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title: "Weeknotes: December 20–27, 2025"
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title: "Weeknotes: December 19–26, 2025"
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date: 2025-12-27T10:45:00-05:00
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date: 2025-12-27T10:45:00-05:00
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description: Slow, like the world was on pause. Everyone else off celebrating while I hung out in the quiet of home.
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description: Slow, like the world was on pause. Everyone else off celebrating while I hung out in the quiet of home.
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title: "Weeknotes: December 28, 2025–January 3, 2026"
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title: "Weeknotes: December 27–January 2, 2026"
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date: 2026-01-03T12:00:00-05:00
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date: 2026-01-03T12:00:00-05:00
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description: Our time-shifted Christmas week was really peaceful. A couple more days before going back to work on Monday, and I'm trying to make the most of it.
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description: Our time-shifted Christmas week was really peaceful. A couple more days before going back to work on Monday, and I'm trying to make the most of it.
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title: "Weeknotes: January 4–10, 2026"
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title: "Weeknotes: January 3–09, 2026"
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date: 2026-01-10T09:00:00-05:00
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date: 2026-01-10T09:00:00-05:00
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description: The chair arrived. Buddhist monks walked through town. Fried chicken achieved maximum cronch.
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description: The chair arrived. Buddhist monks walked through town. Fried chicken achieved maximum cronch.
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title: "Weeknotes: January 11–17, 2026"
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title: "Weeknotes: January 10–16, 2026"
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date: 2026-01-17T10:00:00-05:00
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date: 2026-01-17T10:00:00-05:00
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draft: false
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description: Everything around me seems to be in motion this week. Kids moving through milestones, colleagues moving on to new things, seasons shifting. Even the birds are starting to come back.
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description: Everything around me seems to be in motion this week. Kids moving through milestones, colleagues moving on to new things, seasons shifting. Even the birds are starting to come back.
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content/posts/2026-01-23-weeknotes/cormorant-pendant.jpg
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content/posts/2026-01-23-weeknotes/creature-greeting.jpg
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content/posts/2026-01-23-weeknotes/index.md
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title: "Weeknotes: January 17–23, 2026"
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date: 2026-01-24T09:00:00-05:00
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description: The week started with chlorine and ended with rum. In between, international grocery exploration, storm anxiety, and a fire-eating mermaid who made me want to do more with my life.
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tags:
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- weeknotes
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- Inuhele
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- CONpossible
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- 3d-printing
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- family
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---
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The week started with chlorine and ended with rum. In between: international grocery exploration, storm anxiety, and a fire-eating mermaid who made me want to do more with my life.
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---
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Saturday I spent at UGA's competition pool watching Juniper swim her way through another big high school meet. She's a sophomore, solidly JV, but this was a personal-records kind of day—first place heat finishes, times dropping, the whole arc of improvement visible in a single afternoon. The older kids will graduate. She'll be ready.
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Sunday took me to Duluth for the last in-person CONpossible staff meeting before the convention. But the real adventure was the food. Before the meeting I wandered through a Middle Eastern grocery store down the street from the hotel. Afterward I crossed to an enormous Vietnamese shopping center, which culminated in a truly excellent bánh mì eaten in the parking lot before the drive home. Duluth is a treasure trove of international markets and I've made it a habit to explore a new one each visit. I may never run out.
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Monday was MLK Day—a work holiday. Some years I join one of the local service projects, but this year I put the 3D printer to work on items for CONpossible and one beautiful cormorant pendant for Inuhele.
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The cormorant isn't Inuhele's mascot, but it's a tropical, oceanic bird—adjacent to the traditional tiki imagery but my own. I wanted something that felt both handmade and a little fancy. A few hours of printing, a few more of careful painting, and I had something I was genuinely proud to wear.
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Tuesday and Wednesday were my only work days this week, and by Wednesday evening the weather forecast had solidified into something alarming: a potentially catastrophic ice storm arriving over the weekend, right when we'd be in Atlanta at Inuhele. I split my attention between actual work and storm preparation—weatherproofing the house, arranging extra care for the cats, packing for what might become a longer stay than planned. Tuesday night I managed dinner and drinks with a dear friend I hadn't seen in far too long. She's been traveling internationally and in-person sightings have been rare. It was good medicine before the anxious Wednesday that followed.
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Thursday morning I finished freeze-proofing the house, then we drove to Atlanta for [Inuhele](https://inuhele.com) setup day. This is one of my favorite parts of being on staff: the transformation. You arrive at a generic hotel conference space and leave behind a tropical, kitschy paradise.
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By Thursday night the space had become something else entirely.
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Friday was the first full day of the convention. I'm the A/V and general tech support person for Inuhele, but my workload this year was genuinely light. Light enough that I could do it with a drink—or two—always in hand.
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I love this convention and the people who come to it. The creativity and silliness seem boundless. People show up in elaborate costumes, build themed room parties, treat the whole weekend as collaborative performance art.
