Systems and Departures

Morning routine. Picked up rental car. Lunch at Benchwarmers. Deployment system refinements. Google Workspace MCP expansion. PhotoPrism storage discovery. New Zealand trip finalization. Formal Logic. For We Are Many audiobook.

Deployment fixes, PhotoPrism archaeology, and the last day before three weeks away

Events and activities that occurred on Saturday, February 21, 2026

The day before departure always carries a peculiar tension—half devoted to wrapping up the present, half already reaching toward what's ahead. With tomorrow's flights to New Zealand looming, the hours split between final preparations and the persistent pull of ongoing projects.

Benchwarmers

An unexpected discovery emerged at Benchwarmers, a place I'd avoided for years based on early reputation. The reality proved different—decent food, friendly bartender—another reminder that first impressions calcify into assumptions that outlast their truth. Sometimes places change; sometimes the initial reports were simply wrong.

The technical work accumulated across multiple fronts. The deployment system received attention through three distinct sessions, hunting down documentation inconsistencies—57 script path references updated, obsolete flags removed, and a subtle bug discovered where interface files triggered false "outdated" reports. The root cause traced to path prefix logic: the currency checker only constructed SessionLoad paths for guidance files, skipping interface deployments entirely. A word-splitting bug in project names with spaces got fixed along the way, and Phase 11.16's MD5-based currency tracking finally received its proper git commit.

The Google Workspace MCP server grew substantially. Drive API joined the expanding toolkit—22 new tools across files, permissions, comments, and drives—bringing the system to 152 total tools across eight containers. A critical import conflict surfaced and was resolved: Python's custom calendar module had been shadowing the standard library module, crashing Gmail containers. The fix required rebuilding all eight containers with proper import paths.

PhotoPrism's storage volume hit 100% capacity at 514GB, blocking further photo indexing. The discovery came during testing of the custom MCP server, which otherwise passed Phase 4 verification.

Much of the waiting time between technical tasks went to browsing through PhotoPrism's indexed collection—a photographic archaeology of the past twenty-five years and more. The images tell a story of someone not always mentally present, opportunities both seized and squandered. A mixed bag of wreckage and joy, as most honest assessments of a life tend to be.

New Zealand preparations reached completion: all ten trip reminders elevated to high priority, the complete timeline mirrored to the Belo Retrato calendar with confirmation numbers and logistics, everything saved to permanent storage. Three weeks ahead—the Ao Marama Retreat in Golden Bay, the Coastal Pacific scenic train, eight nights in Christchurch researching the Industrial Age Tour book.

The evening dissolved into Formal Logic episodes and several lighter shows that couldn't hold attention, while Dennis Taylor's For We Are Many played intermittently throughout the day. Too much time absorbed by information environment refinement, though progress does accumulate. Every touch reveals something to add or fix—the perpetual nature of systems that aspire to comprehensive documentation.

The observation about present moment awareness lingered from the photo browsing session. Looking back through years of images offers a particular kind of confrontation: here is what you captured, here is what you missed, here is who you were becoming without quite knowing it.