Automating Forward, Processing Through

Morning struggles and late sleep. MacOS upgrade and laptop cleanup. Daily workflow refinement. Claude-to-Gemini email delegation. Sprint review with Jerry. Gymnastics ticket transfer. Photo tagging. Exercise. Walk to Queen's Chopstick for dinner. Conversation with Brenda about Dan.

A day of system building, grief processing, and steady forward motion

Events and activities that occurred on Wednesday, January 14, 2026

The day began poorly. I woke very early, feeling unwell, not wanting to do anything. Eventually I took some NyQuil and fell asleep in my chair. When the alarm went off, I moved to my bed and slept until about 8:30. The morning routine felt like something to get through rather than embrace.

The laptop revealed itself to be running out of space, which triggered significant cleanup work. I still couldn't determine what was consuming all that storage. Upgrading to the next version of MacOS felt like progress by default—at least the system would be current even if the storage mystery remained unsolved. I cleaned up the kitchen and ate some noodles for breakfast, mundane tasks that helped establish forward momentum.

Daily workflow refinement consumed much of the morning. The systems are getting there, but running out of session and chat space remains a chronic issue. The work feels important—building infrastructure that will support better documentation and retrospective analysis—but the constraints keep reasserting themselves. I pushed forward on delegating email summarization to Gemini from Claude, an experiment in whether one AI can effectively hand off work to another. By evening I'd finished the Gemini-based email summarizer and documented it in the Info Env wiki. Small victories in the automation game.

The sprint review with Jerry turned into more of a catch-up conversation—snow accumulation, trees falling, the ongoing challenges of managing the farm from a distance. The conversation ranged into travel planning: I proposed providing him with lodging in Mexico, and we discussed Frontier Airlines' annual airfare subscription and their Go Wild Pass. A book called "5000 Things to Do in 50 States" came up as potential travel inspiration. Jerry mentioned talking to the attorney, who gave some options for handling estate matters. These catch-up conversations blend the practical and the personal in ways that feel entirely normal until you step back and notice how much ground gets covered.

I transferred the gymnastics tickets to Debi for Friday's event—a small administrative task that cleared one item from the mental queue. Steve cancelled our evening meeting, which I'd forgotten was during dry January anyway. The freed time became available for other things.

Burner group gathering from earlier

I spent time tagging photos, the kind of detailed organizational work that feels satisfying in its completeness. Three 45-second planks, fifteen bird-dogs, five stretches—Phase 1 of the training protocol maintained. The walk to Queen's Chopstick for dinner, picking up groceries on the way back, may have totaled thirty minutes of movement through the winter evening.

The conversation with Brenda about Dan happened after I got back. I told her what had happened. I asked about Sean, her son, and she gave me updates on him and on all the animals—the way conversation flows when loss needs acknowledging but life continues around it. These exchanges carry weight without requiring extended processing. The information gets shared, the care gets expressed, and forward motion resumes.

Wednesday demonstrated that processing grief and building systems can happen simultaneously. Technical infrastructure gets refined while human connections acknowledge loss. The day moves forward not by ignoring difficulty but by maintaining rhythm through it.