<==3

Tonight I found this really heartening endorsement for an engineering toy geared towards little girls.  It made me think of my own upbringing and the results of it.



I grew up on a small farm, but we didn't work it really.  My dad was a firefighter, and then a wheelwright/horse drawn vehicle builder/fixer/restorer.  He had a workshop and I was allowed to use the hand tools.  Because Dad was a firefighter and my ma was sickly I also learned how to do a lot of rural homeowner stuff pretty early.  I could fix fences, flip breakers, irrigate fields, fix the toilet and build a fire to keep the house warm.  My mom knew how to do all that stuff too, so I didn't think of it as "man stuff" though I did observe that Mom only did some things if Dad wasn't there to do them, and vice versa with cooking and laundry and such.  I was aware that there were usual roles, but that they weren't really important.  My parents didn't care that I didn't like dolls or playing house, and they liked me playing outside.  We lived far enough away from toy stores that I didn't know there were pink aisles.

At the same time I still noticed gender bias.  Dad never asked me to help him or work with him out in the shop, and never did teach me to use the power tools.  No one jumped all over themselves to teach me to drive like they did when my cousin Jason turned 16.  It was pretty minor.  As I grew up I found out more, like that there weren't many women in my physics classes, and even more annoying things like people asking to talk to someone in the IT department when I, as the head of the IT department, answered a call.  Most annoying is when I try and do technical or mechanical things with men, and they steamroll me and take over, and all I get to do is strip wires and fetch wrenches.  I've gotten a bit defensive about it to the point of keeping my own tools and not letting anyone use them, and not letting men (Sheldon in this case, though he hasn't done anything wrong!) work on MY projects with me.

This only relates loosely to burning man because I want to do a "mine all mine" electronics project, but I need to hurry!  I'm not sure if I had any other point.

Good news though, you've been saved from hearing about my ridiculous day at work, or the dangerous heat wave, or that I stayed within my points today but I didn't exercise.  I don't have a weigh in this week due to the holiday, so I'm going to try and have a nicely impressive loss by next week.  It won't take much more than I'm doing now to get it I don't think.