Last updated: August 25, 2024 Having this website allows me to respond to events and to share information I get when I research things that really interest and excite me. I was so excited to find out that the Sisters of Earth conference just coincidentally happened on the exact same week back in July 2022, when NASA released the first stunning images from the James Webb Space Telescope – really a kind of synchronicity to be honest. The Universe is astoundingly beautiful! It’s been over a year since the conference, so I thought I would just finish up this blog...
Since March is Women’s History Month, I thought I would write this blog post about some courageous women pilots who have been largely forgotten by time and are not widely recognized today. I am referring to the history of the First Lady Astronaut Trainees, more commonly known as the Mercury 13. This group of women were secretly evaluated to see if they might be suitable astronaut candidates for America’s first human spaceflight program in the early 1960s. The thirteen women pilots, eager to participate in the space race against the Soviet Union, were subjected to the same rigorous tests that...
I wrote a blog post about the O Antiphons in 2019, and I loved picking out the image to illustrate each one. So I have decided to post on the O Antiphons again, in order to highlight additional images and to explore the scriptural roots of the meaningful word images. If you aren’t familiar with the O Antiphons or need a refresher, please check out my 2019 blog post here. Today is the fifth O Antiphon out of the seven days before Christmas, in these late days of Advent intensification. With only three days before Christmas Eve, we continue to...
Sally Ride (1951-2012) became the first American woman in space when she flew as a mission specialist on STS-7 in 1983. She flew a second mission on the Space Shuttle Challenger on STS-41G in 1984. Ride also participated on the boards of both the Challenger and Columbia investigations. Throughout her life, she was a shining beacon of accomplishment and possibility to little girls everywhere. Sally Ride grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from Stanford University in 1973 with bachelor’s degrees in both Physics and English. She continued her studies in Physics, and graduated from Stanford with a PhD in...
As Earth Day approaches on Monday, I find myself battling again with despair about climate change and what feels like a large increase recently in the number of extreme weather events that it is causing. Today we are faced with an increasing number of cyclones, wild fires, hurricanes, extreme rainfall and flooding, tsunamis, earthquakes, tornadoes, desertification and probably a few others that don’t come as readily to mind. According to weather.com, there were 39 weather disasters world-wide in 2018 that caused more than 1 billion dollars of damage each, which is crazy high. The idea that global warming is not...
The fortieth anniversary of the Houston Quilt Festival was held in November 2014 and I made a point to go – in fact it felt more like a pilgrimage than anything else. I signed up to volunteer at the NASA booth, which was expected to be busy, because astronaut Karen Nyberg was going to be speaking at the show that afternoon. I asked my friend and mentor Gail to go with me; she immediately agreed and even reserved a government vehicle for us, which I really appreciated. In this way, I had someone to keep me company in the car...
