Wholesale Healthcare Bed Linens Hospital Sheets

Edited to remove the tables because when I obsessively checked this post on my phone I couldn't read them?? Also I tried to, but was prevented from, editing the title. I know it looks sanctimonious but that's just one small part of my personality I swear. D:
❤️ Section 1: Assets and Debt
Total Net Worth: $30,875 - all equity.
Retirement Balance: $0 for me; $20,500 for my husband in the state pension program for teachers. (My partner, L, has been paying into the state teachers' pension system for 5 years. For most of my 20s, I either worked at very low-paying jobs, or supported myself and others on a teacher’s salary, so no retirement for me. My current job does not have a retirement program, but one of my goals for this year is to either start a Roth IRA or get a new job with a 401k match… or maybe both?)
Savings Account Balance: $23,733 We’re moving this summer to a city closer to our families, and are saving all we can for a down payment on a dreamy spot. After we move, some amount of what’s left over will go into a retirement fund, and the rest will stay in this HYSA as our emergency fund. For us, three months of expenses, including childcare, is about $18,000.
Checking Account Balance: $455
Credit Card Debt: n/a, pay off each month
Student Loan Debt: $80,000 for L’s undergrad and MAT. $18,000 for my undergrad and (unfinished) MAT. (My undergrad degrees were mostly covered by the Pell Grant, scholarships, and a $10,000 529 from my parents. L was a nontraditional student - didn’t start undergrad until he was 24 - so none of his was covered. Most of my debt is for a MAT program I dropped out of after one year. I was trying to find any way out of teaching at the time (it is demanding, all-consuming, and carceral at once) and thought a PhD would be my only route. When I got my current job I promptly left the program and any dreams of a PhD behind.)
Equity: $83,875 (This number is from an online equity calculator, and is for our house in a very popular neighborhood in a very popular city. Our outstanding debt on the house is $295,000. We put our whole savings down in 2019, which was $9,000 at the time.)
❤️ Section 2: Income
Monthly Take Home: My base pay is $65,000, and L’s is $45,000. I worked a side gig last year that totaled about $10k in additional compensation; all of it went to savings so we don't budget for it. My take home is $4096/month for my full time job, and my current side gig income (grant writing) is variable, between $300 and $600 a month. L’s take home is $2262/month. My health insurance is paid in full by work. L’s insurance and B’s come out of L’s paycheck, as does L’s retirement contribution.
Income Progression: I’ve been working since I was 15 years old, moved out for college at 18, and paid my own bills starting that year. I won’t include that money here though (it was like $12,000 a year as a college student, for reference). Income below starts when I graduated with two BAs that had nothing to do with teaching.
Year 1: $15,600 (part time ABA therapist, full time baby anarchist)
Year 2: $32,000 (year 1 teacher salary: I accepted a spot in Teach for America for this giant salary even though I thought it was an obnoxious neoliberal org. Yes, I was also obnoxious at the time.)
Year 3: $33,000 (teacher, step increase)
Year 4: $34,000 (teacher, step increase)
Year 5: $35,000 (teacher, step increase)
Year 6: $15,000 (community organizer; at the time this felt like a dream job)
Year 7: $20,000 (community organizer & cafe worker)
Year 8: $40,000 (back to teaching, felt rich; this includes a side hustle writing grants on the side for $50 an hour)
Year 9: $45,000 (left teaching for my current job, quit the grants side hustle)
Year 10: $55,000 (got a raise, got pregnant)
Year 11: $65,000 (got a raise and promotion, had a baby)
Year 12: $75,000 (was promoted again in January but waiting on the pay increase to hit, hopefully with backdating. This money diary doesn’t reflect this salary as it hasn’t been reflected in my check yet)
❤️ Section 3: Expenses
Mortgage/PMI/Insurance: $2,110
Retirement Contribution: n/a (L’s retirement is pulled out of his check before he receives it: it’s $169 a month. Right now, I don’t have a retirement contribution)
Savings Contribution: $1000 to main savings, $400 to sinking fund (This is a super aggressive goal for us and is only possible because our childcare costs are covered by work)
Debt Payments: n/a right now (We have student loans to the tune of $100k but haven’t been paying a dime since they were paused due to COVID. But then the other day I checked and saw they've gained interest? Should we be paying them then? WWJD? I legit don’t know.)
Electric: $130
Internet: $100
Cellphone: $65 (For L & I both. We are on a bigass family plan with 40 gajillion other people.)
Subscriptions: $45 ($10 Spotify; $10 Youtube music; $2.99 Apple data (Why?!); $22 NYT (for newspaper and cooking app); also have a split subscription to the New Yorker with bestie F but we paid for a yearly deal.)
Car Payment and Insurance: $150 for a car payment; $202 for insurance (Insurance covers both of our used cars and my dad’s used handicap van. Our car payment is for our used Honda. We only owe $6,850 on the car and I’m back and forth on whether to pay it off with savings)
Medical/Therapy: $0 (My therapist is $140 a session, and I just started seeing her again once a month, but this is reimbursed by work. I also get an inhaler at least twice a month - that’s reimbursed too, costs $60 total.)
Misfits Market: $120 (For a weekly box, which really helps us cut down on overall grocery cost)
Gym membership: $30 (For my intense local yoga studio’s app which is so great in the winter. We also run and bike a lot, as long as it’s warm enough)
Donations: $100 (We give monthly to our local Democratic Socialists of America; the Working Families Party; and a small, local org. I’m also on an organizing committee for that org. We’ll give them one big gift of at least $250 this year, probably in May. I support a couple organizations with grant writing and grant-finding support as much as I can, which usually amounts to a few hours a month.)
Childcare: $0 B goes to a very precious Montessori preschool, and we can walk him there. It’s pricey af ($1300/month). The other $200 is to account for some babysitting from my little sister when L or I have to work weird hours. For now, work reimburses this full amount as a COVID perk; if that changes, we will have to cut costs significantly.
House cleaner: $160 (They come twice a month and charge $80 each time.)
❤️ Section 4: Money Diary
NOTE: We are masked and afraid everywhere we go.
✨DAY 1: THURSDAY✨
4:20 am: Good morning world! I shuffle into the kitchen in my panties and my slippers to fill up the gooseneck kettle. I recently got into pour over coffee even though it’s quite a commitment. With a toddler, a full-time job, and a Libra sun, I don’t really have time for meditative morning routines. This lengthy, half-naked coffee regimen is my closest attempt. As soon as I get the coffee brewing, our 18 month old, B, starts making noise. I open the door and see he’s got his pacifier in his mouth and his pillow in his arms. He wants to lay with Dada. I help him get in the bed with my husband, L, as quietly as possible. Last week L was super sick and we thought for sure he had picked up COVID. Blessedly all of our tests came back negative, but on the heels of that, he started having major tooth pain and had to have an emergency tooth extraction, AND he got an ear infection as he was coming down from whatever virus he had. I hate it :(
I get dressed and do some chores while they snooze to ease L's morning. I start the diaper laundry (usually his job - we use cloth), put away the dishes, start the Eufy vacuum, and get B and L’s breakfasts together: sunbutter and a little bit of syrup on some banana pancakes I prepped earlier this week.
6:30 am: B and L are up! The hour before we take B to preschool is kind of a marathon. L eats with B (and supervises his syrup consumption) as I clean out some more dirty diapers, brush my teeth, make another cup of coffee, strip our sheets, spray my hair with water to refresh the curl, return a few group texts, and wash some breakfast dishes. Somewhere in here I also eat two boiled eggs with Everything But the Bagel seasoning, and a bunch of grapes.
I help L get B loaded up in the car, and just as they pull off, my parents Facetime me. They’re calling to see B but are polite enough to talk to me for a few minutes. They live a few hours away, and are divorced, but cohabitating. The full story is long and spiritual for me so I’ll spare you. Anyway, my mom and I talk for a while about this couch she thinks I should buy from one of her friends, but it’s two hours away and we’d have to rent a U-Haul, so I think we’ll pass. I do hate our current couch though. Please drop comfy toddler- and dog-friendly recommendations in the comments!
8:15 am: I set out to walk the dog and listen to the Daily’s recent update on the coronavirus. Donald G. McNeill, Jr., says we’re in this through the summer, which is a bummer on the personal and global front, but I suppose it could be worse??? Maybe?? As soon as they finish talking I switch over to You’re Wrong About. I’m deep in the Jessica Simpson series and highly recommend this pod for any other nerdy, lefty, kinda burnt out millennials, especially those of you that are queer or queer-adjacent. Once home, I take my whole operation onto the front porch to work, since the cleaner will be here soon and I don’t want to crowd her in this time of COVID. I LOVE a clean house and I love paying someone else to do the big stuff, which is a recent luxury for us.
11:00 am: I’ve been working steadily in my email and google docs for a couple hours now, and it’s COLD out here. The cleaner leaves and I am grateful to go back into the heat. I Venmo her $80 for the cleaning (included in monthly expenses). I take a break from work and check out the job boards. My current job is the best, and highest-paying, gig I’ve ever had, but I’m planning to leave some time this year for several reasons. The premier reason: I recently learned that I’m qualified for several positions that pay over $100k at similar organizations. With that kind of money we could pay off our student loans, help our families out more, make sizable donations, and L could explore a career outside of teaching without freaking about a slight cut in his pay for a few years as he finds his niche. Or - maybe he’ll get into Edtech somehow and we’ll join Resource Generation. Who knows.
12:30 pm: I have a quick break and pull together lunch: half a cheese quesadilla, a big bowl of Smitten Kitchen’s roasted tomato soup, and a LimonCello LaCroix. L is on his planning period and asks me to edit his most recent job application, and I oblige. Since we’re both job hunting, I ask him if I can buy a resume template and guide on Etsy. I have sworn off online shopping for the year to curb my impulse spending, but he says we’ll just count this one as his purchase. Great news because I hate the formatting of my resume from 2016 and don’t want to fix it myself! $9.95
3:30 pm: My Zooms are over, my inbox is at 0, and I put up my out of office message because I’m taking the day off tomorrow to work on my resume and do some things to prep our house for sale. My high-functioning anxiety created an ambitious backwards timeline for this process back in December, and that timeline currently runs my life. I work for a few more minutes to tie up loose ends, and then walk O to a nearby shop to buy my favorite candle, curbside-style. When I get there the owner gives me some percentage off because it’s slightly discolored from the sun. Huzzah! $27.25, marked down from $40
4:45 pm: My angel of a baby sister, J, who lives just a few blocks away and is in a pod with us, comes to hang out with B for an hour so L can rest. I head to my good friend D’s place for my investment overalls appointment. She's going to alter their awkward wide leg into more of a tapered, mom jean shape. I have a capsule wardrobe which means I’ll wear these babies at least once a week, and plus I get to pay my friend, so I’m fine with the extra expense. When I arrive, she and her partner have the fire pit going, and we drink a couple glasses of wine together, yet more than 6 feet apart. I learn they are planning to move to the same new city as us in the next couple of years and legit cry happy tears.
Afterwards, I head out to pick up dinner for tonight. We are getting burgers from L’s favorite place as a treat. On my way, the WOLF MOON appears over the water and my stomach does triple flips. Then I pick up our dinner: a veggie burger with eggplant jam and kale for me; a real-meat burger with mushrooms, bacon, swiss, carmelized onion, and horseradish mayo for L; and an appetizer plate with pretzels, pimento cheese, onion jam, pickles, and chips for B. Delicious and unhealthy. The total is $34.54.
6:30: Home and eating dinner. B loves his meal, especially the “chokes.” He calls pretzels “chokes” because when L first started feeding them to him, I worried aloud that he would choke every time. I just couldn’t stop thinking about how a pretzel almost took out George W. Bush. Turns out our toddler is better at chewing than George W. Bush.
After dinner, L gives B a bubble bath while I do my own, very minimal, bedtime routine. Then L and I lay down with B to put him to sleep. He has a floor bed, which is a Montessori thing I learned about on mom blogs. L is a very hot and talented woodworker, so he took my floor bed dream to the next level by building a lovely house-shaped frame. The top beam is wrapped in twinkle lights and fake ivy. It’s a nice place to sleep, and we pass out here all the time.
10:30 pm: L wakes me up and we wander to our own bed.
