So, my great grandfather worked on the railroad. Or I should say, worked FOR the railroad.

I don’t know what he did for the railroad. But I like to think he was an engineer. A railroad engineer, with that weird stripy denim overalls and a hat like no other. Steering, if you could call it steering on a road that couldn’t go left or right, the big powerful railroad engine across the nation.

My grandfather was an engineer. Not for railroads. He worked at Lawrence radiation labs. And later Mare island…But he worked on rocket  bombs. He was the sliderule kind of engineer, and you know what sort of clothes they wore. Skinny black ties and short-sleeve white dress shirts.

I’m an engineer too. And you know what i wear. Jeans or docker pants and a polo shirt. But I’m a girl. So sometimes I wear leggings and a dress with a nice t-shirt.

If you think about it, my great-grandfather was part of the infrastructure that made the future possible. Traveling across big distances fast had been a problem for mankind forever. The railroad, at it’s inception, was a dizzying leap forward in solving that problem. Moving not just people, but their food and their stuff around. That was what my great-grandfather did.

My grandfather was part of the aerospace advances. Getting stuff around even faster, really. To get our bombs there faster than the Russians could get them to us…so fast that maybe we could even shoot the enemy rockets out of the sky before they hit us. Heady, heady stuff.

Now, the era of information is how I use my engineering.

And it’s funny how they are all so different and yet so very much the same.