Rebuilding from Dawn

Morning routine. Discovered broken infrastructure at dawn. Complete rebuild of Google Workspace automation across eight working sessions. Built a bedroom shelf. Eye doctor visit. CHON Topics on Tesla patents and AI in space. Book Club scheduling. Slayden Homes tree consultation.

A day of construction and reconstruction

Events and activities that occurred on Thursday, February 5, 2026

The day began before five o'clock with the kind of discovery that redefines a morning: sitting down to plan the day at 5:19 AM, I found that the entire Google Workspace integration — email summarization, contact management, the tools that make daily workflows possible — had quietly stopped functioning. The email summary automation had been failing since January 27, over a week of silent breakdowns. What was supposed to be a quick planning session became an all-day reconstruction project.

A turtle from Hawaii somewhere

The rebuild consumed eight distinct working sessions across the full day, each building on the last. The first sessions diagnosed the problem and planned a modular architecture. The middle sessions involved the actual construction — 74 individual tools covering Gmail operations, contact management, and People API functionality, organized into a clean modular structure rather than the monolithic approach that had become unmaintainable. OAuth credentials had to be re-authorized for both personal and business accounts. By late afternoon, both systems were tested and confirmed working with live data. The final sessions optimized the session initialization process itself, reducing token consumption from roughly 50,000 to 8,000 tokens per setup, and designed a prefetch service to make email summarization dramatically more efficient.

Between coding sessions, I built a shelf in the bedroom to clear off the window sill — the kind of physical project that offers satisfying contrast to digital infrastructure work. Tangible results in wood and screws while the abstract architecture of API integrations settled in the background.

The eye doctor confirmed everything looks good, so to speak. A routine appointment that delivered welcome routine news.

The CHON Topics thread carried Ian Page's characteristic range: a Tesla patent for embedded wiring using printed circuit glass, thoughts on AI in space exploring the tension between solar power availability and heat dissipation challenges, a manganese catalyst paper on converting CO2 to formate that could replace precious metals, and a piece on Europe's slow reckoning with overtaxed electricity as it tries to electrify economies still dependent on gas. Steve Froelich forwarded "The Recursive Self" from an AI newsletter called Ravel, prompting the natural question of how different AI agents compare in their approaches to self-reference and reflection.

The Book Club scheduling thread continued its amiable negotiation — Jon available any day except Wednesday and Friday, Rajeev suggesting February 12, Larry graciously bowing out of the scheduling constraint due to travel. Meanwhile, Mark Whitney followed up from a recent meeting with a connection to Pete Slayden about the Forest View project and some trees in question, leading to a quick exchange of addresses.

The reconstruction consumed the day's stated intentions entirely — both "bring Google Workspace functionality under control" and "build bedroom shelves" were accomplished, though the first absorbed far more hours than anticipated. There's a particular satisfaction in having infrastructure that works invisibly again, even knowing that invisibility is exactly what made the failure so easy to miss in the first place.