🌿 DAILY TOTAL: 71.74
✨ DAY 2: FRIDAY✨
4:15 am: Wake up and go look at the clock. Decide this is a silly time to get up on a day off, drink some water, and go lay back down. But once in bed all I can think about is how much I want to read the news, organize my resume, and update this money diary. This is the problem with falling asleep at toddler time. So I get up again at 4:45, make my coffee, read a New Yorker article about Biden’s pandemic response on my phone, and sit down to work on this diary.
6:00 am: L wakes up! He works on breakfast for himself and B and I start meal planning for the month. This is one of my best and most recent life hacks. I found that if I chart out our cooking, weekly takeout, and leftovers at the start of the month, we save lots of money and are so much less stressed about the labor that goes into feeding ourselves. I pull out Smitten Kitchen Every Day and use it to inspire the month’s meals. So quaint to cook from an actual BOOK.
6:45 am: B walks out of our room and announces that he drank my water off the side table. He’s so proud! And so ready to eat. While he eats breakfast, I snack on some grapes and, at B’s request, blast 7 Days A Week by They Might Be Giants. This is the consummate children’s song for any household that dreams of a self-determined world. Over the next hour I take B to school; make myself a real breakfast (a soy chorizo and egg taco); and browse TikTok. Eventually I find a series about this Gamestop situation by a smart Irish woman and L and I watch it together. When it’s over we feel like shrewd stock brokers ready to win money, and L gets to work teaching virtually.
I spend the morning painting our front door and our kitchen wall to prep our house to sell, and talking to my (other) little sister on the phone. She’s an HR person with a job that’s taken her far away from our family, and we don’t talk that often. It is so good to catch up on her life. After that I have a fun, day-off Zoom call with longtime bestie and coworker K. We drink coffee and talk about The Future.
12:30 pm: I make lunch (tomato soup with goat cheese on top, and a savory scone on the side) and get a text from another bestie, M, who offers me a little grant writing contract work this week. Yay! I love them and love working with them. Next, I order our groceries for the week. I get baking powder, eggs, cremini mushrooms, vegan sausage patties, oat milk, ginger root, shredded cheddar cheese, plantains, black beans, doggy bags, broccoli, vegan chicken strips, artichoke hearts, roasted red peppers, capers, ciabatta bread, grits, bananas, avocados, greek yogurt, and on impulse, a pineapple on sale (?!). Maybe B will love it. The total comes to $94.08.
1:15 pm: I do a brief power vinyasa class in B’s room and take a shower. It takes me approximately two Drake songs to shower and dry off, as I don’t have to wash my hair today and I never shave. I work on my resume until L and I leave to pick up B. On the way home we stop at the park to play, and then we all get in the car to pick up groceries.
6:30 pm: We get home later than planned and eat together: leftover tofu ramen for us and veggie lasagna for B, who is so sleepy that he hardly touches his lasagna. L gets him in the bath around 7:15 and I run through my evening routine. There’s a lot going on in the house - preschool lunch and clothes to put up, a mountain of laundry in our room, all of the groceries for the week waiting to be put away, and dinner dishes are languishing in the sink. L starts on chores while I get B dressed.
As I’m dressing B, my mom Facetimes and B shows her several of his board books. While we’re talking my dad texts me a heart emoji - he overheard B and my mom talking from his room. He lives with a disability and a painful illness, so he goes to bed very early. We hang up with my mom and record a video of B making “P” sounds and saying “I love you” to my dad, and send it over. This is the first time B’s ever said “I love you!” Huge news. We read books and fall asleep next to B.
9 pm: I wake up and nudge L but he wants to keep sleeping. I go clean the dinner dishes, put away the food and reorganize the cabinets and fridge, and mop the kitchen floor while I listen to The Daily’s latest reporting on QAnon believers who are at once totally bananagrams and also remind me very much of my aunt. L wakes up at 9:30 because he and Y, my sister’s boyfriend, are gonna game. Cute! He finishes the laundry and I fold a few diapers to help out. Then we lay in bed together until game time, when I fall asleep.
🌿 DAILY TOTAL: 94.08
✨DAY 3: SATURDAY✨
5:40 am: Wake up at a ~*~weekend hour~*~!! Start my kettle, clean and moisturize my face, pull out the ingredients for waffles, and pick up around the house while I wait for it to boil. I try to read some, but get bored a few pages in. I’m currently reading How to Do Nothing and it’s good enough, but I think I need to chill on the nonfiction and read, like, saucy romance novels with hot bisexual leads. Send me your recs please!
Waffle time! This recipe is my go-to. I recommend whipping the egg whites first. B wakes up around 7:15 and helps me cook which is cute and very messy. He eats his waffle with honey, peanut butter, and grapes. L wakes up after him - he had a late night gaming!
8 am: I open yesterday’s mail and find an anti-abortion DVD from L’s grandma. It’s Abby Johnson’s “memoir.” Abby Johnson is an opportunistic right winger and documented liar who once moonlighted as a Planned Parenthood clinic manager. L is a preacher’s kid, so we’re not surprised to receive this from his grandma. For example: 10 years ago, when L and I were a couple years into our relationship, her Christmas gift to me was a book about how one can recover from being a slut by getting married and finding Jesus. This particular package really sends me over the edge, though. I decide to write them a short note later that states my own experience with abortion and sets a clear boundary on this kind of propaganda, and includes an article about Abby Johnson’s bullshit life. It’s unlikely this will change their minds - they are septuagenarian Southern Baptists, after all - but at least I’ll be in my integrity.
In the meantime, I group text L’s siblings, and they commiserate with us. His one sibling who is transitioning shares that grandma recently sent them a book about how to tell your gay friends they’re sinning. We agree that’s hilariously dense (and fucking rude) of her, and talk about how everyone under forty is a gay slut living their best life, so really it’s grandma’s loss. During this time I clean the kitchen, finish the waffles, and freeze them for B’s weekday breakfasts.
9:30 am: B asks to use the potty and does a great job peeing on his own! He’s geeked about it and is especially excited to have my parents on Facetime cheering him on. After that we head out on our morning walk. L takes B to the playground and I take O to the dog park nearby. She gets tired pretty quick and we all head to the thrift store. We need chairs for our hand-me-down kitchen table. The ones that came with it are awkwardly wide. L spots two sturdy ones that are just $5 each. Score! $10
11:30 am: B and L are both wiped out once we get home. They eat lunch and go to sleep. I clean up the kitchen, repot one of my plants, water our porch plants, and eat some leftover ramen for lunch. The Marie Antoinette episode of You’re Wrong About keeps me company all the while. 10/10 would recommend.
2 pm: B wakes up and eats some lunch. We watercolor together for a while (he on his big paper, I in my bullet journal), then walk down the street to the local high school while L preps potatoes for our fondue. The high school grounds are open on the weekends, and there’s an amphitheatre on site. B loves the echo in there.
4:30 pm: L joins us in the amphitheatre and together we drag B two blocks back home. I prep the fondue: brie, gouda, and more gouda with white wine. It ends up being a little clumpy but so delicious. My sister, J, and her boyfriend, Y arrive while I’m cooking. Y brings yummy baguettes from his bakery job for the dipping and we prep broccoli, green beans, and tempeh too. We sit down in our new chairs to eat and for the zillionth time I am so thankful we’ve been able to make a pod together this year. Fondue would be a terrifying proposition with anyone else, really.
While we eat, Y tells us he put in his two weeks at the bakery because their COVID protocols aren’t so tight and his coworkers are continuing to go to bars and out to eat. His plan for now is to get back on unemployment and find a virtual job sometime soon. Both he and my sister have worked food service their whole adult lives so the pandemic has been tough on them. Besides the fact that they’re delightful and perfect, this is one key reason we’re planning to move with them to our new city this summer: L and I will be able to easily afford the majority of the rent, deposits, and utilities on a pretty big, and centrally located, house. Living together will allow us to grow our savings and take our time looking for a Forever Home, and will allow J and Y to pay really low rent as my sister goes back to school full time and Y looks for a full-time job. I’m really looking forward to living with them and know it’ll be good for B, too. They leave around 7 pm and we put B to bed, this time without falling asleep ourselves!
8:30 pm: Turn on How I Met Your Mother in bed and the episodes are baaaaad bad. One entire episode casts sex workers as a punch line. Ick. L and I agree to find a new show, and fall asleep around 10.
11 pm - 2 am: B is up and between our two beds. Wahhhh.
🌿 DAILY TOTAL: 10
✨DAY 4: SUNDAY✨
6 am: Up and at ‘em! Discover I’m out of my fancy coffee and don’t want to emphasize the flavor of our grocery store beans with a slow pour, so make a french press instead. B wakes up too early so we watch toddlers together on TikTok while I drink my coffee, then read books while L makes us all eggs for breakfast. We head out for our morning walk around 9 am and stop at a coffee shop a few blocks away. I pick up Counter Culture’s Iridescent beans, buy an espresso brownie on a whim, and tip the cashier because she’s so sweet and tipping is good. The total is 23.03. L takes B to the playground and I drop my purchases and O back at the house before I head out for a run.
9:45 am: It’s 65 degrees and my run is glorious. I run to the water and pause Lil Yachty for a minute to take it all in. Once home I shower and put on a black LA Apparel catsuit and a marled black and white cocoon sweater from AA of the past (I like what I like!). We feed B lunch and then L puts him down while I clean up.
Around 11:30, J comes over after to watch B while we remove the storm windows from our whole house and clean the windows underneath as part of our work to prep the house for sale. We’re a solid team: L removes the storm windows and caulks all the gaps in the wood while I follow behind him and wash the windows inside and out. Our sweet neighbor catches us cleaning and offers to let us use her power washer for free next weekend to clean up the front of the house. I resolve to bake them some cookies.
2:30 pm: We are done with the window operation and it’s time for me to water all 57 plants in the house. Along the way, discover that I overwatered B’s hoya last week and it’s rotting. Noooo! I unpot it on the porch to dry the roots, but it’s raining so this might not work. There’s only one surefire solution: buy a replacement plant! I try to convince L we should go to the nursery, but he’s not so into it. I walk around dejectedly with a towel to clean up all the water I spilled, and Zelle J $70 for babysitting even though she insists she would do it for free. Next B, L, and I share a snack: crackers with goat cheese and harissa. Mmm. B skips the harissa but loves the goat cheese. Meanwhile I begin to stress about making dinner. We’d planned goddess bowls but L and I just aren’t feeling it after our marathon of house work. L requests Chinese and is suddenly more amenable to visiting the nursery, which is near our favorite Chinese takeout spot. Score!
5:00 pm: We leave the plant shop with a heartleaf philodendron for B’s room and a giant, lovely, perfect monstera deliciosa just because. The total comes to $53.24. Then we pick up our food: $33.08 including the tip. L ordered a large veggie lo mein to share with B and General Tso’s chicken, and I got family style tofu and vegetables. We start B’s bedtime routine at 6:30 and he’s out by 7:00 - early for him!
After he’s down, L preps his breakfast sandwiches for the week and I do some dishes. Then we take mutual advantage of the extra hour we have together. Even after 12 years it’s always so good with L. I fall asleep around 10 pm feeling blessed.
🌿 Daily total: 179.32
✨DAY 5: MONDAY✨
5 am: I make my pour over and get started on work first thing. I have a couple of deadlines this week and the side gig to balance so I’m already feeling pressed for time! I wrap up an entire grant report before 6 am and feel very accomplished. Then I pause work to start our breakfast, which is all pre-prepped, hallelujah. While L and B eat breakfast, I get dressed in a black turtleneck minidress, busted old tights, black ankle socks, and my Doc Martens.
I help L load up the car with B and all his gear, and tell L to be careful. Today is L’s first day back teaching in person since December, and we’re both nervous since COVID is still running wild in our red state. On the way to work he fills up his car for $18.33.
2:30 pm: After another grant report, seventy gajillion emails, forty Slack messages, and several hours of Zoom calls, I’m ready for a break. I finish eating the quinoa salad I prepped during Zoom call #2 and then eat a pear too. I see our Misfits box has been delivered. It’s $30 a week, and is included in our monthly expenses. I unpack it, clean the counters, wipe down the bathroom sinks, take O for a walk, and sit down to work on my side gig grant report, which is due Wednesday. I set a 30 minute timer because I don’t want to be too late picking up B.
