Prolific Blogger Award from a Friend I Have Never Met

Prolific Blogger Award

Heather Archuletta from Pillow Astronaut, a person I can call a friend who I never met, one of the people whose blogs and openness to the world and to me provided some of the inspiration to start my own blog and put my spacepirations into writing, has conferred the Prolific Blogger Award on me, listing Spacepirations alongside Miles O'Brian, who's been reporting about space for about two decades.

Passion without anyone to share it with remains bottled up and diminished. Space, as they say about a lot of things, is not what it used to be, and at least in my close proximity at work it is not a widely shared interest. Though aspirations should not be directly affected by the people that surround oneself, humans have a general tendency to fit in. I can't say I've been particularly good at that ever since I was a child, and that may come hand in hand with thinking outside the box. But I digress...

According to the rules pertaining to the award:

A Prolific Blogger is one who is intellectually productive… keeping up an active blog that is filled with enjoyable content.

Every winner of the Prolific Blogger Award has to pass on this award to at least seven other deserving prolific bloggers. Spread some love!

Each Prolific Blogger must link to the blog from which he/she has received the award.

Every Prolific Blogger must link back to this post, which explains the origins and motivation for the award.

Every Prolific Blogger must visit this post and add his/her name by leaving a comment so that we all can get to know the other winners.

I'd like to give the Prolific Blogger Award to:

Brian Shiro and Astronaut for Hire - Brian was the first person I contacted when I started on the journey I'm on, last fall. First by e-mail, then by phone, Brian made the time to talk with me between his toddler son and his very important job at the NOAA Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, and his blog was what provoked my thoughts about creating Spacepirations. I recently met Brian at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, when he was the commander of MDRS-89.

Phil Rosenberg and reCareered - I recently stumbled on this blog when thinking of my long term career goals. Phil provides interesting perspectives about career moves and insights about processes of hiring and getting hired. He consistently shatters preconceptions I have about the subject and provides interesting posts about what is going on in the job market.

Robert Brand and Echoes of Apollo - I first virtually met Robert in the short time he was associated with the Starwalker show. He is a space veteran whose work for NASA dates back to Apollo 11 days, when he wired up communications equipment in Australia. Nowadays I can't think of a more prolific blogger than Robert - the amount of space news and articles he publishes or syndicates (some of mine, too) is huge.

Emma and emmanation - Emma is a Louisville, CO resident (i.e. across the highway from where we live), who I also have never met. I accidentally discovered her when I searched for local tweets on my BlackBerry. Emma blogs about anything and everything going on in her life, and her opinions are amusing to read. You don't have to agree with her or even like all the subjects she writes about, but she is damn prolific, that's for sure.

So who invented that rule of seven anyway? Even if all Americans (yes, even day old babies) had blogs, like a pyramid scheme, the eleventh level of giving the award will have a hard time finding blogs that haven't received it yet. So out of shear consideration to the ones I am giving the award to, I will stop at four.

And for readers who don't have their own blogs yet - try it. You may like it or not, you may be good at it or not, but where would we be if no one tried anything because they haven't done it before?