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My favorite new person was [MeduSirena](https://www.instagram.com/fireeatingmermaid.medusirena/), billed as "the fire-eating mermaid." Her approach to art and performance mirrors my own sensibilities so closely—but she actually goes out and *does* it, full time. I only dabble. Watching her made me want to do more. Not necessarily fire-eating or mermaid-ing, but *something*. She's the kind of inspiration that sticks with you after the convention ends.
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**Shipped:** One hand-painted cormorant pendant. The CONpossible prints are still on the printer, waiting for paint.
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**Noticed:** Duluth's international food scene keeps rewarding exploration. And MeduSirena reminded me that "dabbling" is a choice, not a constraint.
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**What's Next:** An ice storm was bearing down on Georgia as Friday ended. We were safely in Atlanta with the cats cared for at home, but the forecast looked bad. More on that next week. CONpossible prep continues—those prints need painting.
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**Vibe Check:** A week that built from routine through anxiety and released into something joyful.
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content/posts/2026-01-30-weeknotes/index.md
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title: "Weeknotes: January 24–30, 2026"
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date: 2026-01-31T09:00:00-05:00
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draft: false
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description: One day you're watching fire dancers in a hotel ballroom transformed into a Polynesian paradise. Three days later you're on back-to-back video calls while ice encases everything outside your window.
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tags:
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- weeknotes
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- Inuhele
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- swimming
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- ice-storm
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- work
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lastmod: 2026-02-04T03:01:17.216Z
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One day you're watching fire dancers in a hotel ballroom transformed into a Polynesian paradise. Three days later you're on back-to-back video calls while ice encases everything outside your window. Convention weeks do that to you.
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Saturday was the last full day of Inuhele, and it delivered. Panels all day, then a spectacular evening show where MeduSirena and her husband once again demonstrated why they're worth traveling to see: wit, creativity, and genuine mastery over their art form. After that, the room parties. If you've never been to a tiki convention, you might expect grass skirts and plastic leis. You'd be wrong. One room transported us to Victorian-era Coney Island. The attention to detail in these transformations is staggering.
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The reverie continued well into the early morning hours.
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Sunday is usually a half day, but the incoming ice storm had other plans. Most attendees fled before noon, which meant those of us on crew got an early start on breakdown. Returning an immersive tropical paradise back into boring hotel conference space is its own kind of work: slower than setup, and a little melancholy. A dedicated crew stayed until after dark, loading everything onto trucks and depositing it safely back in the warehouse. A few of us closed out the weekend with dinner at the hotel bar, tired and satisfied.
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The ice arrived overnight, though not as badly as feared. Northern Alabama got crippled; large swaths north and west of Atlanta were hit hard. We got a late checkout and made our careful escape back to Athens in the afternoon. The roads were fine even as the ice on the trees grew thicker the closer we got to home. Good thing we didn't wait much longer. Everything froze over again at sunset and stayed that way for two days.
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---
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One downside to being in charge of so many things: when I take time away, the work just waits. Tuesday was a full day of meetings, catching up on everything that had queued while I was hauling tiki bars and dodging ice. The town was still frozen over, but our power held, and I powered through.
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Wednesday and Thursday I wrapped up a project I'd been sprinting on for five weeks: a community engagement portal for a university client. The final push involved rebuilding several major components after discovering, three days before deadline, that we'd been working from outdated brand guidelines. We still shipped on time. I wrote up the story for the [Infinity blog](https://iinteractive.com/resources/blog/why-we-build-the-runway-before-we-need-it). The short version is good infrastructure, centralized design tokens, and a tireless AI collaborator named Ray turned what could have been a crisis into just a hard few days.
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But the technical save wasn't the satisfying part. It was the client's reaction when she saw her years-long vision finally realized. That kind of joy is why I do this work.
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Friday was the final swim meet of the season: a local championship at the UGA pool with several area high schools competing. Juniper set more personal bests, continuing her trend of steady improvement all year. Swim season is brutal for everyone involved: near-daily evening practices stacked on top of a heavy class load. It was certainly a challenge this year. Good to have it behind us and settle into a more relaxed spring schedule.
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**Shipped:** The university portal, after a four-week solo sprint and a three-day scramble at the end. One of the more satisfying deliveries I've had in a while.
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**Read:** Honestly? Nothing. Convention weeks don't leave much room for reading.
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**Played:** Also nothing. See above.
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**Cooked:** Survival mode. Whatever was in the fridge that hadn't gone bad while we were gone.
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**Noticed:** The strange beauty of ice-coated trees against gray skies. The whiplash of going from tropical escapism to frozen reality in 48 hours. And once the thaw finally came, Piglet and Wil'em reclaimed the sunny windowsill like nothing had ever happened.
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**Thinking about:** How conventions create these intense temporary communities, then disperse. How the breakdown is part of the ritual—you can't just leave the magic standing. Also thinking about what happens after you ship something hard: the scramble, then the relief, then the quiet satisfaction once it's done.
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**What's Next:** CONpossible is at the end of next week. Am I ready? Not even a little bit.
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**Vibe Check:** Coming down from the high, digging back into the work,
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