4:25 pm: Worked longer than I meant to! Pack some snacks and pick up B. On the way home we get a giant bag of potting soil so I can repot those plants. It’s $18.52. Come home and engage in B’s favorite winter activity: pressing all the buttons in the turned-off car. Meanwhile, in another car across town, L picks up a big bag of Purina One, butter, maple syrup, and applesauce. That total is $28.64.
5:30 pm: The whole family is home and we kick it inside until it starts to get dark. L and I gather all the things and take the creatures out for a walk even though there’s a light, but very cold, rain happening. B is cranky and so are we, so the walk is quick.
We eat leftover Chinese food around 7 and start B’s bedtime routine. B falls asleep at 8 and I update this diary for a while, then go watch Ted Lasso in bed with L til about 9:30. It’s much better than How I Met Your Mother, for the record.
🌿 DAILY TOTAL: 65.51
✨Day 6: TUESDAY✨
3 am: B wakes up and needs a diaper change. I have the hardest time falling back asleep after: I can’t stop thinking about how I left B’s hoya out in the cold with its roots exposed most of the day yesterday and into tonight. But it’s too cold for me to get up again and pull it inside! So instead I toss and turn and hope it’s not dead yet.
6 am: L’s alarm wakes me up! No early morning reading and writing time for me. I get right up, make a giant pour over, and get breakfast together while L wakes up B. Then I actually sit down with them to eat: B and I both eat boiled eggs with everything but the bagel seasoning and some coconut milk yogurt, and L sips his coffee while his breakfast sandwich heats in the oven. I get dressed in my workout gear and walk the dog while L gets B ready for school. They leave, and I finally bring the hoya in, and start work, around 7:30. L buys coffee and snacks from the gas station on his way to work: $6.88.
9:30 am: I grab some crackers and peanut butter from the kitchen and notice a DMV bill on the fridge I’ve been meaning to pay, but don’t totally understand. I call them up and respond to emails while I sit on hold. Turns out I owe the DMV $10 for paying my Dad’s van insurance late. With the “processing fee” it comes to $11.17.
1:30 pm: Been on Zoom calls all morning, and decide to switch over to the side gig work for a bit. Meanwhile I eat that quinoa salad I prepped yesterday. At 2 pm, my longtime bestie and neighbor F comes over and we take O for a walk in the park together and have such a good conversation. While the context is (very) different, I’m reminded of the Toni Morrison quote when I think of F: “She’s a friend of my mind.” Such a gem, and such a smartie. At 3:30 I start a HIIT yoga class and it kicks my butt even though it’s only 20 minutes long. Afterwards, I shower and pick up B.
5:00 pm: L arrives home while B and I are playing, and we get in the car once more to check out a cute couch L scoped out on Facebook marketplace. It’s a sweet vintage brown velvet actually-for-real midcentury situation. Unfortunately we discover it’s also small and very uncomfortable. $200 not spent. Once home, my family goes for a walk and I make dinner - this grits and beans recipe from NYT cooking. It’s blessedly quick to pull together. Meanwhile D texts me and says my overalls are ready! YAY! She’s gonna drop them off in a couple of days. She says the total is $30. I include a tip and Venmo her $40.
7:00 pm: At bedtime, B cannot get enough of his books and we read All The World several times. He finally falls asleep around 8:20 and L and I eat dinner on the couch, with Ted Lasso. I drink a glass of red wine, which is a mistake: my anxiety spikes right after, my stomach hurts, and I can’t sleep. This is very upsetting as I want very much to be a wine mom. Does this happen to anyone else?
🌿 DAILY TOTAL: 58.05
✨DAY 7: WEDNESDAY✨
5:45 am: Wake up with B cuddled into my back - L moved him to our bed in the middle of the night after his second wake up. Get my coffee and breakfast together and sit down at my computer to work on the side gig grant while everyone's asleep. Then L and I manage the morning rush together. I eat sourdough toast, two scrambled eggs, and some pineapple along the way.
7:30 am: Take O out for a walk and on a whim decide to listen to one of my favorite easy-listening pods: A Beautiful Mess. Normally the two sisters and co-hosts, Elsie and Emma, chat about things like home decor or craft making or how to balance kids and work. This episode is about the host’s evangelical upbringing, though, and is a real raw and honest tear jerker. Pair it with this, one of my top reads of 2020: “What Does the White Evangelical Want?” It gets me thinking about L’s upbringing in the church. He and all his siblings are all agnostic now.
Finally sit down at my desk and debate taking Adderall. I used it regularly in college and for a few years after in order to Do All The Things. I try to stay away from it now - I’m not trying to live an impossible life any more - but I also really want to pick B up earlier than normal today, and that means I need to meet all my deadlines and make it through two Zoom calls with my direct reports by 3 pm. I decide to take 4 mg. Right after I take it, three different friends text me at once and then, suddenly, I’ve spent an hour catching up via text. Get to work for real around 9 am.
3:00 pm: Wrapped all my calls, answered all my emails, washed all the dishes, ate some lunch, and finished the side gig work! OK Adderall, you beautiful bitch. Spend a few more minutes tying up loose ends and then gather my things to pick B up from school. The plan today is to go “play basketball” in the park near his school because he is OBSESSED with balls, and I’m trying to do more magical things every day with him. It’s cold but I’m ready to brave it on his precious, curly-headed behalf.
At 4 pm J calls and asks to go pick him up with me. Hooray, things just got even more magical! We head to a different-than-usual park together and run around until B sits in, and then drinks from, a puddle. We panic and J googles “What happens if my baby drinks from a puddle?” The search returns lots of stories of babies eating muddy rocks and surviving, so we decide it’s ok.
5:00 pm Head home and L is back from work! We take the smols on a walk and I tell L that I think nighttime screentime is making me anxious. I’m a sensitive creature and I really don’t want to blame the wine. He’s very perfect so he helps me think through an alternate plan for this evening: hot tea and book reading in bed, and maybe sex, too! Fun.
Next, I head home with O to pot the plants we bought the other day, and L takes B to the playground. They get back around 6:30 and I am very excited to reveal my new plant placements. Everyone feigns interest except O. Then we eat leftovers together and B gets in bed around 7:30. L and I promptly fall asleep next to him and don’t wake up again til 11 pm. Guess our new nighttime routine will have to wait til tomorrow!
🌿 DAILY TOTAL: 0
❤️ Section 5: TOTALS
Total Expenses: $478.71
Food & Drink: $220.25
Fun & Entertainment: $0
Home & Health: $109.01
Clothes & Beauty: $40
Transport: $29.50
Other: $79.95
❤️ Section 6: REFLECTION
This week reflects a new normal for us, I think! We just set the goal of saving up for another down payment in December, and that’s when I swore off online shopping both to save money and to stop lining the pockets of evil billionaires like Bezos (no shade to anyone who uses Amazon, this is purely a personal goal & I’m not sure I can meet it). This self-imposed rule is helping me reign in my discretionary spending overall. L and I have only been living a two-income, middle class life for a few years, and my lifestyle creep was a little out of control in 2020. That said, I can and do still regularly justify spending money on things that make life more luxurious and beautiful - like a $40 candle or a totally unnecessary but very lovely plant.
There are a couple of things not reflected in this diary that we regularly spend on: gifts (my achilles heel - for example, we spent three! thousand! dollars! on Christmas gifts in December), and medical bills. Both B and I had to visit the emergency room in 2020 and we are still getting random bills in the mail as our insurance company and the hospital duke it out. As I was editing this diary on Thursday, I received one for $787. Wahhhh. I think I’m gonna get on a payment plan, but even so that it will be over $200 a month.
Last thought: this process got me thinking in some detail about the contradiction of organizing for the fall of capitalism (and the rise of a more gentle and just economic system), yet believing everyone - including ourselves and our own families - deserve to live full and abundant lives. This means I compromise my own anti-capitalist values and beliefs every day, in big and small ways. Discuss?

My family started in a trailer in a poor part of my city. First my parents had my sister, and then me a year later. My parents never married, but they tried to make it work for me and my sister's sake. They made it into an apartment, and then eventually worked their way into beginning to pay on the house my mom still lives in today. Up until I was about 10 years old, my father and mom stayed together in this house, and it was the definition of hell. Screaming/fights almost every day. Sometimes my dad would start it, sometimes my mom would, sometimes me or my sister. My dad has thrown me across the room, slapped and punched my mom multiple times, (my mom is 5'2', my dad is 6'3'). He has issues, some from his own father dying while he was young, some from using/selling coke and weed and drinking. My mom told me when I was young (maybe 7-8 years old) she was raped by two men in her home state of Oklahoma, and I don't think I really processed it well as a kid. Her dad also died while she was young, he fell to his death on a construction site.
Me and my sister both have mental health issues nowadays, but she did make it through four years of college, which is more than either of my parents or me did. I personally have really bad anger issues and anxiety, PTSD from close range shoot outs and robberies. I struggle daily with depression and suicidal thoughts almost every day. I sold weed at a pretty decent level for a long time, 6-7 years. I started around 16 when I realized my parents didn't really have the money they were giving me for my weed/drug habit. 20 or so dollars every day was adding up and they would tell me. My mom was a manager at a Texas roadhouse around when I was 8-9-ish years old, and she ended up getting in between two drunk guys that were in a bar fight and she got punched in her neck. She ended up getting a $50,000ish settlement, but had to have multiple surgeries and will pretty much always be in pain and will always have metal in her neck to the point where she can feel it when its raining outside. My mom has never been great with finances, so that money after bills went by very fast. She did use probably 20-30 grand of it on a new truck. An brand new F-150. Remember she's 5'2" lol. That was definitely a mistake, and I think she knows it, but I've never been good with money either. My father has always been broke, to the point where he would ask my mother for money for his own weed and bills. I'm not sure where my dad lives now, last I heard it was in the mountains in North Carolina. He left the house when I was around 10 like I mentioned earlier. He went to his moms house for a while and then moved out. His mom took care of us a lot of nights that they couldn't because of work or other things. She's the sweetest most Christian grandmother you could imagine. She had four kids, and then as I mentioned her husband (my dads dad) died of a heart attack while they were all still young. I can't imagine the pain, I'm sure it messed my dad up pretty bad. I think these things are important to understand though, because they help me see why they were always so mad and upset always.
So in comes when it started getting hard. I had almost no friends in elementary school, I remember getting a "red card" in maybe second grade for punching a kid in the back, yes the back, lol. Because he was literally just talking to a girl I had a crush on. I never really talked to girls then, I would just decide I had a crush on them. In second grade. Lol. He didn't even hit me back, he was kind of just like "What the fuck?" And then I just walked away until a teacher came up to me that's all I remember. I've always been a kind of small and skinny dude, and I especially was back then. In middle school I started making some friends but I was always annoying them because I was always asking to hang out and to come over to their houses. I remember my bus route used to go through the nicest neighborhoods on my side of the city, I'm talking retired NFL player nice. they make my moms house look like a shack, and I don't know if I realized it back then, but it was making me jealous. The friends I ended up making in middle school were not very healthy friends, we were always the loud and obnoxious ones. I got into a lot of trouble starting around this time, 7th grade. I spent almost half of my 7th grade year in In School Suspension, just staring at wall while "doing" class work. It was also this year toward the end of the year that I got into my first real fight. I was always outspoken, and so was this other guy, but he lived in a super nice house and was from a rich ass family. We had a social studies class together, and one day, I'm not even sure how it started, he started making jokes about my mother working at chick fil a. She got that job after her neck was healed up just enough to get a job. She had to get a job, as she was my house's income. She loved and still loves that job, she's a manager now. But back then and how he made fun of her in front of my whole class while my teacher just didn't do anything about it, I was just so mad. So I told him I was going to beat his ass and after class (and more trolling me) we met next to the side of the school and a huge crowd gathered to watch. A lot of people, not the whole school, but most of my grade, because we all exited the same door if you rode on the bus. I threw the first punch, missed, he grabbed my neck and slammed my head into the brick wall, I tried to throw another punch, missed, and I just yelled "stop making fun of my mom" grabbed my backpack and got on the bus, Just cried the whole way home, my sister on the bus was just wondering what happened. I've never been good at explaining my thoughts or feelings to people, so most people think I'm even more dumb than I actually am. I didn't tell my family about that fight for years, even though my sister did. I just will never forget it. I even tried to tell people that I didn't lose that fight even though everyone heard about it. I just couldn't come to terms with it. 8th grade I don't have many memories of. I was a goofball, and my grades were really slipping now, even worse than the year before. Most people just saw me as that weird kid who got his ass beat. I think around this time I started to get very, very cynical with my worldview and my attitude. I was always on the internet when I could be, playing shitty games on our homes only computer; a dell desktop, and reading stupid conspiracy theories. Later I would start gaming pretty hard, and I loved watching streams all the way back to the justin.tv days. My dad had a PlayStation 1, and I loved watching him play Call of Duty. It might be my only good memory with my dad, honestly, and he never got to play a lot. The internet and my cynical world view pushed me away from religion, even though my family was heavily Christian. Even before this though, I hated going to church. From a young kid onward every single Sunday was a screaming match between me and my mom about not wanting to go to church. Sometimes she would end up getting me to go, but that was less and less, and before even middle school I just stopped going completely.
