Hi! I wanted to expand a bit on my profile bio.

I grew up just a few miles from where the Manned Spacecraft Center (now Johnson Space Center) was built in Houston in the early 1960's. I was 12 years old when the space center opened & the astronaut families moved into the area. There was only one junior high school and one high school in the surrounding communities back then, so the astronauts' kids became my friends and classmates. Sixty years later, I'm now friends with almost all of the children of the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo astronauts, even those I didn't go to school with.

While growing up, most of my friends had at least one parent working for NASA. That includes me. My mother played a role in saving the Skylab Program in 1973 after it suffered damage during its launch.

This is the official NASA photo of my mother, a seamstress, sewing the 'parasol' that replaced Skylab's missing heat shield and allowed the program to survive that damage.

Even before Mom's involvement, I had managed to get a job with the news media - starting as a 17-year old in 1969 - covering several of the Apollo moon missions and a couple of the Skylab missions.

I still have my ID badges that allowed me to work onsite at NASA for several TV networks.

It's probably no surprise that I ended up having a 42-year career working for NASA after graduating from UT-Austin and moving back to the Houston area.

I've also been very active in community theatre since 1980, performing on stage in 22 productions, including Shakespeare, comedies, musicals, and mysteries.

My favorite recent role was playing Kris Kringle in a production of 'Miracle on 34th Street' at the Clear Creek Community Theatre, where I've been on their Board of Directors for the past 4 years.

Since retiring from NASA in 2017, I've stayed connected to the world of space exploration as a member of the NASA Alumni League-Johnson Space Center, where I've been an officer on its Board of Directors since 2020. I also volunteer for many nonprofits that promote STEM education, including the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, Space Center Houston, Girlstart, and the 'Remembering Columbia' museum.

For the past 10 years, my friends have been bugging me to write a book about my career. I finally finished the book and published it in October 2024. It's a memoir about my career with NASA (about 74,000 words) - available in both paperback and eBook formats.