Blame It on the Wind (not the rain)

Let's reminisce about the days of high school. I had horrible hair and wore mutli-colored nail polish back then...circa 1994. One of my favorite classes was drafting. I wanted to be an architect because I thought it would be neat to design floor plans. No one in my family was an architect and hardly any went to college (save some who are nurses now, God bless them), but I knew my heart-shaped pool designs and lofts overlooking the great room would be more than awesome.

Drafting combined things I enjoyed most: art and math. Yes, math. I liked pythagorean's theorem, SOH-CAH-TAO (that's how you get sine, cosine and tangent for all of you folks out there), and all the like. I did not, however, enjoy elipses and hyperboles. Sorry, I got math carried away. I'm a nerd.

The first year of drafting consisted of T-squares, drawing tables, triangles and three (yes 3!) different sizes of mechanical pencils. Each pencil had its purpose people.

My second year of drafting consisted of computer aided drafting (we were high tech back in 1995 and was sorry to see no Oregon Trail on the giant green screen computer). My class size was larger than the amount of computers available so guess who had to partner up? The only two girls in the freakin' place. Was I mad that I didn't have my own computer? Not really, I mean, we didn't have FaceSpace back then and all you could do is play minesweeper. My partner, Stacy, was pretty cool and we shared our like of drafting. I don't think she enjoyed the math per se but nonetheless we were partners.

During this most impressionable time in a young person's life, our drafting teacher Mr. Parke showed us video on the Tacoma Narrow's Bridge (Galloping Gertie). After watching this video, I decided at that moment I wanted to become an engineer.  Take a gander at the video and see the destruction of a famous bridge in the 1940s.





Thanks to my best good friend Shannon, I have stills of this video in my office to remind myself why I'm here.