So in between middle and high-school I started smoking weed, it made me some new friends and got me into hanging out at a park near my moms house. This park would end up being where I spent most of my next 6-7 or so years. Most people knew it was a druggie park, would call us all "park rats" and make fun of us for wasting our time and money doing drugs. But I gained more memories here than I could ever write down, I probably could make a book out of those memories. There were all ages of people there, some young as me, some mid 30s-40s, a lot of weed smoking teens, a lot of acid tripping hippies, some Xanax/oxy fiends, and even some meth and heroine people. Most days it was just normal people getting fucked up to enjoy their time, but there was always plenty of drama. This park was known not just on my side of town but through the whole city. its kind of tucked away in woods, sits on a lake, and has a small disc-golf course, so you'd even have a bunch of random (probably) sober people show up to play some days, but they usually stayed on their course and away from us, minus a few of them. I started selling weed when my mom started telling me no to my almost daily asks of 20 dollars. I look back and realize she just didn't have the money to support my habits, and I understand now. But once I started selling weed, I realized I could start eating when I was hungry, I realized I could get and smoke weed almost whenever I wanted to. Being at the park always made it easier to sell it too, because people knew to come there to find some weed. I met a LOT of people selling, and I mean a LOT. I started moving up to QP's (quarter pounds) on the front (pay back later) and always found myself 100-200 short on my re-ups, usually just from smoking too much and cutting too many people deals, Like I said never been good with money.
Then the serious shit started happening. I was maybe 17-18 when I was at my weed guy's small apartment downtown one day. I always liked going over there, not only because I knew we'd be smoking a lot, but because me and my plug were close, I looked up to him, and we had a decently similar shitty upbringing. One day, I get a call to come chill downtown at his apartment, even had two of our friends come pick me up from the park and bring me there. Took fat dabs on the way (THC oil/wax) and when I got there he surprised us with sheets of Gel-Tabbed Acid. Strong shit. I took my usual 2 doses, I was known for tripping a lot back then, haven't tripped since this day. It was going to be a "No Traffic" day, meaning no sales in his apartment so we could just smoke and enjoy our time. His girlfriend at the time had arranged a deal between him and 3 people he did not know. A young (17 at the time) girl, a mid twenties white dude, and a mid twenties black dude. What we didn't know until after this, was they had set this up, and once inside (mind you we were tripping pretty hard at this point), the white dude and the black dude pulled a gun on my plug and my plug instantly pulled his and fired back and 20-30 shell casings later everyone ran to get out. This was a very small apartment. I mean very very small, 7 or so people all feet away from each other. I was literally sitting on the floor because there weren't enough chairs for everyone, even before the 3 robbers came in. I ducked behind the chair I was sitting next to. One of the people that drove me there got shot twice, once in the thigh and one through the side of his asscheek, no joke. The white guy who was robbing us took at least one to the chest, and was also crushed underneath us all as we all ran out and flooded the small staircase down, I could not describe to you how twisted and contorted his body was, and I had no doubt he was dead. I ran to find my plug, I'm not sure why, but I saw somehow he had made it all the way to the other side of the street already, and was on the ground. I ran up to him, not wanting to touch him, and told him an ambulance is coming and not to worry, he was laying there bleeding out of his mouth and chest with what I later found out were SEVEN BULLETS IN HIS CHEST. I watched him die, or so I thought. I yelled for someone to call an ambulance and when I saw some random student walking past was doing that I ran away and back to the two friends who had drove me there. They were freaking out, it was a dude and a girl, they were a couple at the time. The dude had just gotten shot two times. His girlfriend needed me to go back in and grab her purse and phone that were left in the chaos, I said no at first, but she begged me so I ran back to the staircase and over the white guy on the stairs who had robbed us, I definitely thought he was dead the way his body looked. I went back up the stairs and into the apartment and grabbed the phone and purse and all I could see was blood and holes everywhere, it was disgusting, and it makes me tear up while I type this. I got back into the car and they drove to the nearby hospital (The guy that got hit twice actually drove, believe it or not) and I got out of the car right before they pulled into the hospital.
I'm 23, and besides these last two years, I have been on probation/in legal trouble my whole life. When I was a juvenile, I was on Show-Cap probation, where a cop would most nights come check and make sure I was at home. A cop would wake my whole household up at anywhere from 10PM - 2AM just to make me show him a card I had and then would leave, almost every night. During the shooting I was talking about, I was on Show-Cap probation. That's why I got out of the car at the hospital. I wasn't supposed to be around certain people or things like guns, legally. I got out of my friends car and walked (still tripping balls) to a McDonalds a few blocks away, sat down, and called a friend, crying the whole time, and I just remember seeing black around the edges of my vision, like I was either dying or falling into a like dark area of some kind, definitely losing it to the drugs at this point. I got picked up and drove back to my moms house, I told the car full of people I was with what had happened and they couldn't offer much aside from positive words but I will never forget at least they came and got my ass quick. That was some real friend shit. I cried and cried the whole way back to my moms, got dropped off, and like clockwork a few minutes later my mom got home. I told her something had happened (but not the whole story yet) and I felt like I was going to be in a lot of trouble. About 30 minutes later, maybe in total 1-2 hours after the shooting, a black SUV pulled up to my moms house.
I had to go downtown, I will say my mom even made me one of the Sur-gel drinks I had been using to pass drug tests to drink during the car ride there. They weren't even trying to drug test me, I didn't ask her to, she was just that cool I guess. I rode an elevator up a huge building and they sat me down with two cops who were pretty convinced this was my doing in some way. They kept asking me why I had been talking to my plug that day and when I said I hadn't, they pulled up my phone logs and texts. So they not only knew about my outstanding legal issues, they also knew I was lying. I really was just lying because I thought just being there was going to violate my probation. They had me on camera every single step from leaving the car at the hospital to walking into the McDonalds. They really wanted to blame me, they even told me my friend (my plug) was dead and it made me cry and cry and cry and cry. In the end, they couldn't hold me there. They forced me to point at a picture line up of people but I told them over and over I didn't know what they looked like and that you shouldn't use what I say because I just didn't know. Whole time during all of this 3-4 hour interrogation, they yelled and screamed at me and at one point left me in the room for maybe 2 hours while I just cried and cried. They were probably just watching what I would do when alone. I was still tripping acid, hard, and just felt like death was all around me. All I could do was cry.
Like I said, they released me to my mother. They obviously had no evidence against me, but one thing that they asked me during the investigation was why was my plugs girlfriend outside talking to the 3 robbers (juvenile girl, white guy, black guy, the juvenile girl ended up getting some lesser felonies but she didn't have a gun or shoot anyone, she just tried to block the exit at first). That was enough for me to put together that she was behind this, set him up to have him robbed. She probably just expected my plug to just give up his shit without a fight, but no, no he would never just do that. Obviously this whole situation fucked me up pretty bad mentally. For weeks I thought my plug was dead. Until one day he literally just called me out of the blue. Told me to come see him at his moms house. I'm telling you, this was my brother. Got in my car and went to go see him. When I got there I tried to hug him but he said he couldn't hug anyone, he lifted up his shirt and it was like a Frankenstein stitching all across his whole chest. If I recall it was 8 bullets that hit him in total. He had to use crutches and a wheelchair to move around the little bit he could. He only has one lung now, and will never move the same. It was a miracle, but no one died during that shooting, not even the white guy robber, who was shot in the chest and trampled over on the staircase. The white guy (I keep saying white guy and black guy just because I'm not trying to give out names, I hate all people equally) ended up pleading guilty and sentenced to 30 something years in jail. The black-guy robber took it to trial and WON. No fingerprints on his taped up shitty little .22 caliber pistol. Jury found him not guilty, and he is a free man to this day. Plug's girlfriend that set it up was never even charged as an accessory, but she did violate her adult probation by being there. As if that's all she deserved. This is a true story, google Fort Sanders shooting, It'll come up. The only reason my name wasn't in the articles was because I was 17 years old at the time. Not even an adult yet.
They subpoena'd me after the shooting to make sure I'd show up to court or to trial. It wasn't until 4-5 years later the black-guy robber had his trial. By this time I had moved up a lot in the selling game, my plug (same plug) had moved out to the west coast to step up his game as well. Had my own house I was renting in my hometown, Knoxville, TN. Nice car, shitty (but real) diamond ring, bunch of shoes and clothes, 2 shitty cars. Tons of memories, good times and bad, important memories in between then and the trial. I've had a lot of friends die that I went to school/smoked with, especially when Fentanyl started coming around. From what I've heard that's a problem a lot of people share, fuck Fentanyl. I have done most drugs, but luckily I was just smart enough to stay away from shit like heroine and meth. (not to say Knoxville powder wasn't dirty, because it was) I just really liked weed, it has always calmed down my bad emotions from my childhood and from the events I've been through, I don't get to smoke a lot anymore, mostly because I am poor again now. Its still Illegal as fuck in my state too, but that's another story.
I declined to testify at the trial of the black guy robber, and they never asked me to testify at the white guys trial because he didn't have one, he plead guilty. I decided not to testify because of multiple reasons, one- I hate cops, and law enforcement. I understand some are actually decent people. But go through a day in jail without food, because they CO thinks you're lying about not getting a tray, and ask me how you feel about cops after. Go through getting kicked out of your high school during your SENIOR YEAR because someone told some teacher you had weed in your car. I got pulled out of class by cops and arrested, and my car wasn't even on school grounds. Cops used to roll through the park I grew up in and would get out and do pat downs on whoever couldn't run away in time. These things and many more have made me hate cops, and yes, I still to this day hate cops. Is me not testifying the reason one of the robbers walked free? Maybe. But I certainly had no new information to tell the jury they didn't already know. Especially if the no fingerprints on the weapon they recovered was the reason they acquitted him. Who knows, maybe me going in there and crying like a bitch or something would've made it the jury see the truth. Either way it does weigh heavy on my heart but even my plug didn't blame me for not testifying.
During and before and after the trial, me and my plug were still at work. This is when I had moved into my house I rented, after living in a shitty apartment. I fully furnished it and everything. Washer, dryer, Ps4, Xbox 1, queen sized bed, the works. Even the little shower floor mat, I loved that home.
Fast forward to early covid 2020, my plug was starting to get annoyed with me. I was always asking him about the next pack coming in, always wanting as much of it as he could get to me, and I was always on him about the quality of it, even though it was always above average and most of the time it was top shelf. He ran into some legal trouble driving through Texas, that and along with a few other things happening in his personal life, work for me started slowing down. I never was good at saving money, I knew I should, I'd always beat myself up for not having money when I needed it, but I just never could change my spending habits. I'm still not sold on the whole "trying to be something you're not" argument because I've never had to fake anything. Most of the people I was around have heard from others what I've been through. At one point people were driving 2-3 hours just to pick up from me. I've been robbed plenty of times and I've robbed others. One things for sure, if karma is real, then I've definitely paid my dues. I haven't been selling now or have been in any legal trouble for the longest stretch of time since I started it all almost 8 years ago. And yes, I am proud of that.
Almost all of the friends I've ever had have either robbed me or wronged me in some way, or I've cut contact for my own issues or reasons. As of today, I have one friend that lives in Ireland, and he's a great friend, but he's got his own life to live. I got evicted for giving a bad check to my landlord, 3 weeks before they did the eviction halting for covid, which is still active today. Unlucky for sure, but my fault nonetheless. Finding somewhere to live has always been a challenge for me because of my lack of provable income. Today I have decent credit, a credit card, and a few thousand dollars I have invested in my Robinhood account that I seem to keep losing and gaining back. I stream on Twitch, but my last stream I just sat and cried for like 2 and a half hours, its still the latest stream on my channel. No one wants to follow me or give me a chance, which I understand, I probably could make it work if I grinded harder and harder at it, its just depressing as fuck to sit there and talk to yourself for hours at the beginning.
