Yes, one of my lots in life seems to be engineers. My brother was an automotive engineer. He could recognize various car makes and models well before he could read. He couldn’t have been older than about seven when the parents took a trip down to Daytwa and he explicitly specified that they were supposed to *notify* him if they saw a Corvette with its lights open! Or shut. I can’t remember. I couldn’t have cared less about cars. In later years, it seemed like nothing was more fun for him than taking a vee-hickle (especially somebody else’s vee-hickle) in for service. More often than not, when I drove into his driveway, he would be coming out of his garage with an air pump, having eye-balled my tires as I drove up the street. Once or twice, when I was at the beach and the GG was not, The Engineer took my vee-hickle in for new tires (at my expense, of course) and we would wait to see how long it would take the GG to notice. [He’ll comment that he noticed right away, of course! :-] I will never forget the time Mouse and Pengo tried to drive the POC and came back immediately with, “POC makes a funny noise when I turn it.” Hoo boy! On a cold, gray, boring, limpopo day like that day? We were in town at the Chrysler dealer in no time flat! And plenty of Bugs and Horsey’s part of the Fin clan will remember the Engineer and his entourage, consisting of Grandroobly and Sam (dog, not archaeologist), walking around opening up various vee-hickle hoods while they were eating dinner in the old cabin. “It’s over here now. It used to be over there. It doesn’t matter,” The Engineer would say about this or that obscure part of an engine. Any engine.

I am pretty sure that I could have been an engineer too, if I had wanted to be. But even though MIT was looking for female students enough to send me stuff when I was graduating from high school, I wasn’t all that interested in engineering. Actually, I was interested in a *lot* of stuff then. Still am. So was my brother. Not sure why he had an easier time choosing and then sticking to something than I did. I do remember a famous argument we once had, which ended with me yelling “Mormon nailer” and him asking, “how’d you get that?” and me retorting with “patterns!!!” The difference between engineers and non-engineers, at least that day, was the difference between those who liked to do story problems (him) and those who could detect patterns (me and I *hate* story problems). Don’t try to figger this whole thing out, especially if your initials are GG. It was a fun argument that maybe only the two of us could totally understand and we both ended up laughing. Not all of our arguments were fun and not all of them ended up in laughter. Regrettably. But what the heck, we were *siblings*, fer kee-reist. Any of y’all ever argue with your sibling(s)? Miss you bro’!

My other major lot in life? Large Catholic families, of course. Can’t think of anything negative to say about that! At least not about the large Catholic families I’ve been involved with.

Today… Got up at 5:30. Packed. Mouse and I hopped like frogs over to Zingerman’s @ Plum Market for a bagel and coffee as soon as it opened. At 7 AM. If you look closely, you can just barely see Mouse behind that unknown guy. We reluctantly dragged ourselves away from the cafe. Mouse returned to kzoo and I saddled up the Ninja and drove clunkety-clunkety (road, not Ninja) to Yooperland. Beach tomorrow. It is awfully interesting to write a blahg entry while talking to an engineer a computer scientist and an octogenarian in the next room, so I apologize if this entry reads even more like gibberish than usual.

Lovin’ y’all from the GWN and missin’ my babeeees, owls and whatever,
KW

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at 7:22 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.