has a audio issues - ironically, coming from the audio guy.......but its not like Desmond and I are having talks that have any sort of importance - these aren't Ted Talks! So, I think i'm just going to leave that episode and move on...maybe at some later date it'll get cleaned up...

28 November 2024

My producer Desmond is on holiday with his family so I, with my OCD, am George Lucasing everything. I have a better understanding of him now. I also threw up a blog site. I have always hated the word. It's not a vanity project but really just an exercise in writing again for me....I used to write all the time in life....then i got married, had a child, would later be not married and a single mom - things took a backseat...but now said child is older and growing more and more independent daily, I figured I should get back to doing things I enjoyed since getting a bit more free time in my schedule....I was kinda betting on making a pineapple shield that could resist a flamethrower but saw there was a crazy amount of work into making it despite it having very practical uses....so here we are....there's going to be a new "words" tab up top if you feel like following along....I'll save this space for brief technical updates to the site....stay rad, folks 

17 November 2024

I don't understand how we have hit over 500K views on Instagram. That's crazy! And we've hit over 4K followers in just a couple of months so thank you for everyone finding us and sticking around. It's super humbling!

19 October 2024

Two more episodes have been released and we hit 125,000 views this morning which was crazy! Have 6 more to edit and release and a bunch of episodes with awesome guests upcoming to record. I've just been super busy personally with family stuff and a remodel so time has been short...but I'm getting there....

11 October 2024

I completely deleted everything from Patreon because I still wrestle with the whole paid thing....and I don't really want to do that....and people have given me tips on putting it out the way I want....so, bear with me.....everything is free....the podcasts will always be free......I'll be honest with you, because we'd hit like 60k views consistently on a short period of time, I was getting all these notices to monetize...and I hated it all and abandoned it all because I really didn't want to have a forced monetization thing just to hear people, as my dad would have said, shooting the sh*t....

23 September 2024

The latest episode of the podcast is probably one of my most special episodes because I brought on one of my oldest friends - who happened to be my first boyfriend, first peck - but also one of the people who introduced the most music to me. The conversation is awesome as we cover 80s and 90s San Diego skate culture - the epicenter! 

16 September 2024

Had a rad meeting with Desmond today. We have 9 shows we still haven't edited yet and need to put out plus a lot of rad guests still in queue to be recorded. We are so thankful for everyone listening!

8 September 2024

Lot's going on lately and more stuff coming, but due to interest in the opening song for the Sayonara Cupcake Podcast - BMF by a.m. Vibe - here is a link so you can purchase the song direct from the band and show some love for an awesome song! https://amvibe.bandcamp.com/track/b-m-f

24 August 2024

So today we are announcing an upcoming subscription based podcast called Stripped, that doesn't have to do entirely with music, There's a few reasons for this.....on the main podcast, I want to keep focus on those conversations with different good folks about music. I want everyone to listen in to talks about music....maybe they will discover something new that they like.....but I am also mindful when editing those episodes to try and take out expletives - not for me, but because I am mindful that anyone can listen and so I am super mindful of kids,....even if this isn't their kinda podcast.....so having a subscription based podcast, even at $1, it zeroes in more on the target audience......and I don't have to take time worrying about edits for language - which the podcasts hosts also flag you for....

We just recorded a awesome podcast with Marty and Desmond and it covered everything from aging parents to the density of great white sharks off the coasts off San Diego vs South Africa and why there's more of a prevalence of shark attacks in South Africa to whether or not we are living in a simulation. The podcast is really just conversations about everything and anything, but with lots of different viewpoints, and everyone is super chill and cool. Ok, like maybe one person isn't chill. But they mean well. Too much negativity in the world. Just want good conversations, some enlightenment (for me), some laughs, little better understanding of life (again, for me).

In addition, because there's little to edit, the frequency of podcasts increased and will also have video.

I mean that's the plan. But I change my mind like the wind changes direction.

Plus we have an episode with seriously, a soul with many hats....among them, producer, engineer, multi-instrumentalist in several bands, Josiah Mazzaschi, as well as young adult fiction author, Justin Carroll...so lots coming up! Keep checking back!

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