Quiet Revolutions

Waking at Valley River Inn. Drive home with audiobook. Cat feeder chaos. CHON Topics on batteries and materials science. Cliffe meeting with KAI proxy breakthrough. Amazon transaction scraping. Exercise and yoga. Evening conversation at Suds.

From hotel checkout to technology updates to bar conversation

Events and activities that occurred on Thursday, January 29, 2026

We woke in the hotel around 5:30am, a normal hour for me even in unfamiliar surroundings. Joey decided she needed to check on her cats, so we checked out and went our separate ways. Adam, the clerk who had checked us in the night before, offered a complimentary coffee before I headed out. On the drive home, I listened to We Are Legion (We Are Bob), the audiobook picking up where I'd left off.

Home brought an unexpected challenge: the automatic cat feeder had lost its programming entirely, requiring a complete reset. Trouble expressed her displeasure at the disruption to her feeding schedule.

Picture of Dan that Zelda sent

The morning routine led into planning and journaling work. The automated scripts had failed overnight due to a permissions issue, which prompted a fix to the deployment system to prevent similar failures. Small infrastructure improvements that compound over time.

Ian Page's CHON Topics emails arrived with their usual density of technical insight. China's battery installation rate has reached 1200 GWh per year—enough capacity to absorb the total output from 50 large nuclear plants for 24 hours. Niobium phosphide emerged as a potential copper replacement for ultrathin chip conductors, with supply chains tracing through Brazil and Canada while China develops its own massive deposits. And perovskite solar cells have reached commercial production at a facility in Wagga Wagga, Australia, despite ongoing durability challenges with UV, heat, and moisture.

The meeting with Cliffe brought genuinely exciting news. I'd discovered U.S. non-profits that can act as financial brokers between American and Kenyan accounts, potentially eliminating the need for KAI to establish its own U.S. non-profit entity. Two promising organizations emerged—one specializing in financial proxies, another focused on enabling organizational sustainability in places like Kenya. We agreed to establish monthly board meetings via Zoom with Ameerah to track developments. Cliffe reported solid progress on his end: website improvements with Meshak, PayPal-to-bank connections nearly complete, and weekly team meetings now running smoothly. We discussed hosting monthly public KitBag sessions in Nairobi using library or community spaces, potentially with sliding scale fees. The path forward feels clearer than it has in months.

Amazon transaction scraping consumed the afternoon hours. Pass three of the process took shape, and October's transactions reached classification. The work is methodical—watching Claude grind through order history while eating a sandwich prepared during a break.

Exercise followed the established pattern: three 45-second planks, 15 bird-dogs, 5 stretches, 15 curls. Then 60 minutes of Yin yoga via online class from Willamette Valley Power Yoga, a good counterbalance to desk-bound technical work.

The evening pulled me toward Suds, where Aaron was bartending. He's become my favorite bartender and increasingly a good friend. We talked about the Super Bowl, coffee, and Callahan's Chronicles. The conversation flowed easily, the kind of bar talk that leaves you feeling lighter than when you arrived.

The day's quiet revolutions—a proxy breakthrough, materials science updates, infrastructure fixes—accumulate without fanfare. Progress often looks like normal Thursday activities until you notice the trajectory.