quote:

Originally posted by Mary Anna:

quote:

Originally posted by QuirtEvans:

quote:

my hair doesn't take any more kindly to direction than the rest of me

Something we have in common.

Did your children inherit that trait?

Nope. They all have great hair, and it's nothing like mine. Their hair is almost straight, with a bit of wave to it underneath. It's very thick and shiny. My lack of hairstyling skill extended to being able to style theirs competently, but they took over when they hit adolescence. They all look great.

I did help Muffin highlight her hair yesterday, though I was sure the entire time that she'd wind up with orange tiger stripes. Fortunately, it turned out to be gorgeous, despite my involvement.

Actually, although I acknowledge the ambiguity, I meant that YOU don't take direction well, not your hair.

Oh. I was focused on hair, particularly because I held my breath for a half-hour yesterday while Muffin's highlights developed, dead-certain that I'd botched her head completely. Fortunately, she's pretty, no matter what.

As for the capacity to take direction from others, my grandfather apparently warned my father, as he was preparing to marry my mother, that "she butts with her own head." Like mother, like daughter...

I think my kids take the same approach to life that I do. They're considerate of the people in their lives, so that don't just walk all over them, doing as they please. They ask for advice as they're making decisions. They consider the effects of those decisions on the people around them. And they generally make good decisions.

They don't, however, give a whole lot of credence to the opinions of "the crowd," and yeah. They probably learned that at their mother's knee.

quote:

Originally posted by Mary Anna:

quote:

Originally posted by CHAS:
Who is the best looking guy you ever met at Wakulla Springs on a cold day?

Why you, darlin'! But you knew that already...

Ok then... who's the worst looking guy you've ever met at Wakulla Springs on a cold day?

There was a very unfortunate-looking tourist sitting a couple of rows behind us on the tour boat...

I can't imagine there's anything left of much undivulged between you and me, but I'll throw a few soft pitches for you so others can be as enlightened as I!

Oxford or Murray?

Arkansas or Louisiana?

Red or green?

Who was the first boy you ever knew was interested in you?

Which is a woman's worse enemy, wind or rain?

So excited I forgot my manners.

Thank you very much, Mary Anna.

jon, not so much.

Oxford or Murray?
I presume you mean Oxford, Mississippi, as I've never been to Oxford, England. Oxford is way prettier than Murray, and it has the kind of historical vibe that would make it a good field trip for us, Cousin. The campus at Ole Miss still has some beautiful antebellum buildings that only survived the Recent Unpleasantness because the Yankees commandeered them as hospitals. There's a cemetery on campus for the soldiers on both sides who did not survive. And the town itself is adorable, with that slightly overripe feel you'd expect of the place that inspired Faulkner.

Arkansas or Louisiana?
Louisiana, for sure. First of all, Louisiana's food is reason enough to go there. And then there are the historical and cultural opportunities associated with New Orleans and the Mississippi River. I feel a road trip coming on...

Red or green?
Red or green what? Curry? I'll eat pretty much anything that's been cooked with curry of any color, but I lean toward the yellow kind, myself. If we're just talking colors, I like to wear red. Green makes me look bilious. So I'll go with red.

Who was the first boy who I knew was interested in me?
Terry Shows, who was my first boyfriend. I was about Muffin's age. I first became aware of boys about three years before that, but it took them a long time to notice me. I remember being in sixth grade, watching a high school football game, and one of my classmates was a waterboy...John Mark Carlisle. He ran out onto the field to take somebody some water, and it was like one of those scenes in the movies where the male lead is running in slow motion. I was completely unable to form a sentence...a word...in his presence for about six years. He probably thought I was mute.

Then, in our senior year, I was a contestant in the school beauty pageant and he just happened to be the escort assigned to walk me across the stage. He took my arm and said, "You look so beautiful. You're going to win." As it turned out, I did not. I was just a runner-up, but that moment made me feel like I'd won. Oh...and I was wearing red.

A woman's worst enemy...wind or rain?
Hmmm. Rain, I guess. You can usually continue doing whatever it is you're doing in the wind, unless it's a hurricane, but rain usually spoils any kind of outdoor activity. Not always, though. I was planting a bunch of flowers this spring and it started raining about a half-hour into my project. The weather was warm. The rain was warm. I was wearing my bathing suit. So I just kept working. Not smart, perhaps, considering the lightning strike rate in Florida, but it was a really lovely afternoon.

Well, Cousin, did you learn anything you didn't already know?

quote:

Originally posted by CHAS:
So excited I forgot my manners.

