
I have grown up and lived in the Northeastern USA for all my life. Last November, fir the first time, I ventured out into the desert out West, spending only 1 day walking around the various areas of Joshua Tree National Park during a business trip I was on… I was instantly enamored with desert ecology, I really want to go back and spend more time out there. I took a detour down a dirt road and ended up at a crossroads and stopped to take in the view, and I couldn’t see or hear the presence of other humans. There was no sound, utter silence, not even the rustling of leaves in the breeze which is such a common background noise. That complete silence and isolation is something I had never really experienced before. I sat on a rock and stared into the distance for almost an hour, I did a lot of introspection and reflection sitting out there. I really want to experience that again. Here was my view
My grandfather was a draftsman for one of the big military contractors back in the day. He’s got some of his old work framed, it’s really amazing what the human hand used to accomplish with only a straightedge and a compass… As an engineer who uses a lot of Solidworks, sometimes I romanticize and yearn to blow everything up and return to the artful days of hand-drafting as the standard.
My first job out of college was re-making tools to manufacture small electromechanical assemblies for repairing old military aircraft. (Said tools had been thrown away by some previous now-fired director who thought “We haven’t used these tools in 15 years, surely we don’t need them anymore…”, but when the military calls up and asks for part XYZ for a B52 that you’ve manufactured for the last 65 years, you don’t say no, even if you haven’t made the part in 2 decades). I had an entire room full of B, C, and D-sized hand-drafted drawings to pull specs and dimensions from, and each one was so beautiful in its own way. Getting to spend a whole day digging through drawings was always a nice little quiet retreat from the rest of the chaotic world.