10-Week Rundown
for Cousin Jesi

A Note to Jesi

Hope you are having a good day, cousin. I had Claude put together a quick rundown of what has been going on with me the last 10 weeks or so. Figured it was easier than trying to explain it all over the phone.

There is more going on here than I tend to talk about, and most of it I am proud of. Some of it is shop work, some of it is the day job at Kings Bay, and a good chunk is the home setup that ties all of it together. None of it is exciting in a fireworks way. It is the kind of progress that only shows up when you stack 10 weeks of it next to each other.

Read what you want, skip what you do not. The right column on every page is the short version if you are in a hurry.

The Workshop

Woodberrymill is the CNC and custom woodworking side. Out of the shop in Kingsland. The customer base is mostly Kings Bay military folks looking for retirement gifts, shadow boxes, and one-off pieces.

What got done

• Worked through the shadow box production pipeline so the same design does not get rebuilt from scratch every time. Templates now do most of the layout work.
• Got the big CNC machine, the Shapeoko 5 Pro, fully calibrated. The spindle was running slow because of a setting buried three menus deep in the variable frequency drive. Took the whole evening to track down. Documented it so it never costs me that time again.
• Built a small reference tool for the GRBL controller. Speeds up setup on every new job by a couple of minutes.
• Standardized the toolpath templates for cribbage boards and retirement plaques. The two highest-volume products are now mostly hands-off.

The shop is in the position now where I can take an order and most of the design and machining is already solved. That was not true two months ago.

The Command Center

This is the part of my setup that probably sounds the most absurd over the phone, so I will keep it grounded. I have three computers running at the house, plus the one out at the CNC, and they all work together so I do not have to babysit the business.

The machines

• Tower in the office. The main workhorse. Runs the websites, the customer phone routing, and the long-running tasks.
• Laptop. What I am usually sitting in front of.
• A small machine in the garage that handles the lighter work in bulk.
• The Surface tablet at the CNC, which only runs when I tell it to.

What got built

• A dispatcher that decides which machine handles which task. Stops me from manually pointing work at this computer or that one.
• A visual project tracker. 248 open projects across categories. I can glance at it and see what is in flight.
• A master inventory system. Every piece of stock material the shop owns, with quantity on hand.
• A control dashboard that shows me, at a glance, how the shop and the websites are doing financially and operationally.

None of this is showy. It is the difference between running a one-person business by remembering everything in my head and running it like a real operation that can keep going when I am at the base for ten hours.

Navy Work at Kings Bay

Day job is N48 Course Supervisor at Trident Training Facility Kings Bay. Senior Chief, Auxiliaryman by rate. The schedule work is the heaviest lift right now because of where we are in the fiscal year planning cycle.

What got done

• Finished the FY27 N48 scheduling package. Seven-tab workbook covering the whole year of training rotations.
• Working through the Master Scheduler tool that the next supervisor will inherit. Goal is that when I hand it off, the package is self-explanatory.
• Identified my relief, Chief Castleberry, and started walking him through the parts of the job that are not in any official manual.

The retirement runway

Terminal leave starts December 1 of this year. Official retirement date is February 2027. The shop is being positioned to be the primary income by then, which is why so much of the last 10 weeks has been about making the business run without me babysitting it.

The Chat Archive

This is the project I would put at the top of the list if you only read one section. The short version is, I built a searchable archive of every conversation I have had with the AI tools I use to run the business and write code, going back more than a year. It changed how I work.

Why it exists

Anyone who works with an AI assistant for any length of time figures out the same problem. The model is brilliant in the moment and has no memory of what you talked about yesterday. So you end up solving the same problems over and over. I was burning hours every week re-explaining setups, re-troubleshooting issues, and re-deriving solutions I had already found weeks earlier.

What got built

• A web service that holds every conversation, indexed for full-text search. It went to its third major version on May 9.
• A separate memory server that holds the patterns and rules I have learned, kept apart from the raw transcripts.
• A recall procedure that any new chat session runs through automatically, so before it says "I do not know," it checks the archive first.
• An anti-pattern catalog. Every failure mode we have hit, written down once, never repeated.

Why I am calling it out

Because this is the substrate underneath all the other work. The shop automation, the scheduling tools, the inventory system, none of those got built fast without the archive backing them up. It is the difference between starting every problem from scratch and starting every problem from the last time we solved it.

Phone Line & Outreach

The shop has needed a real, separate business phone line for a while. That is in the works.

What got done

• Stood up a toll-free number for the workshop, 877-409-9623, currently in carrier verification. Once it clears, that becomes the public number on the website and the invoices.
• Built the back end so the number can take texts as well as calls, with customer messages routed and logged automatically.
• Drafted a small customer-facing wiki for the most common questions about commissions, lead times, and pricing.

The verification step is the part that is out of my hands. Carriers take a couple of weeks to clear toll-free numbers for SMS in particular. Once that is done the public-facing rollout is straightforward.

The Family Side

Outside the workshop and the base, the family pieces of the last 10 weeks.

Dani

Danielle is deep in her novel trilogy, the one she calls Roothold. She has her own workspace, separated from anything having to do with the business, so her writing time stays her writing time. We talk through structure and craft when she wants a sounding board, but the work is hers. She is steady and serious about it.

Bella

Doing her thing, holding her own. Less to report on the project side, which is how teenagers prefer it.

The house

Quiet. Which is the right answer.

Looking Ahead

The next 10 weeks and the next 6 months.

Near term

• Get the toll-free number through carrier verification and switch the website over to it.
• Finish walking Chief Castleberry through the N48 role and get the FY27 package signed off.
• Push the shop production templates from "most products" to "all products."

The bigger picture

Fourteen months of Navy left. Terminal leave starts in roughly six and a half months. The work that has happened this spring is mostly about positioning the workshop to be the primary income by the time the uniform comes off for good. The home setup we built is what makes that possible without me being chained to a keyboard all day. That is the whole point.

Anyway. That is the rundown. Hope your week is going well. Tell everyone I said hi.