Todays' (1/28/2021) events in the stock market made me write this. Me and my mom keep fighting and its BEEN PAST the time I move back out again. No one will lease to me. She wont even stay here until I leave, as of this last week. I'm waiting on my new debit card to get here in the mail, and whether I have somewhere to go or not, I told her I'd leave when it got here, I have been homeless a few times, lived in my car, extended stay hotels, other peoples' couches. Its hard, but I know that I can make it fine. Today I woke up and had $20,000 in my investments, up from $1,100 I started with at the beginning of January 2021. I finally felt a little bit positive about my future at least a little bit, after a very depressing Christmas and January. Then Robinhood and other brokers today cut off buying GME, AMC, and others. I was heavy into GME, having gotten in @ $69 (lol) dollars a share. It was $450+ per share this morning, after a week of mainstream media attention from every social media website, major TV news stations, and billionaires like Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, that Chamath guy (who seems awesome) and many more. Robinhood and a couple other brokers actually turned off the ability to buy the stock. Literally. All the stocks that were heavy volume "meme stocks" they cut off. I was in GME and AMC, but even Blackberry, Nokia, and others were cut off too. Needless to say, after the whole week of manufactured panic from all of these different sources, this straw broke the camels back. GME at this moment is trading @ 225, and I sold mine when I opened my app and saw it at 155, which was the lowest dip of the day. I came out in the green, I came out making a $1,500 or so dollars. But my portfolio by the time I cut AMC losses went from $20,000 this morning, down to $5,000 as I type this. I have never wanted to kill myself more than I do right now, mostly because this week it felt like I really earned this. I stayed diamond hands (held through the media pressure) through this whole week, only to give up at the end. It will hurt even more if GME recovers from this dip, but It's not because other people are making money without me, its because I could've used that money to move out, get some food to eat, get a new car that doesn't leak through the roof in case I'm living in it here in a couple days. And more importantly, I earned that money. I noticed the momentum before it even touched 40 a share. I've watch DFV's (roaring kitty on YouTube) 5-6 hour livestreams where he was going over the financials and spreadsheets of GameStop back in fucking 2019. I believed in this play and threw the money I had at it, and it should have worked out at least better than it did, I was planning to exit or at least hedge my earnings tomorrow, when shorts have to cover. But when I stepped away to eat lunch and take a shower because of how stressful this morning this morning was, I came back, opened my phone, and I was $15,000 down. So yes, my diamond hands failed. I sold. And while I still had a gain, its not at all what it should rightfully be. I can't even bitch and moan in the Wallstreetbets subreddit because apparently me being a lurker for a year isn't enough because of all of the newbies in there from all of the media attention.
So to finally wrap this up, I feel like I tried my best in this life. I haven't always been a good person, but not once have I thought to myself that I was evil. I'm too nice sometimes, and its gotten me fucked over, and I'd still go back and front friends weed or give them money/weed for free because I'm just not having fun unless people around me are too. Everyone's struggling in their own ways. I do not want to live on this earth any longer. I wrote this to at least explain to everyone what happened to me. And while I left out some very important parts in my life, this should give you a summary of what was going through my mind today. I really have been a good human being these last 2 years. Maybe I'm greedy for not selling earlier today. I was just so caught up in finally "sticking it to the man" and making the best play I've ever made I didn't want to feel like they would win by making us sell. I didn't even come out in the red, but goddamn it feels like I lost everything. I don't want you to feel sorry for me, just learn from my mistakes and take care of yourselves. You have to be stronger emotionally than I was. Move out of the U.S. if you can, its just greed and money that rule here. Maybe nowadays that's just everywhere.
Thank you to anyone that for some reason read all of this. To my dead friends Tad, Pmoney, Cierra, Raegan, Tina, I miss you guys and you better have a blunt for me when I see you all soon, I could really fucking use one about now. Much Love, - Bleezy

Background: I am a 25 year old Starbucks barista. I was working full-time until fairly recently (Novemberish) as the rising cases in my city & my own health issues led to a really good talk with my boss. I have reduced my hours by 50% - enough to keep my health insurance, but enough to qualify for the Canada Recovery Benefit, an extra $900 every two weeks. This is for my own peace of mind as I really cannot afford to get COVID, especially as I am chronically ill.
I’d like to make note of two things -
I am one of those weirdos who has taken COVID seriously since it hit the news in January. My spouse and I had masks and sanitizer before it was cool, lol. As a result, I have not and do not go out much except to work. I do not see other people (the exception being this week as you will read.) I do pop into retail stores still as Canada Post is absolutely swamped with packages so I avoid trying to buy online.
In this diary I am battling with a Crohn’s flare. I promise the exhaustion and joint aches are because of that, not because of COVID! Funnily enough, I do credit my Crohn’s for my ease with COVID-19 restrictions and lockdowns. Being that I was hospitalized for a long time as a teen, I find it easy to be isolated and stay isolated. I know a lot of people struggle with that.
Onto the good stuff…
The Positives
Income: 16.24/hourly. I was promoted since my last diary and am now a certified trainer!
CRB: $1800/monthly. I am so incredibly thankful that I have this failsafe.
Student loans: I am back in school with more emergency management and communications classes. I applied for just enough of a student loan to pay the tuition and no more. Starbucks gives $1,000 of tuition reimbursement if you pass your classes which I can pay back onto my student loans and basically covers the cost of my classes this semester.
The Negatives
Rent/Utilities/Condo Fees: a flat $1050 monthly to S. The bills come out of his account and this is the number we landed on.
Internet: $42.50 (my half - all bills are my half. S works for the city government in waste management and makes $63,000~ a year. He has no debts except his car loan & the mortgage.)
Phone: $58.21 monthly for 13GB and unlimited texts and calls. I own my phone outright.
NYT: $14.28 for the news, Cooking, and the crossword.
Spotify: $4.99 monthly. Canadian baristas do not get the free Spotify perk. :(
Headspace: $0 monthly. We do at least get this!
Car insurance: $197.41 monthly. This is with a 9 year clean driving record, a reduced rate because of my grades, and the fact that identifying as a woman also lessens the price. And it’s still $2400 a year. Kill me. I own my car outright though.
Google Photos: $2.79/monthly.
Health insurance: $39/check to cover S and I, dental and medical. I am also on S’s so we have full coverage.
Debts & Assets:
Student loans: I have $8,000 in provincial loans and $11,000 in federal loans. They are on pause as I am in school but I was paying $215 a month towards them. I know I qualify for repayment assistance but the goddamn NSLSC will never pick up the phone.
Car: It is a 13-year-old SUV and worth maybe $2,000. I will drive that thing until it dies.
Savings: I have approximately $1500 in a TFSA. I have about $750 in Starbucks stock (not technically a savings, it was my grant this year + my own contributions, 1% from my paycheck.) I am also enrolled in their retirement plan. No idea how much is in that as I can only access the website on the work computer and never remember to do that. I have $150 in stocks because I thought I was going to be Jordan Belfort or something, idk.
Tips: I hoard all of my tip money in a little jar hidden somewhere in my home. It is at about $475.
I have no other debt.
Day One - Tuesday
7:50: S kisses me goodbye and leaves for work. I snuggle back in.
8:10: M, my male cat, is tapping my face for breakfast. Ignored.
8:24: He tries again and I get up. Lately I have been noticing the time 8:24 a lot. I told S and he said he’s been noticing 10:42 a lot. So we have decided those are our angel numbers. M is no angel though despite waking me up at this time.
8:40: Everyone is fed and I make my coffee and let out the dog, K. Oh yeah… the dog… he was an accident. We did not intend on getting a dog. It is a long story. I love him to bits.
9:15: Finish my coffee and go upstairs to have a snuggle with Z, our female cat. She is so warm. I was intending on going out to buy M’s wet food today but it is snowing something fierce and I hate driving in the snow so I resign myself to staying indoors. I would also normally take K on a walk at this time but he had knee surgery this past year and the cold and snow really bother it, so we will do some indoor play and puzzles to keep him occupied (he is a corgi and is a monster without stimulation. Again, DID NOT INTEND ON THE DOG.)
10:00: Write these entries and tidy up our spare room. We turned it into a nap/cat/yoga den as we were, obviously, not having any visitors. However, my sister-in-law is pregnant and is coming down tonight for an advanced ultrasound as there is a tentative abnormality with the baby. Because her town has had 0 cases thus far - congratulations to them, honestly - and the outpatient clinic is the one two minutes from our neighbourhood, we decided it was OK for her to stay with us. She will drive down tonight and leave right after her appointment tomorrow. 12:30: Did some cleaning, cereal eating, bed-making, what have you. I go to take the garbage out to our complex dumpster in my tshirt and notice it’s not as bad as I thought despite the snow. So I gear up and take out K.
1:15: I’m so glad I did - he was so happy! Usually he starts limping within a few minutes if the cold is bothering him but he was putting his head and belly into the snow drifts so I know he was having a good time. The cold and the walk have wiped me out though. I eat a clementine and lay under my heated blanket for a nap with Z and K (M likes to watch the snow upstairs.)
4:15: K snores himself awake and barks at himself so I wake up too. Z looks annoyed and wanders upstairs. Three animals is quite the zoo.
Check my phone and see my SIL asked if I could leave a dinner for her in the fridge, if I was making something? She left later than intended and won’t be here until 9 so dinner options will be limited. I tell her I haven’t been feeling well and S is at a union meeting tonight (why the union is doing in person meetings, I don’t know.) but it is pasta Tuesday at Boston Pizza… she readily agrees. I place an order for ravioli for myself and fettuccine for her. S will get fed at his meeting. My SIL says she will leave me cash for her half even though I try to tell her not to. Hopefully she forgets. (27.98 delivery, I’m going to leave a cash tip of $10 taped to the door for coming in the snow.)
6:30: I have enough of an appetite to eat my ravioli but only get through four pieces. I put it away to eat it later and feed the animals. I give K his puzzle bowl and he gives me a look of despair.
8:00: Ding! Crossword and mood log notifications go off. I get about halfway through the crossword when my SIL gets here.
10:30: We have a catch-up and exchange Christmas gifts as we couldn’t go up North for the holidays. Then I head to bed. I do my skincare and jade roll out a pinched nerve in my jaw - feels so good. Finish my crossword and then bed.
Daily Total: $39.98
Day Two - Wednesday
8:24: Right on time, the tiny beasts request food. SIL is already gone. She left me a $20, argh! I put it in my tip jar as I took from there to leave the cash tip but I wish she hadn’t. Babies are let out and fed.
9:30: Manage a bowl of cereal. Feel exhausted. It’s -31C out so we play indoor fetch. Putter around the house.
10:30: Go upstairs and do my skincare and fill out my journal as I couldn’t last night. I bought a daily Moleskine planner but use it as more of a journal. I put on a Yoga by Adrienne video as I won’t be walking K. I work today so I stretch.
12:30: I lay down with K after some more fetch (I told you the exhaustion is real in this diary.)
2:00: My alarm goes off. I eat mashed potatoes and drink some water, then go upstairs to find M and Z cuddling in my vanity chair. I perch on the edge - because they refuse to move! - and do some makeup. I change into my personal uniform of all black (hides the stains) and set out.
5:00: I have my first break. I got $3 in tips from last week (lol) so I use it to buy a croissant. I’m gonna claim this as a +.82 because the croissant was only 2.18.
7:00: I only manage half of my pasta on my break, which is unusual for me. I drink a mint tea to settle my stomach.
9:15: It was so dead we managed to finish everything super quickly. I take home some expired oat bars as they’re the only Starbucks snack S can eat.
9:30: Home and greet everyone. S lets out K and goes upstairs to get ready for bed. I do my “closing tasks.” This is something I picked up from the TikTok account domesticblisters, who is a licensed therapist. She has this concept of care tasks, and what tasks you should do to help set yourself up for success every night - even if it’s just to survive the day. It really resonated with me and is something I have done every night since November with a few exceptions! I start my closing tasks after I finish my nightly crossword.
