Retrospectives and System Building

Morning routine. Read Heather Cox Richardson on Trump. Created last week's retrospective. Worked on December retrospective system. Ate Cup o' Noodles. Worked on planning/journaling system—installed Brain MCP server on desktop. Rajeev postponed due to illness. Hit Claude session limit at 1pm. Got fetch.com referral from Loni. Scanned Mexico vacation documents. Drove to Suds for a beer with Michael, Mary, Tim, Cathy—Michael heading to NYC tomorrow. Watched Ancient Civilizations on Tang dynasty, Star Trek (Spock's Brain ending, Romulan cloaking device beginning), Hogan's Heroes.

Building Scaffolding for Future Work

January 05, 2026

These notes describe the events of Saturday, 01/04/2026.

I completed my morning routine, then read Heather Cox Richardson's take on current Trump insanity. The political landscape continues to provide disturbing content, each new development raising questions about what norms remain and what gets normalized through repetition.

I worked on my plan for the day, then created a retrospective for last week. The process of looking back across seven days reveals patterns that individual entries don't capture—the accumulation of small decisions, the trajectory of projects, the ebb and flow of motivation and connection. I worked on a retrospective system for creating a retrospective for the month of December, building tools to make reflection more systematic and less reliant on memory.

I ate a Cup o' Noodles for lunch, then went back to work on the planning/journaling system. I mostly worked on installing The Brain MCP server on my desktop, integrating tools that should make knowledge management more fluid and accessible. Rajeev let me know that he's feeling sick today and needs to postpone. I said that he should let me know when he's feeling better. I hit my session limit in Claude at 1pm and had to wait to proceed on some things until the limit reset.

I got a referral to fetch.com from Loni, another tool in the expanding ecosystem of services that promise to solve problems I may or may not actually have. I scanned the vacation portion of the Mexico trip plus a few other documents, continuing the administrative momentum from last week.

Waiting for others to arrive

I drove to Suds for a beer with Michael, Mary, Tim, and Cathy. Michael is heading to New York tomorrow and he's pretty excited about it. The anticipation of travel to a city he knows well, the theater he'll see, the energy of the place—it's infectious even secondhand.

I watched Ancient Civilizations on the Tang dynasty, a very rich and cultured period similar to some Roman periods. The lecture highlighted how certain civilizations at certain moments achieve a kind of cultural flowering, where prosperity and stability create conditions for art, philosophy, and technical innovation to advance simultaneously. I watched an episode of Star Trek—the end of the Spock's Brain episode, then the beginning of the episode where they steal the Romulan cloaking device. I watched Hogan's Heroes and continue to be impressed by how the complexity of the stories increases in the later seasons.

I'm pondering the implications of "being serious." Can you really not be serious and joyful at the same time? Is being serious a burden? I don't know. The question seems worth sitting with, the tension between taking things seriously—commitments, work, relationships—and maintaining lightness, humor, the ability to not let seriousness become weight that crushes other possibilities.

The day moved through system building and reflection, technical work and social connection, ancient civilizations and science fiction. Sometimes a day serves as infrastructure—building tools, maintaining connections, organizing information—rather than producing anything immediately visible, but the scaffolding matters as much as what eventually gets built on it.