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March 20, 2018: More on Maintenance Mode

I am figuring this maintenance thing out. Last night I was annoyed with Pete because at 8:30 p.m. he opted to tend to a maintenance related item. I was finishing up outside, and he was supposedly inside, getting going on dinner. He finally finished a phone call and came out and gave me a hand. I asked him if he was working on dinner and he said no, he’d been dealing with Backcountry Horsemen of Alaska stuff. He is now the state treasurer and he was needing to find out something about an EIN number.

I didn’t quite understand why he didn’t tell the other BCHA person that he’d deal with this in the morning. I have since figured it out. Pete, you see, is maintenance driven. He takes great joy in finishing tasks. It doesn’t matter how mundane it is, he tackles all with a high degree of focus. And he never, ever complains. If, for example, there are more dirty dishes than clean, he will pitch in and do them. I, on the other hand, get three quarters of the way through and then decide enough is enough.

I’m the ideas person. This is not to say that Pete doesn’t have ideas, but Pete is the maintenance person. This is not to say that I avoid all maintenance tasks. Both of us just tend to favor one over the other, me ideas and Pete maintenance. So generally we work quite well together. For instance, I wrote


Maintenance tasks require ladders.

up my PowerPoint presentation notes and figured out what photos and graphics I wanted to use. This was of course all ideas related. And Pete designed and formatted the presentation slides. He could not have done what I did, and I could not have done what he did.

I find it quite curious that I like coming up with rough drafts and revising them, and to a certain degree copy editing them. However, I am quite okay with letting Pete format what I’ve produced. If he was not around I would hire someone to do this for me. Before I met him, when I was in graduate school, I had to write annotated bibliographies. I did work at it, but my work was deemed substandard. I thought I had dealt with all the little nit picky things, but it soon became apparent to me I had not. Rather than attempt to revise, I opted to get a lower grade. My thinking, even back then was that life is short so I instead put revision time into writing poetry.

I have no idea why I am the way I am. There is a part of me that for a long time thought that Pete, in taking on more technical maintenance-related tasks, found them to be as onerous as I. Now I think not. This morning is a case in point. I was at school – I walked into his office. There he was, sitting next to his computer. And on the screen was a document he had written that was related to what he was working on last night, which is the EIN number. Quite obviously, if he had considered this to be an onerous task, he would not have dove back into it this morning.

I have left out the essential details of Pete’s maintenance task because I tuned out a good portion of what he was talking about. This is further proof that my patience for such things is limited.

Next: 80. 3/21/18: Heading South

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