Every night, I fill up all the waters in the house (ours, animals, the Keurig, etc.) I get to Sink Zero, which might mean loading the dishwasher and running it, or washing all the dishes in the sink. I disinfect the sink and scrub the stove, then disinfect the counters and the dining table. I do a Swiffer of the floor (K brings in lots of pawprints and salt from outside.) I pick up any garbage/recycling/things that don’t belong downstairs. It is so nice to come down every morning to a clean main floor and sets the mood for the day. And it only takes me 20ish minutes.
10:00: Done my tasks, give everyone a little treat for not walking on the wet floor - they’ve learned quickly that if they wait they get a treat - and head upstairs. Journal, do my skincare, floss, brush, and head to bed. Listen to Temple Rain on Headspace.
Daily Total: +$20.82
Day Three - Thursday
8:00: I can already tell today is a bad stomach day. Luckily my boss texted me and asked if I wanted to give up my shift as it was going to be super dead with the impending snowstorm and deep freeze. I readily agree and doze off for a few minutes before M bites me hard enough to get me up.
9:00: Everyone is fed, let out. I drink coffee. K is being a major snugglebug. It is snowing like crazy out but I have to go do some errands.
12:00: I stop bumming around and gear up to go outside. It’s still snowing. Ugh, Alberta.
First stop is to get gas. I have a quarter of a tank left. Remember in April when gas was like, 50c a litre? It’s 1.06 today. Also, fellow Canadians, the Esso Speedpass app is a godsend. Not having to touch any buttons on the pump has been so helpful. 45.93
Next I head to the grocery store to get milk, chicken, and cereal. I also end up getting soup, a new bubble bath, a replacement of my body wash, and a new leave-in conditioner. 27.66 (my half)
Third stop is the pet store. I grab a flat of M’s wet food. At the checkout the cashier asks if I want to donate some canned food to the local rescue as they just picked up nearly 100 kittens. That suckers me and I say yes. I also note that they’re accepting old blankets/comforters, as we just switched our duvet out, and the old one is fluffy and perfect for furbabies. 32.29 (my half)
Lastly, I go to Canadian Tire to pick up an online order I placed. It was paid for last week. It’s a gift wrap storage bin as we accumulated a bunch of rolls last year and the cats keep scratching it. Canadian Tire is fun because they have these lockers they place your order in now, and give you a pin to pick it up, so I don’t even interact with anyone. In and out.
2:00: Home and everything sanitized and put away. I wipe down my phone and watch and throw my gloves in the washer as they’re looking kind of grimy. Have a rest with K.
5:00: We play fetch and S comes home. K runs around like crazy. I go upstairs and work on a paper.
7:00: I have an appetite! I manage about 6 pieces of ravioli and some yogurt. S makes chicken wings for himself.
8:00: Go upstairs to finish off my paper and get my steps in. M is whining at me so we play with his favourite toy, a piece of twine. I do my crossword, drag the twine, and do my steps at the same time. It’s called multitasking. I make a lemon ginger tea. It’s disgusting but I drink it all as I’ve heard it has great benefits for your stomach. Does anyone else just not like tea? I’ve tried tons - thanks to Teavana at work - but I’m really only a real Indian cha girl.
9:30: I finish my steps, do my closing tasks, take a melatonin, do my skincare, and head to bed. Goodnight world.
Daily Total: 105.88
Day Four - Friday
7:45: Everyone is being very loud and banging around this morning.
8:20: Feed the zoo, let out K. It is snowing again and it is a vicious -27C outside. I have my coffee.
9:30: Realize my paper is due today. It’s mostly finished so I don’t fret. Eat cereal and start a load of laundry, and then vacuum.
10:30: Get distracted looking up refurbished Apple Pencils. I don’t need one, I don’t need one… I click out of the page. Then reopen it. Then exit it again and watch TikToks instead.
11:00: I pluck my eyebrows - something I’ve done on my own for about 7 years now. I wonder how much money that’s saved me. I put on snail essence but don’t do a full skincare routine as I intend on a shower. I do a full hair treatment with a desi hair oil. I wrap it up in a bun and get to work on finishing my paper.
1:00: Finish and submit. I air fry pork buns for lunch. My stomach feels way better today. Maybe the tea made some points…
3:00: Finished my shower. My natural curl has come back in full force. I used to have tiny ringlets as a kid and they vanished with age. Then I saw a TikTok (again, lol) which essentially said: if you’re not white, why are you using white hair products? I switched to desi & black hair products a month ago and the difference has been crazy.
5:30: S is home and K is immediately crazy. I really miss our walks. I decide to corral him momentarily in the bathroom and hide his kibble around the main floor so he can do his sniffari for dinner. He loved this game!
7:00: I try to build a Notion dashboard. This is too hard. I eat some more ravioli. Sorry for my five-year-old diet in this. It’s a bowel rest diet.
8:00: Crossword, steps, and M play time.
9:30: Closing tasks! Then bed.
Daily total: $0
Day Five - Saturday
7:45: Woken up by the usual ruckus.
8:30: Blah, blah, blah. Have my coffee. Make an egg sandwich because Saturdays are chaos and I need the protein.
9:30: Do my skincare, makeup, and hair while a nervous pit opens up in my stomach. Not only is it a cool -35C out, but Saturdays are terrible at work. I’m not a crier and have never cried at any place of employment until Saturdays @ the Siren. It’s gotten worse during the pandemic as people crave normalcy and to them, getting their coffee every Saturday is normal. But they refuse to treat us with any decency. It’s hard when you are treated as expendable so that white-collar WFH/SFH families can berate you over how long their $40 order takes. (I work in a very wealthy area.)
Also, if I am put in the drive-thru window, I will be very grumpy about it.
1:00: I was put on bar, which is a lot of responsibility on a Saturday. I buy a butter croissant and drink a mint tea on my break. 2.38
3:00: Someone yells at me about the bathrooms being closed.
3:30: I eat the last of my pasta at lunch and have a blacktea lemonade.
5:00: Someone returns a drink twice for not being the right shade of pink. She tries a third time and I politely tell her another store can make the moment right, since we clearly can’t. I hate Saturdays.
5:30: Free and covered in syrup, milk, and a mango dragonfruit that exploded at my feet. I take a hot shower and decide my day is done, so I do my skincare and remove my makeup and contacts.
8:00: S finishes gaming with his brother and I make a stir-fry sans veggies for dinner.
9:30: Closing tasks, except no mopping because the ground is frozen so K hasn’t brought in any tracks. I floss, jade roll, and fall asleep.
Daily Total: 2.38
Day Six - Sunday
8:24: M pats me awake.
9:00: I apologize for this being the most boring Money Diary of all time. Coffee and toast for breakfast.
12:00: Bummed around all morning but did a vacuum and started a load of laundry. Tomorrow is our weekly “reset” day so I don’t have much to do today. I work at 5 PM.
I research photobooks on Shutterfly. I have 30,000 photos sitting in my Google Drive and a backup hard drive. It’s serving me no use so I want to go through them, make photobooks, and delete the rest off of my computer (keeping them in their backups.) They’re currently 50% off but it would take me a long time to do seven years’ worth of books so I can’t (and won’t) pull the trigger now, but I also know Shutterfly and vistaprint host many sales, so I’m not too fussed.
2:00: We have a Zoom call with S’s family to do a late Christmas opening together. The kids (and adults!) love their gifts. We talk about the cold and about the new niece or nephew on the way.
4:30: I go upstairs and get dressed for work. S is driving me so I don’t have to worry about starting my car in the cold. It is supposed to reach -41C.
5:30: I forgot it was Superbowl Sunday. Our store is located next to the turnoff into the plaza so we try and count how many Ubers are coming in for food pickups but get bored of that. Somehow I get water on the ceiling.
7:00: I eat an “expired” croissant and drink a mint tea on my break. A woman comes through drive-thru for just a cookie. She says she didn’t know there was a Starbucks here so she had to settle for another coffee chain’s iced coffee, and then drove by and saw us. I tell her to wait and come back with a free iced coffee because no one should be subjected to the other chain’s. To my surprise she bursts into tears. A very wholesome interaction.
8:30: It’s so dead my supervisor lets the other closer go home because we’re basically done for the night and he lives 40 minutes from the store.
9:30: I leave with my coffee bean markout and another “expired” croissant, as well as a blacktea lemonade for S. We wait to make sure my supervisor’s car starts as she drives a ten-year-old minivan that recently got rear-ended, and it didn’t start last night apparently, so she had to wait for her husband to come boost her as everyone had left. She flashes her lights at us and we leave. S wants McDonald’s but I don’t so he orders and pays for just himself.
10:30: Done closing tasks. I had some soup for dinner. Bed time.
Daily Total: $0
Day Seven - Monday
8:00: I did not sleep well. M bites me and I grumble at him and hide under the covers. S gets up and feeds the animals instead.
8:45: Everyone is waiting for me to come downstairs. Being a pet mom is like being a celebrity.
9:30: Coffee and my croissant from last night for breakfast.
10:30: It’s reset day. Every Monday I clean out the fridge, dust/clean the appliances and cupboards, wash the sheets, do a major vacuum (we do small vacuums during the week but I have a Bissell Crosswave and use it every week to suck up the oodles of pet hair.) and refill canisters. I also do some self care tasks like a serious eyebrow groom, a hair oil, an Aztec face mask, clipping all my nails/painting my toenails, and in the shower I shave my legs for the week. The animals also get a spa day. We check toenails and brush them out.
Then the week is nicely set up and we don’t have to worry about this stuff until next Monday!
S is braving the weather to go to the grocery store. He comes back with a full haul as there was quite a bit of discounted meat. We put it in the freezer. 48.33 (my half)
2:30: I finish the main floor items and go upstairs to find S and the cats in the nap den bed. I decide to crawl in too and we have a major cuddle nap. K isn’t allowed upstairs so the cats have a space away from him, but we spend a lot of time downstairs with him, so I don’t feel too bad.
4:30: Up from the nap and do the upstairs chores, and then a shower. I break halfway to have some soup.
7:00: House is clean, I am clean, and animals are clean! S and I make Cajun rice for dinner. I do my steps and crossword puzzle.
9:30: Closing tasks, lights out!
Daily Total: 48.33

Notes and Highlights of Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear’s Live Update February 8, 2021
Notes by mr_tyler_durden and Daily Update Team
Watch here:

• Youtube: Update (YT Channel)
• Facebook: Update (FB Page)

Headlines

• 378,793 Cases (+1,003), 4,091 Deaths (+40)
• New cases by county: 205x Jefferson, 69x Fayette, 38x Warren, 30x Campbell, 26x Bullitt, 25x Kenton, 25x Madison, 24x Boone, 24x Daviess, 24x Shelby, 20x Graves, 20x McCracken, 18x Allen, 18x Hardin, 17x Franklin, 17x Oldham, 15x Marion, 15x Marshall, 14x Calloway, 13x Barren, 13x Boyd, 13x Greenup, 13x Livingston, 13x Pike, 12x Floyd, 12x Nelson, 12x Whitley, 10x Bourbon, 10x Jessamine, 10x Trigg, 9x Logan, 8x Carter, 7x Grayson, 7x Harlan, 7x Simpson, 7x Woodford, 6x Bell, 6x Butler, 6x Henderson, 6x Jackson, 6x Letcher, 6x Scott, 6x Spencer, 5x Clay, 5x Hart, 5x Hopkins, 5x Johnson, 5x Muhlenberg, 4x Breathitt, 4x Crittenden, 4x Grant, 4x Hancock, 4x Lewis, 4x Lincoln, 4x Mercer, 4x Metcalfe, 4x Ohio, 4x Russell, 3x Ballard, 3x Boyle, 3x Carroll, 3x Garrard, 3x Laurel, 3x McCreary, 3x Mason, 3x Meade, 3x Nicholas, 3x Pendleton, 3x Pulaski, 3x Taylor, 3x Washington, 2x Anderson, 2x Caldwell, 2x Christian, 2x Edmonson, 2x Fleming, 2x Harrison, 2x Hickman, 2x Knott, 2x Larue, 2x Lyon, 2x McLean, 2x Trimble, 2x Webster, 1x Breckinridge, 1x Clark, 1x Clinton, 1x Estill, 1x Henry, 1x Monroe, 1x Montgomery, 1x Owsley, 1x Rockcastle, 1x Todd, 1x Wolfe
• New deaths by county: 68 F Barren, 70 F Barren, 71 F Barren, 82 F Barren, 82 F Barren, 55 M Barren, 73 M Barren, 76 F Boyd, 70 M Butler, 78 M Butler, 83 M Butler, 68 F Edmonson, 75 M Fulton, 94 F Graves, 44 F Hardin, 59 M Hardin, 63 M Harrison, 69 F Hart, 94 F Hart, 82 M Hart, 63 F Hopkins, 80 F Larue, 61 F Laurel, 73 F Logan, 69 F Marshall, 75 F Meade, 67 M Meade, 63 M Metcalfe, 69 M Metcalfe, 71 M Metcalfe, 78 M Metcalfe, 77 M Russell, 49 M Scott, 68 F Simpson, 58 M Simpson, 70 M Simpson, 68 F Warren, 69 M Warren, 85 M Warren, 66 M Washington
• Good News.
