The DU Lounge

... skills he mysteriously acquired as an Army Air Corp officer in World War II. He fancied himself the daring fly boy but the Army recognized he'd be much more valuable on the ground, not to mention less dangerous. A certain autistic spectrum clumsiness was one of his more endearing traits, but he couldn't deal with that and overcompensated, playing the part of a manly man. My grandma saw through that.

My grandpa's mad metal skills later landed him a job as an engineer for the Apollo project.

My dad did not follow in his father's footsteps. He's an artist.

Thanks to my grandpa, me and my siblings had multiple Erector Sets to play with and we'd spend many hours building fanciful machines, but none of us became engineers. I started college as an engineering major, but I switched to biology partly because (I confess) there were so few women in engineering classes, usually one or two, and none I figured would ever notice me.

One of my brothers builds exotic motorcycles, another is a building contractor, and I do stuff with computers. I guess those are sort of like engineering. But mostly me and my siblings are artists.

My grandpa never embraced electronic computers. He was much more comfortable with his slide rules, tables, and graphs. When I was in college the student bookstores still had a magnificent selection of highly specialized graph papers and entire books of tables useful for all sorts of calculations.