Thank you very much, Mary Anna.

jon, not so much.

You're very welcome.

What are your favorite types of bonbons? I learned to make excellent ones tonight (see multiple threads ) so if you tell me I might make some to lure you this way...

But they won't be made with Hershey's! Sorry

Marry Anna, I want to go back to the engineering career if I might.

My uncle got his master's degree in mechanical engineering and married someone got her master's degree in mechanical engineering. This was in the '80's.

I remember at that time my aunt (they stayed married seven years, she's not my aunt today) talking about what it was like to be a woman working as a mechanical engineer.

They lived for a year in south Florida after they got married and worked at Motorola. Then they moved to RTP (which made sense because they met at UNC).

So that's who they were and who he still is- very, hmm, chemistry, math, engineering, rigorous personalities, and workaholics.

What I remember her saying is that all of the men in her office played golf and she felt she had to play golf, and so she did. I, frankly, find the whole concept of 'having' to play golf very foreign and kind of grotesque.

To make a long story short, her general theme was about how she was a woman doing a job mostly done by men.

My questions for you are: did you find that you were in the minority based on your gender? If so, how did you feel about this?

And (and these questions are unrelated to my first question):

What is it about engineering that attracted you to it?

What is it about engineering that made you want to quit doing it?

Thanks.

quote:

Originally posted by Muffin's sister:
What are your favorite types of bonbons? I learned to make excellent ones tonight (see multiple threads ) so if you tell me I might make some to lure you this way...

But they won't be made with Hershey's! Sorry

I like anything with caramel in it. Also pecans.

Fruit-wise, those orange ones you made last night sounded pretty darn spiffy.

I forgive you for not using Hershey's, but you might want to think again. You see, I bought Hershey's stock and put it in my IRA, figuring that over a lifetime I'd eat enough of the stuff to make myself rich. So if you use Hershey's, you're just fattening your inheritance.

Gee, I really need to buy a few shares of Coca-Cola...

quote:

Originally posted by Daniel:
Marry Anna, I want to go back to the engineering career if I might.

My uncle got his master's degree in mechanical engineering and married someone got her master's degree in mechanical engineering. This was in the '80's.

I remember at that time my aunt (they stayed married seven years, she's not my aunt today) talking about what it was like to be a woman working as a mechanical engineer.

They lived for a year in south Florida after they got married and worked at Motorola. Then they moved to RTP (which made sense because they met at UNC).

So that's who they were and who he still is- very, hmm, chemistry, math, engineering, rigorous personalities, and workaholics.

What I remember her saying is that all of the men in her office played golf and she felt she had to play golf, and so she did. I, frankly, find the whole concept of 'having' to play golf very foreign and kind of grotesque.

My sister is a Ph.D. chemist, and a darn fine one. She doesn't play golf, but she has said that she thinks young people should learn to play, because it is good for their careers. Many deals are struck on the golf course.

I am feeling crabby about such things lately, so pardon me a minute while I take a conversational detour. But could you imagine someone telling a man going into, say, nursing, that it would help his career if he joined the quilting club?

Or let's look at relationships. Over the past year, I've been invited on dates to do things the gentleman enjoys doing. I rode 200 miles on the back of a motorcycle to go to Bike Week. I learned to shoot guns. I learned to catch crabs. I learned to play roulette. I shot some pool very badly. I was deemed a "cool chick" more than once for being game to try such things, and I enjoyed them because they were new and different. But not one of those gentlemen ever even asked to hear me play the piano dominating my living room. Only one of them read my books. They seem to want a woman to meld quietly into their lives, with no notion that she might bring something new and rewarding to theirs, if they paid any attention to what she had to offer.

I repeatedly turned down a man who made it clear that he was looking for a woman to join him on the marathon bike rides he takes every Saturday morning, and he just didn't seem to understand that I wasn't her. And one of my favorite online dating profiles of all time said, "Basically, I'm looking for a woman who's just like me, only she has all the necessary equipment."

Try to imagine a man taking up...oh, I don't know...needlepoint, because he wanted to share an interest with the woman in his life.

Now I'll shift gears and start a new post, so I can actually answer your questions...

quote:

Originally posted by Daniel:
My questions for you are: did you find that you were in the minority based on your gender? If so, how did you feel about this?

And (and these questions are unrelated to my first question):

What is it about engineering that attracted you to it?

What is it about engineering that made you want to quit doing it?

Thanks.