  • 1. Today I'm happy to announce a new development that will bring a headquarter operation to Kentucky while creating high-quality, sustainable career opportunities for Kentuckians and their family. Wieland North America, a maker of copper and copper-alloy products, plans to establish a new North American headquarters in Louisville.
  • 2.The second piece of good news is some good news related to the upcoming closing of our Team Kentucky Fund. <...> Thanks to the incredible generosity of Kentuckians today I get to announce the Team Kentucky Fund is donating $380,000 to 19 local nonprofits , fighting homelessness and the opioid epidemic across Kentucky.
• Let's start with our stair stepper chart which shows our weekly update. As you can see, this last week had fewer cases than the week before. <...>This marks the first time that we have had four straight weeks of declining cases, since the very beginning of the pandemic. The very first time.<...> We see the exact same thing in our test positivity, which shows you that this is real. Four straight weeks of declining test positivity, which, in looking on here, <...> Let's put up our inpatient census. Look at that, as you can see we had that significant escalation that was you know in November before we took the steps that we needed to take and now look at the downward line, as we are seeing fewer people hospitalized for COVID. <...> Look at the ICU graph. That too, after reaching that height, is really starting to decrease as well as the ventilator numbers, if we can show that.> So, let's show the hospital capacity as well. Normally, we've got about four areas of the state that are in the red zone; we're down to two and both just barely qualify. You’ve got to be at 80% or more in one of those three categories. Area 10 is at 80% flat on ICU beds. Area 7 is at 81%. This is the best looking map we've had in hospital capacity in months.
• Alright, now we're gonna spend a considerable amount of time on updating you on vaccinations. Let's start with the weekly chart that we show each and every week that shows our seven day utilization, in other words: how fast are we getting shots into people's arms? And what you can see is, for the fifth straight week, we have vaccinated more people than we've gotten first doses from the federal government,<...> even though we got 12,000 more of this last week than the week before, we were still able to do that. <...> Overall, of the first doses we've received, because that's what we're trying to do, vaccinate individuals, how many unique people have been vaccinated, we have put 91% of all those doses we've received in someone's arm. So what you'll see is, we now have 444,930 people vaccinated just through the state program, and the long term care program. So let's look at the breakdown of that. So what you'll see in our state program is that we've actually hit 92% utilization which means 92% of all first doses to the state program are in somebody's arm.
• I want to remind everybody about our vaccine website http://vaccine.ky.gov/, and the hotline that helps Kentuckians to determine if they're eligible right now to receive a vaccine, and then helps you find one in your region. The hotline is 855-598-2246, or, for hard of hearing Kentuckians and only for them, because we can't clog up this line, is 855-326-4654. You'll answer a series of questions that will tell you about your eligibility.
• Is there any consideration being given, since we have lower numbers of cases, and the other numbers you’ve referred to, when you balance that against the potential increase in the variants, is there going to be any lowering of some of the restrictions that restaurants and different locations have been dealing with for the last several months? -- If we continue on this trend, that's something that we hope to be able to do. And as the vaccine numbers, think about two different levels: the vaccine numbers going up, and the cases going down, and if that continues to happen, then yes we hope to do that. Now where we still are, , is we're still pretty elevated, right? But we're moving in the right direction. And if we can see that continue, then we'll see what we can loosen
• You touched on it earlier in the briefing with delivering vaccines to African American communities but you've also mentioned earlier, a couple of weeks ago, when talking about getting local pharmacies involved. [...] Can you again describe how important those local pharmacies are going to be in their strategy to make people feel comfortable and to make it easy for them to get the vaccine? [...] -- Local health departments, and local independent pharmacies are absolutely critical to getting vaccine to individuals, especially in counties that may not have a hospital, may not have a Walgreens, and so what you'll see on Thursday is the the federal pharmacy program was originally just going to be with some of the major brands, and we fought hard to include independent pharmacies specifically for Eastern Kentucky, parts of eastern Kentucky, and parts of western Kentucky.
• Slides from Update

Full Notes

• Good afternoon everybody. Good afternoon, Virginia. It is four o'clock, that time we come together, get an update on this battle of our lifetimes, and remember that we'll get through this, and we'll get through it together. Today, we're going to share some good news, and then we're going to talk about COVID trends. We're going to give the COVID report, and we're going to talk about where we are on vaccinations, go over the four programs that will be operating by the end of this week. We're going to go through the first set of demographic data that we have received on who's getting the vaccine, and we're going to talk about some of the reasons that it looks the way that it does but also how we're going to do better.
• So let's start with good news. As our state continues making progress in our fight against COVID-19, we are simultaneously rebuilding our economy, making it stronger than ever. Today I'm happy to announce a new development that will bring a headquarter operation to Kentucky while creating high-quality, sustainable career opportunities for Kentuckians and their family. Wieland North America, a maker of copper and copper-alloy products, plans to establish a new North American headquarters in Louisville. With the company's announcement we anticipate the creation of 75 well paying Kentucky resident jobs, along with an $8.8M capital investment. Wieland’s new headquarters, which company leaders hope to open by the end of Q1, will locate on Olympia Park Plaza near the intersection of I-71, and the Gene Snyder Freeway. The company will lease nearly 30,000 square feet to house personnel, including Wieland’s leadership, financial, legal, human resources, supply chain, sales, and marketing teams. The new headquarters will share a building with Wieland rolled products North American LLC, which is formerly Olin Brass, which was acquired in July of 2019. Both are subsidiaries of Wlm Germany-based Wieland-Werke AG. As a manufacturer of copper and copper-alloy products, including sheet, strip, foil, tube, and other fabricated components, the company serves customers throughout North America, in industries. This customer base spans a variety of those industries including building and construction, munitions, automotive, coinage, and electronic components. With this development our state continues to establish itself as a prime destination for both metals-related companies, and corporate headquarters. More than 1,000 corporate headquarters call Kentucky home, and we are thrilled to add Wieland to that list. As we work to build a better Kentucky for generations to come, gaining a new headquarters with a company like Wieland, it’s pretty special and it's something we ought to celebrate, and we've done it all in the midst of a pandemic. So let this announcement just be an example of what's possible in the years to come. Given some of the economic development announcements, groundbreakings, openings, headquarter relocations, we have so much potential in front of us. We've got to have the courage to go get it. We can't cower. We have to move ahead. When we have opportunities to invest, just like the private sector, we have to do it. We got to act with urgency, we've got to realize that the post-COVID economy is being created right now and I, for one, I'm going to push as hard as we can to create as many opportunities for your kids and mine in the years to come.
• The second piece of good news is some good news related to the upcoming closing of our Team Kentucky Fund. Our Team Kentucky Fund has helped so many families and we are reaching the end where the last set of applications are being reviewed. That leaves us with some leftover dollars that are going to go to some places and some organizations that need them and do incredible work. Thanks to the incredible generosity of Kentuckians today I get to announce the Team Kentucky Fund is donating $380,000 to 19 local nonprofits , fighting homelessness and the opioid epidemic across Kentucky. Unfortunately, both of these crises have worsened during COVID-19, and we must turn the tide. So many of our friends and neighbors are depending on it. All these organizations have a mission that is closely aligned with the mission of Team Kentucky and the Team Kentucky Fund, helping Kentucky families that suffered a significant financial setback due to COVID-19. These are organizations that are helping those that have lost their homes, or don't have a home, and need to be healthy at home during COVID-19. They're helping folks that maybe the isolation has worsened an addiction, maybe haven't been able to climb out because of the circumstances that we find ourselves in. Each organization will receive an equal share of $20,000, the same qualified nonprofit organizations will also receive, in equal shares, any remaining funds from the Team Kentucky Fund after all pending applications have been processed. So, the 19 organizations, many of which I've had the opportunity to work with in the past that help so many people, I think do God's work, are:
  • Children's Home of Northern Kentucky
  • Chrysalis House
  • Coalition for the Homeless, that's in Louisville
  • The Daniel Pitino Shelter
  • Hope in the mountains. I remember working with Hope in the Mountains in Prestonsburg when they were about to close and now Medicaid-eligible and incredible work they do.
  • Hotel Inc.
  • KVC Kentucky.
  • Maryhurst,
  • Mountain Comprehensive Care Center
  • Pathways Inc
  • Ramy-Estep. Again, a group that I got to tour their facility and just see the great work they were doing for kids that need people that care about them.
  • Salvation Army of Hopkinsville
  • Volunteers of America MidState (Freedom House), they have both a facility in Louisville and a facility in Manchester,
  • Welcome House of Northern Kentucky
  • WestCare
  • Independence House, in Corbin
  • Kentucky River Community Care
  • Transition
  • And Clark County's Homeless Coalition.
• This gift wouldn't be possible, helping these organizations that have additional costs but are doing such critical work, without so many of you out there helping out. Since the Team Kentucky Fund was established, on March 23rd of last year, the fund has raised $3,768,222 from 11,411 donors. It's assisted 3,662 Kentucky families to date. I encourage everyone that while this fund is closing, keep the spirit of the Team Kentucky Fund alive. It's all about helping other people, it's all about banding together. It was launched at a time when we remember some of the kindness, and sometimes we remember the joy in helping each other at that point. Just because we're worn and tired and maybe even torn, doesn't mean that we can't reach deep in, find that joy, show it for the world to see, because helping people now, especially 11 months into the pandemic, is more important than it's ever been.
• Alright, let's talk about our COVID trends, as we eventually get to our report what you'll see is deaths remain too high, we hope that starts to level off soon, but all the rest of the trends are going in a more positive direction from the trend itself, than we have seen in the course of this pandemic
• Let's start with our stair stepper chart which shows our weekly update. As you can see, this last week had fewer cases than the week before. This marks the first time that we have had four straight weeks of declining cases, since the very beginning of the pandemic. The very first time. In fighting each of the three major waves that we have seen, in virtually each instance, we have been able to plateau that escalation. This is the first time we have seen a decrease and from the top, even a significant decrease. Now we had three straight weeks before we had our holiday bump, but this is the exact type of trend that we want to see, we are moving in the right direction. As you can tell from the graph those cases are still too high. I mean we were worried in the summer, about where we were and we are two to three times higher than where we were in the summer but going in the right direction, so keep it up. This is based on your hard work.
• We see the exact same thing in our test positivity, which shows you that this is real. Four straight weeks of declining test positivity, which, in looking on here, I do not believe that, again, we've ever had in the course of this pandemic. Being below 8% is a good thing. Again, we want to continue to push this down, so trends are moving in the right direction. I’ll tell you where that becomes even more important: in our healthcare system.
• Let's put up our inpatient census. Look at that, as you can see we had that significant escalation that was you know in November before we took the steps that we needed to take and now look at the downward line, as we are seeing fewer people hospitalized for COVID. That feels really good to say. Remember it's fragile, we let our guard down, everything changes. There are variants out there that appear to spread more aggressively. We're moving in the right direction, we just gotta keep it up.
