Context and Countdown

Morning routine. Published yesterday's blog post. Chili breakfast. Technical infrastructure work. SESIG at the coffee shop. Fixed living room shelves. New Zealand trip logistics finalized. Goblet squats and yoga. Watched Formal Logic and The Avengers.

When deployment systems and travel plans converge

Events and activities that occurred on Tuesday, February 10, 2026

The morning began with completing the previous day's documentation cycle—publishing the blog post and creating the DayOne entry for February 9th before diving into technical work. Breakfast was a can of chili, a practical choice that kept momentum going through the early hours.

The day's technical focus centered on the deployment system and development environment, particularly implementing context-aware scripts that properly distinguish between production and staging environments. A satisfying bug fix emerged: the sync script had been querying the database for the correct path, then promptly ignoring the result and constructing the path manually anyway. The kind of oversight that makes you wonder how many similar ghosts haunt other codebases. Later work addressed a gap in the deployment system—a comprehensive CRUD interface for managing the deployment manifest, providing systematic operations for both human operators and AI systems to read, create, update, and delete manifest entries programmatically.

Between coding sessions, Amazon deliveries got properly shelved, and the Subscribe & Save settings received their periodic review and adjustment. I shopped for and ordered a few merino wool items—preparation for the New Zealand trip continues piece by piece.

SESIG gathered at Imagine Coffee with Larry, Tom, and Jim. Larry described his work using Fusion, an Autodesk product, specifically designing a hand grip deflector. Tom arrived fresh from a month-long road trip with stories to share. The conversation drifted into familiar territory around AI and the social ebbs and flows that accompany its adoption—the enthusiasms and skepticisms that ripple through communities as capabilities expand. Tom mentioned a person who can learn languages remarkably quickly, a thread worth following up on.

Cassia notes

Returning home, I found my housekeeper had flagged an issue with the living room shelves—they were poorly attached to the wall. The kind of thing that demands prompt attention before it becomes a larger problem. A portion of the rest of the afternoon shifted to fixing the shelves properly, a satisfying tangible task between the more abstract technical work. I also spent some time getting Gemini to convert my whiteboard scribblings on Cassia locations into a spreadsheet—it sort of worked, the kind of partial success that characterizes much AI-assisted work at this stage.

The New Zealand trip crossed a significant threshold with final logistics falling into place. Both rental car legs are now confirmed—Corvallis to PDX and PDX to Corvallis. The Golden Bay retreat is fully paid. NZeTA applications are complete for both Joey and me, and Joey's TSA PreCheck status is verified and ready. Twelve days until departure, and the planning has simplified from an ambitious three-location itinerary to a more focused two-location approach: Golden Bay for the photography retreat, then Christchurch with flexibility for weather and energy.

Physical practice included three sets of fifteen goblet squats with a three-pound weight, twelve step-ups, and an evening yoga session. The modest weights serve the purpose—building the movement patterns and stamina for carrying camera gear up steep New Zealand trails.

The evening settled into screen time with Formal Logic—continuing the educational series—followed by The Avengers, a familiar comfort that asks nothing and delivers reliable entertainment.

The pieces keep assembling toward the trip. Documentation systems mature. The body prepares. Twelve days feels simultaneously distant and immediate.