May 14, 2008 10:37 A.M. Weight: 160.0 lbs.

This morning, as I was settling into my day at work, I got an e-mail from my husband. Apparently, Jessie declared as she was getting ready to go to daycare today that she is going to be an Ice Cream Truck Lady when she grows up. Since Gavin fluctuates between being an astronaut and a cashier at Target, I'm thinking I may very well be happy to have a nice 401k plan in place when I'm older. I wonder if Ice Cream Truck driving school qualifies for 529 savings payments. Now, if she gets a business management degree and OWNS her own giant Ice Cream Truck empire, well, that's different.

I have to say though, when I was younger my aspirations revolved around owning my own ad agency just like Angela Bower. I even won a contest with Life Cereal for writing a little commercial as a kid… well… 'won' might be a bit strong. They sent me a certificate saying 'nice ad, kid' or something like that. When I got older I wanted to be a lawyer. I wanted to argue the case for justice in the world. Then when I was dating an engineer I wanted to get an engineering degree and since I liked my chemistry classes in high school more than physics I landed on chemical engineer - THEN I'd get that law degree and be an intellectual properties lawyer arguing for justice in the patent world. Ya, I know, I was a little ambitious.

My first year in chemical engineering involved taking an organic chem class. Just in case you don't know - for people who rely mostly on computers to store any memory at all (I think I'd forget how to phone home if it wasn't programmed into my cell), organic chem class can also be called "torture". I couldn't memorize anything. I LITERALLY filled out the little test bubbles on the final exam by just making a pattern that looked aesthetically pleasing to me. (BTW - I got a C in the class.) Thankfully, my first year also included taking a class in Fortran. Fortran is a programming language that cave men used to write code that calculated how long and sharp the flint spearhead had to be on their spears to bring down the largest mammoths. All the same, it was interesting and I was intrigued. I ended up writing all the Fortran code for my fellow ChemE majors in that class while I relied on them to do the actual chemical engineering stuff. Thus, a major change to Computer Science followed.

I was still planning on getting the computer science degree and then the law degree so I didn't really think the type of engineering mattered all that much. By my sophomore year I was being asked to apply for internship jobs and by my senior year I was being given job offers such that 4+ more years in school to get a law degree didn't look very appealing. I was happy enough working as a computer dork and plus, I really wanted to start my family. Now here I am, computer dork extraordinaire. So really, who knows where Jessie's path towards ice cream truck driving dreams will take her. As long as I get free creamsicles when she's in the neighborhood I may not care.