• Look at the ICU graph. That too, after reaching that height, is really starting to decrease as well as the ventilator numbers, if we can show that.>
• So, let's show the hospital capacity as well. Normally, we've got about four areas of the state that are in the red zone; we're down to two and both just barely qualify. You’ve got to be at 80% or more in one of those three categories. Area 10 is at 80% flat on ICU beds. Area 7 is at 81%. This is the best looking map we've had in hospital capacity in months. So by all that, what we ought to take from this, is the trends are all moving in the right direction. But that only happens from your hard work. We have more people wearing masks, we have more people social distancing, we're having fewer large gatherings in homes or out in public. We must keep this up because we do not want to lose this progress and we're moving in a direction, where, especially with the vaccination efforts going on, we're gonna be able to stop these escalated numbers of deaths, which is critically important, but more than that, we're gonna get in a position to where we can do more in our everyday lives. But we got to keep it going. Just because things are moving in the right direction, doesn't mean they're not too high, they are too high, but you were making, and you're making, substantial progress. I'm proud of you, keep it up.
• That leads into today's report which, just like just about every day, good news on everything, but the death numbers.
• Positive cases today: 1,003 - That's the lowest since December 26th and before that October 26th. That tells you how low the number is, in that it makes it the third lowest since October 26th.
• Probable cases: 267
• Total confirmed cases: 378,793
• Children Under 18: 175
• And today, we only have 95 red counties. That means we have 25 counties that aren't red. That's the most we've had again in a while. Now, let’s not celebrate that we have 95 red counties, but let's just keep it up. If we keep it up, we're going to be at a place where we, again, will find ourselves in a much better position than we have recently seen.
• New cases by county, there's only one in triple digits and that's Jefferson with 205, everybody else is below 100 cases, which is good to see.
• New cases by county: 205x Jefferson, 69x Fayette, 38x Warren, 30x Campbell, 26x Bullitt, 25x Kenton, 25x Madison, 24x Boone, 24x Daviess, 24x Shelby, 20x Graves, 20x McCracken, 18x Allen, 18x Hardin, 17x Franklin, 17x Oldham, 15x Marion, 15x Marshall, 14x Calloway, 13x Barren, 13x Boyd, 13x Greenup, 13x Livingston, 13x Pike, 12x Floyd, 12x Nelson, 12x Whitley, 10x Bourbon, 10x Jessamine, 10x Trigg, 9x Logan, 8x Carter, 7x Grayson, 7x Harlan, 7x Simpson, 7x Woodford, 6x Bell, 6x Butler, 6x Henderson, 6x Jackson, 6x Letcher, 6x Scott, 6x Spencer, 5x Clay, 5x Hart, 5x Hopkins, 5x Johnson, 5x Muhlenberg, 4x Breathitt, 4x Crittenden, 4x Grant, 4x Hancock, 4x Lewis, 4x Lincoln, 4x Mercer, 4x Metcalfe, 4x Ohio, 4x Russell, 3x Ballard, 3x Boyle, 3x Carroll, 3x Garrard, 3x Laurel, 3x McCreary, 3x Mason, 3x Meade, 3x Nicholas, 3x Pendleton, 3x Pulaski, 3x Taylor, 3x Washington, 2x Anderson, 2x Caldwell, 2x Christian, 2x Edmonson, 2x Fleming, 2x Harrison, 2x Hickman, 2x Knott, 2x Larue, 2x Lyon, 2x McLean, 2x Trimble, 2x Webster, 1x Breckinridge, 1x Clark, 1x Clinton, 1x Estill, 1x Henry, 1x Monroe, 1x Montgomery, 1x Owsley, 1x Rockcastle, 1x Todd, 1x Wolfe
• Total tests conducted: 4,197,293 (PCR: 3,694,175, Serology: 109,151)
• Positivity Rate: 7.78% - The lowest it's been since November the 10th
• Our hospitalization, ICU, ventilator numbers are all down and/or staying right about stable.
• Total hospitalized: 17,429
• Currently hospitalized: 1,163
• Total in ICU: 3,689
• Currently in ICU: 274
• On a ventilator: 142
• Total recovered: 44,961
• New deaths today: 40 - Here's the hard part, we have 40 new deaths. And these deaths are from all over the state. As I look at this, they are from January and February; remember we have a process to go through to ensure we're not counting someone who passed away in a car wreck. There is one from December on here, and remember they've got to go through the process so may come to us slightly later than they’re announced in a community
• Total Deaths: 2189
• New deaths by county: 68 F Barren, 70 F Barren, 71 F Barren, 82 F Barren, 82 F Barren, 55 M Barren, 73 M Barren, 76 F Boyd, 70 M Butler, 78 M Butler, 83 M Butler, 68 F Edmonson, 75 M Fulton, 94 F Graves, 44 F Hardin, 59 M Hardin, 63 M Harrison, 69 F Hart, 94 F Hart, 82 M Hart, 63 F Hopkins, 80 F Larue, 61 F Laurel, 73 F Logan, 69 F Marshall, 75 F Meade, 67 M Meade, 63 M Metcalfe, 69 M Metcalfe, 71 M Metcalfe, 78 M Metcalfe, 77 M Russell, 49 M Scott, 68 F Simpson, 58 M Simpson, 70 M Simpson, 68 F Warren, 69 M Warren, 85 M Warren, 66 M Washington
• All losses are a loss for Kentucky. Let’s light those houses up green and let’s ring those bells at 10am. This is a reminder that we are thinking of the Kentuckians we’ve lost, their families, and their communities. It’s the color of compassion and renewal as their souls move from their bodies to a better place.
• Racial breakdown of all cases: 85% White, 8.5% Black, 5% Multiracial, 1.2% Asian, 0.3% American Indian, 0.1% Pacific Islander
• Ethnicity breakdown of all cases: 94.4% Non-Hispanic, 5.6% Hispanic
• Racial breakdown of all deaths: 88.1% White, 8.4% Black, 2.7% Multiracial, 0.6% Asian, 0.1% American Indian
• Ethnicity breakdown of all deaths: 98.2% Non-Hispanic, 1.8% Hispanic
• Long Term Care Facilities (PDF): 19 new residents and 20 new staff positive from yesterday, and 10 more deaths. Our long term care update for the day. If there is good news in the number of deaths we're seeing, a smaller and smaller and smaller percentage are long term care residents; which means vaccination is working in terms of preventing the worst of the worst outcomes. It should also be a leading indicator on what we should expect to see, which are deaths to start decreasing. If you look at our number of active cases compared to that total, and what we see are our things in long term care getting better.
  • Total facilities: 335
  • Total deaths: 4,091
  • Active cases: 332 residents, 235 staff
  • Total cases: 16650 residents, 12276 staff
• K-12 Update (PDF): PDF update only
• University Update (PDF): PDF update only
• Now's a good time, we haven't talked in a while about the process that these all go through, so that we can vet each and every one of them. You may remember early on in the pandemic there were questions about who was included. And there were folks who were trying to say numbers were inflated and we talked about going through this meticulous process to make sure it's accurate. I think we got Dr Stack here. Steve, will you walk us through the process again we use to make sure we have the very best information?
• Good afternoon Governor, good afternoon everyone. I'd be happy to do that. So, remember we have over 4000 COVID-related deaths already and COVID has become the third leading cause of death in the United States of America. This is a disease that did not exist until probably about 14 months ago. So that disease, that has now become the third leading cause of death, has resulted in, at times, a strain on this process. The process is well defined and has been done this way for a very long time. First of all, there's the sadness of a person whose life has come to its natural close, then you have to have that reported by a hospital or a physician or someone else to the appropriate authorities. And you have to have a death certificate signed, that can take days, weeks or, in unusual cases, longer. That all has to get reported to the local health department, the local health department then has to review those materials, and make sure things are in order, and once they've made that determination, they may feel that they have concluded the case and say that this is a death and it’s related to COVID. They then report that up to the state, the state then has to take that information and has to independently verify certain additional data points to make sure there was a positive COVID test or that there are, in fact, were test results or other clinical evidence that supports that COVID was related or find that perhaps COVID was not related. Once they review that, most of these things, probably more than 90% of all cases, go through routine processing with vital statistics staff and other epidemiology staff who do this as a matter of routine course in their jobs. There's a subset of cases, however, perhaps less than 10%, for which there's something that requires verification, meaning that the materials didn't include a test result or they didn't say COVID was part of the cause, but the clinical records that are available clearly say that COVID should have been considered as a cause, or a contributory factor, so then they have to request records. Well, depending on the timeliness of this, that requires reaching out to a hospital, or a doctor, or someone else, a funeral home, to get records and information. When they get that information, sometimes it comes quickly within hours or days, sometimes it takes days or weeks, and that information is collected, then the normal processing staff review those, and many of the times that's all that's necessary to very clearly determine “Was it a COVID-related or non-COVID-related death?”.
• Some of them, however, look a little bit less clear cut, and there's a need to apply some additional decision making. So I have a deputy clinical Commissioner, who is a physician, who reviews those cases that are felt to be uncertain and require someone to make an informed determination based on all of the information obtained. My deputy clinical Commissioner also has a team of professionals, who help gather this information, present it to her, and offer their insights, as applicable for their training. And these are people who are Masters of Public Health, PhDs in epidemiology, medical doctors, and other types of pretty highly educated professionals. Then the clinical deputy, after reviewing these things, makes this final determination and then that's that small subset, less than 10% of the total cases, that goes to that level of review.
• So, the bottom line is this process can take anywhere from a few days, if everything comes through quickly and cleanly, all the way up to weeks or even a month or more in the outlier cases. When we just went through the biggest surge the entire United States of America has ever seen in this entire pandemic, and you hear that there are more deaths reported still now, weeks after that a massive surge which is just now beginning to abate, what you're seeing is that states all across the United States of America are having the same task presented to them, which is a sadly enormous number of deaths that has occurred because of this disease. And it's this process working its normal course, it's a process the public would never attend to, but clearly, the public has an interest in this because of the sheer magnitude of the impact COVID has had and the number of people whose lives have been lost to it. So this is all a very methodical process, we work through it in partnership with the local health departments and medical providers as we go through it. And I have found when we've looked into this repeatedly, over the last year, whenever there have been questions asked, and we almost have always found a very clear answer for the question. So, I'm confident in the integrity of the process. And when we do report someone, when the governor reads each day and shares the number of people who have died, those are the days that those individuals' deaths, everything has been verified, and so we can report them on the official logs. We don't want to give bad information. But when we report those dates we put them back into our record keeping for the actual date of death. So the historical record is always accurate as far as the actual day the individual died, as opposed to the day we're able to release it, which is often delayed by days or weeks after the person's actual passing. So I hope that helps, again, to bring some kind of additional clarity to this. It's a very thoughtful process, a very methodical process, it's a lot of very capable professionals who are doing their regular daily jobs to operationalize this. And I think we should really focus most on the tragedy that this represents, that we've already lost over 4000, actually coming close to 4100, Kentuckians as a result of this pandemic. But, be grateful, even in the face of that loss, that because Team Kentucky pulled together, and followed our guidance in so many ways, that our numbers are much lower overall than many, many other states, including some of those that neighbor us. And so, amidst this sorrow there is at least the saving grace that we haven't had more people lost. So thank you very much and back to you Governor.
• Today we have another Memorial, which reminds us that these aren't numbers or just individuals in a process. And this is another personal one for me, this is a friend's dad. Today we're honoring Roy Holladay known by many as “Doc”. He was 73 when he passed away Friday at Baptist Health in Paducah after battling COVID-19. Doc moved to Paducah from Tennessee in 1967, beginning a long career with Union Carbide. He was a master electrician and served in Germany with the Air Force as a maintenance trainer for aircraft during Vietnam. Doc loved the outdoors, Lake Barkley was his heaven on earth. He shared his passion for fishing, camping and hunting to anybody who’d listen. He was an amateur crappie tournament winner several times over, but his real triumph was teaching his daughter, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and friends to fish. His grandkids were by far the light of his life, Ali is 14 and Colin is 13, and he relished his time supporting them or showing them love. Doc served his church, Twelve Oaks Baptist, as both a leader and a humble servant. He was a deacon, bus driver, maintenance man, greeter, and self-proclaimed “master popcorn maker” for basketball games and events. You name it, Doc did it. Doc is survived by his wife of 52 years, Martha Holladay. His daughter Heather and her husband Jim, who were friends of Britainy and mine, and his two grandchildren. We planted a flag in honor of Doc amongst the over 4,000 in the back of the Capitol. And we're thinking about this entire family, their loss, the loss in the community, and realizing that their grief is felt by more than 4,000 families out there. But we all grieve with you and care about you and will continue to do the best we can to make sure we don't lose any other “Doc”s, because everybody is special, and everybody is irreplaceable.

(continued in stickied comment)