Oh, yes, I was always in the minority. I started college at Ole Miss in 1979, so I wasn't in the first wave of female engineers, but it was still very early. There were five women, counting me, in my freshman chemical engineering class, out of maybe 35, and that was considered extraordinary. I think in previous years there had only been one woman at a time. The other engineering disciplines had fewer women, I think. It was also considered extraordinary that we were...um...the kind of girls who wear makeup. At least four of us were in sororities, and we may have been the first sorority girls in the program. The guys seemed to find that noteworthy.

The general engineering building had been designed without a women's room, so they had to convert the faculty lounge for us. The Chem E building was brand-new. I believe it too had been designed without facilities for us, because the men's room was on the first floor and the women's room was on the second floor, suggesting a last-minute conversion.

There was a mechanical engineering professor who taught a general engineering class that I managed to avoid. He was quite open about the fact that women did not belong in engineering and we would not receive an A in his class, regardless of the quality of our work.

The grading system was based on a curve that said "90% of the top man is an A." There was a lot of competition to be "top man." I was top man in thermodynamics. That was my blow against the sexists of the world.

(When I speak to women's education charities, like the AAUW, I generally have the audience in the palm of my hand by the time I get to this point. They rush forward afterward and bring their daughters to meet me. )

I married before my junior year and transferred to Murray State in Kentucky and finished my degree in engineering physics with an emphasis in chemistry. The gender situation was about the same--there were three of us in my graduating class. Because the degree programs were more flexible, we didn't always take the same classes, so that was the first time I was the only woman in class.

One class where I was the only female was Electric Circuit Theory. I stink at electricity, and I was in terror for the entire semester. I think the professor, an ancient gentleman who had helped develop computers during WWII, knew it. Anyway, he was well-known for giving the same tests every year, and all the guys were in the same fraternity, where there was a file cabinet containing all his old tests. So for the first 3 tests or so, I made an 88 every time, and they all got As. Then he made up a new test. They all flunked, and I got my usual 88. After that, he started walking out of class with me, always saying the same thing, "You know...you're doing all right in this class." I kept making 88s, but he gave me an A. Afterward, I found out that he was notorious for thinking women were stupid, so I guess he was flabbergasted that I was doing "all right" in his class. Another blow struck against sexists everywhere...

I went back to Ole Miss for grad school, and women were a bit more scarce at that level. There was one other woman in the master's program a year or so behind me, but that was it. The professors in the Chem E department were wonderful--actually they were excited to finally have me around and went out of their way to help me. There had been one Iranian woman to graduate with a master's back in the seventies, but I was the first American woman to receive an advanced degree in chemical engineering from Ole Miss. Coincidentally, there's a feature article about me and my books in this month's issue of OLE MISS ENGINEER magazine.

What attracted me to engineering? Well, I was a practical soul and it seemed like a career in which I could reliably earn a living. (Unlike fiction writing...) I enjoy problem-solving, and every assignment is like a puzzle. I guess I enjoyed the schoolwork more than I would have ever enjoyed the typical Chem E job--maintaining an aging chemical plant, which is primarily fixing broken things and never designing anything new. And I confess to sticking with the program because it's probably the most rigorous one on campus and quitting would have been admitting that there was something I couldn't do.

Why did I quit working as an engineer? Lots of reasons. I really enjoyed environmental consulting. It's all about problem-solving and judgement calls. You have to recognize the potential for a problem and develop a plan for testing that potential and remediating it. And at my level, I could then call in a field crew and say, "Go check it out," without actually having to do anything practical myself. I just monitored their work and wrote the report.

A consulting engineer's only product is her report, so writing skills were critical to my work and I was rewarded for them. When I consult now, it's not for my technical know-how, which has atrophied. It's for my communications ability.

I left that work after Muffin was born, because I couldn't see a way to do it well and raise my children well at the same time. And I was feeling a bit of resentment over the gender thing because I felt that I sat in meetings and presented well-reasoned solutions to problems and was ignored in favor of illogical rantings presented by tall people with low voices and Y-chromosomes. Without the desire to stay home with my children, though, I'd have stayed and battled through that, but I just didn't have the energy to do both.

And I wanted the chance to write. So I took it. Even if I end up going back to more traditional employment, I wouldn't go back and change any of my career decisions.

Don't you guys and girls think Mary Anna should go ahead and take up with a younger guy? It appears that too many the older ones are threatened by a female engineer/author.

My mother's sister-in-law did after becoming a widow. They have been together for many years.