Maintenance Day

Ya know those traditional job interview questions, “What’s your biggest weakness?” and “What’s your biggest strength?” Well my answers to those two questions are really tied together, as one sprang from the other. I’m forgetful as hell, and not as a result of mashed-taters-for-brains or anything like that. It’s because I’m perpetually distracted by my noisy mind. While I’m knitting, I’m listening to the TV, music, or podcasts, and thinking about the next step in the pattern or the next pattern altogether. Or variations that might be done to the work currently in my hands. And yet there’s another portion of my brain that’s thinking about what I need to do next, after this current activity.

This running dialogue in my head goes on all day. While driving, shopping, doing housework, taking a shower – constantly. So of course I’ve done forgot that you asked me to pick up some more stamps while I was at the store.

Knowing this about myself, I’ve developed another tendency that serves me very well as an adult. Well, it’s a set of traits that go together like my forgetfulness and distractibility. I not only write everything down, I do so methodically. And I have routines for that and everything else. You know, a collection of good habits that save me from myself. My routines are not an OCD thing, as some might think, and some have even commented on how organized and thorough I am. No not really. At least not naturally. I just made myself find a way to remember things and “get ‘r done.” See, my strength is the coping mechanism for my weakness. It’s okay to have weaknesses – ‘cause we all do – it’s really a matter of how do you cope with yours?

How I cope with Tuesdays is a good example. Nearly every week, on a Tuesday, the WoW servers go down all day for maintenance. Now, any other day of the week, I do my in-game dailies (repeatable quests for monetary or reputation point gains) in the mornings when the server population is low. Then I do my knitting in the afternoons, supper on the table in the evenings, and more knitting with the family in the den for those down-shifting hours before bedtime. Everybody here knows that coming to the supper table as a family is nonnegotiable, lol. I don’t even have to insist on it anymore; they’re all trained to it nicely.

But then there’s Tuesday maintenance, with no game to play – ugh! Time to be adaptive.

There are some routines that aren’t daily, but more of a weekly thing, and Tuesdays are a good time for those. I get long stretches of knitting and writing done, and weekly housework happens on these days too. They’re also good times to square away the things on my “one-of-these-days” list, like sorting through my stash or my binder of downloaded patterns.

Tuesday is not only maintenance day for the virtual land of Azeroth, it is for me too.