My wife Abby and I fill each other’s gaps. I am the technologist of the team; she is the mechanic.

That was made very obvious the other day when I came in from mowing after the belt had detached from the flywheels on the deck of the mower. I removed the deck and looked at it. I saw a tangle of belts and pulleys. Honestly, it looked like trigonometry, or those cog-and-gear questions on standardized tests.

Nothing was obvious, so I half-heartedly devised a plan to take the deck to the John Deere place the next day. But first, I decided to ask Abby what she thought.

“Honey, would you come out here an look at the mower. I’m missing something obvious.”

“Why do you say that?” she replied.

“Because I’m missing something obvious.”

She came out and looked down at the mower deck, thought for about four seconds, then clunk, boing, clank! It was fixed.

As for the title of this post, anyone familiar with the real Hertzsprung–Russell diagram gets the joke, particularly if you know that my middle name is Russell and that I am something of a science nurd.