breakfast and book recommendations and sunshine in london

the first strawberries of the season for us . . from mexico . . chanda ate them all!

 over breakfast, we talked about first american woman astronaut sally ride. in the late '80's, after the explosion of the challenger shuttle, she helped nasa refocus and develop a new mission: planet earth. during her lifetime the astronaut part of her was never known for gushing about what she could see from the window of her space craft when orbiting the earth, but the astrophysicist part of her saw a fragile planet and helped convince nasa that the earth is worth trying to protect. this leads us to our next biography: rachel carson. the new yorker magazine just had an article about her by jill lepore, discussing a very important book she wrote titled, the sea around us. it kind of got swept under the rug by silent spring, but ms lepore points out that she could never have written silent spring if she first hadn't studied what she called the "great mother of life," the sea.

 headstrong, 52 women who changed science and the world, by rachel swaby.

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london has been having beautiful warm and sunny weather. morgana sent us these pics of her days now filled with new blooms: