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Gather round my friends and listen to the very long and very sad tale of my technical nemesis the Maximum PC 1999 Dream Machine.
Back in the late 90s I did tech support in rural Alaska. What's not rural in Alaska you ask?
Well urban Alaska is a place you can drive to on a paved road.
Suburban Alaska is a place you drive to on a road.
Rural Alaska is where downtown is on the road, but the houses not so much.
Remote Alaska takes a boat, plane, train, ATV, snow machine, dog sled, or other non standard mode of transportation.
Anyway on with the story. I worked in town at a small tech shop. We had a frequent customer who lived remote. He was a friend of the shop and spent easily $10,000 a year on hardware for his off-grid "cabin." Every time he came to town he bought some new toy or component and talked shop with us techies.
He was super excited about the new millennium so when Maximum PC released their 1999 Dream Machine he came to us to put one together for him. Top of the line: Pentium 3 - Coppermine 800mhz water cooled and overclocked, 1Gb of CL2 SDRAM, GeForce 256 with dual SLI Voodoo 2s, SCSI 8GB boot drive, Striped 20GB IDE storage array. It was hell on rails and the absolute sexiest machine a gamer could ask for.
For those who aren't reaching retirement age, the Pentium 3 Coppermine CPU was basically unobtainable in 1999 it took us the better part of a month just to find someone willing to sell it to us. We paid 3x retail and considered ourselves fortunate to have gotten it at all. Then we had it overnighted to Alaska from somewhere in Indiana for an additional ton of money. CPU alone ended up costing $3000.
The CPU was the last part to arrive and the shop basically closed down when FedEx arrived. We thoroughly inspected the package for signs of damage, triple checked our grounding straps, and everyone watched in awe and trepidation as the lead tech ever so gingerly placed it into the socket. A dab of Silver Fox and the stock heat sink later we're ready for first boot... Hurray it POSTs!
So we do the usual, slap Windows 98SE install disk in let it get to work on install. Install finishes up and we start up 3DMark, gonna get us a high score! Nope... Halfway through the test BSOD! Crap, okay wire check, temp check everything is good. 2nd try, fingers crossed... Boom BSOD.
2 hours of frantic forums searching later. 98SE hates more RAM than 512 unless you tweak a bunch of system settings. So we pull out half the RAM start it back up, run 3DMark so we know it was just the RAM amount. Benchmark score is nice, like double any of our personal rig scores nice. So we tweak some system settings, shut it down, add the RAM back in, spin it up, Mark it. Success!
Burn in time. Now sure we could have set 3DMark on a loop, but this rig was worth better than half a year's salary and the hottest setup we had ever seen. So we hooked it up to the shop network, big screen, and speakers and payed Unreal Tournament till 2am. Satisfied with the hardware we made our way home.
Bright and early the next morning we show up and get to the hard work of switching from air cooled to water cooled. We ran the tubes, measured twice, cut once, plumbed the blocks, checked for leaks...
No leaks!
Drained 'em set aside to let dry, took off the fans from ALL THE THINGS!!!, installed the water blocks, filled the system, prayed to all the gods we could think of, and checked for leaks...
No leaks!!
Second burn in time! It's business hours now though so it's 3DMark on a loop. Rig runs all day CPU levels off at 45c and stays. Awesome! Full load 45c we're good for phase 3. Let's see what this baby can do! Hit the BIOS set the FSB from 100mhz to 133mhz hell yeah! We've got GHZ! Score it again, this time it's mind blowing. I can't for the life of me remember the score but it was insane. So we start the true burn in, watching like hawks crowded around the bench, staring blinkless at the CPU temp. 45, 50, 55, 60... no sign of slowing, 65, 70, 75... fingers poised to abort because none of us can afford to replace this CPU, 76, 77, 77, 77!
Stable!!!
So we let it run and call the customer. Congratulations Mr. Customer sir it's a thing of beauty, come pick it up. Per shop policy we put it in a place of prominence next to the counter and hooked up to the biggest CRT we had for the ceremonial presentation. Customer finally arrives, as giddy as a rough and tumble Alaskan fisherman can be. It's late December so we shout Merry Christmas and usher him to his newest acquisition. He's delighted of course, and since we're in town and have DSL he's got a request. He pulls a copy of Quake off the shelf, writes out a check and takes his rig to our "cyber cafe" to pwn some folks. (Yes I know this was like 5 years before pwn was coined, cut me a little slack.) He spent the rest of the day and a bunch of that evening in there happy as a clam. On the sickest rig I'd ever seen.
Now if that was the end of it this would be the long, pleasant, and anticlimactic story of building a rich guy a computer. This is the long, sad, and sordid affair of the Dream PC 1999. We're only halfway through.
Our happy customer takes his prize home, the owner cashes the $8,000 check, everyone is happy, we close up shop and take Christmas with our families.
New Year comes around and we get a call from our favorite customer. He finally got new telephone out to his place and got DSL but he can't run Quake for more than 5 minutes without the system freezing up. With great trepidation the phone tech asks if it smells funny or there's any water leaking from the bottom...
Nope dry and smell free!
"Ok then bring it in for your 12 months of free warranty service, we'll see what's up with it."
A few days later in he comes with the rig under his arm, evidently chagrined but in good spirits. He gets the favorite customer treatment and we set the rig up on the test bench immediately. It works, flawlessly. Boot up Quake crank the settings to max run a round still fine. Slap 3dMark on it it chews it up and spits out a mind blowing score. We show the customer and he asks us to keep stress testing it while he goes shopping and he'll stop by after. So we spend 2 hours poking at it trying to make it fail but no dice, it's the most stable overclocked machine we've ever seen. When the customer comes back we pronounce it provisionally fixed and he takes it home.
Two days later phone call, "Quakey no worky." Alright bring it back in... This time we're serious we keep it overnight. Which means over a week since the customer only comes in to town once a week. So for a week we poke, prod, and abuse this computer. Constantly running benchmarks and games, use it as the technical teams super gaming rig in-store after hours. We can't make it fail. We call the customer back "Look this thing works like a champ we can't break it" he comes in we show him. He takes it to the cafe it works, so he takes it home.
The next week... "Rigs not working again, maybe it wants a car ride?" In he comes with it. Per usual it works, he shops, he takes it home.
The next day, "Car ride didn't work, can I schedule a house call?" Generally house calls weren't a problem, but remember I said this guy lived remote. He was 40 miles out of town, only 20 of those were paved or plowed and the last 10 weren't even road. No one in the shop wanted to burn a full day going out there for warranty work in February in Alaska, but since Windows Server 2000 was fresh on the market we offered him a copy on the house if he brought the rig back in and let us reinstall it. We figured that maybe the issue had to do with the system tweaks we had done to make 98 accept the RAM. It was a long shot but we were desperate.
The next week in comes our customer and his dream rig. He leaves it in our care and we spend the next week backing up, wiping, installing the new OS, and burning the rig in again. It still handles like a champ the whole time. Never as much as a jitter. When he comes back in we have the rig set up in the cafe all ready for him to test, which he does but you can see the glee has gone out of him. He's waiting for the other shoe to drop when he gets home.
And drop it does. We don't hear from him for two weeks but that's because he was afraid to call the night he got it home. He still can't game on it. This time when he asks for a service call we schedule it. The lead tech was the only one of us that owned a Skidoo to make the last 10 miles so he got the pleasure of making the trip. He set it for Friday morning so he could make a whole weekend trip out of it and go skidooing after the call out.
Does the boss get his happy weekend? NO! The curse of the intermittent problem rises up to defeat him.
He's there on site for 6 hours. The customer isn't lying, the rig will idle fine, but 5 minutes of Quake and it reboots. Not BSOD, just reboots like the reset button got pushed. He used every tool he had with him but couldn't find anything wrong with it. He even took 3dMark and a copy of Unreal Tournament out in case it was somehow something about Quake in specific. It wasn't, he couldn't run anything graphics or CPU intensive without it shutting down. So he restored the FSB to 100mhz thinking it must be an OC thing...Nope still won't run, just now it fails while not performing as well. So instead of a long weekend of Skidoo he has to bring the rig back to our bench to be tested component by component.
After a week of bench testing each component we still haven't gotten anything to fail either individually or together, but we're on the hook with this guy for the most expensive rig anyone has ever built so we RMA every piece we can one at a time, with a trip back to the customer after every RMA. Over the next 2 months we made that rig onto a Ship of Theseus, that means everything from the case on in has been replaced except for the CPU. We kept the CPU for last since we got that technically aftermarket we were on the hook for it and couldn't RMA it. By that point though it was May and we just bought another one retail. It was still $1000...
I remind you that at no point has this rig been anything other than amazing for us to use in the shop and between the time and the extra expense we'd killed any profit we had on the deal but this customer was still our best customer so we kept at it.
Memorial Day rolls around and I get the delivery job for the now entirely new PC. The "road" is dry now so I can take it in my off road truck along with every tester I own, my personal bench PC, and a take no prisoners attitude. This will be a solved issue!
I rolled out with a multimeter, network tester, lineman's handset, broad spectrum RF analyzer, oscilloscope, surge protector, UPS, you name it I had it, and I checked everything. Power? He was on a generator after all. He took me and showed me his setup, 20kw pure sine wave inverter cleaner power than we had in town. Telephone? It was a new copper run... Tested dead on for voltage, coms were clear. Turns out he's paid $3000 a mile for 8 miles of run to his property line. Then hired out for another mile to the cabin privately specifically to have good enough signal to get maxed out DSL internet.
I setup both his computer and my bench rig. Bench rig first in case I was wrong about the power and network. Bench rig goes up gets online plays Quake. Not at the same settings his could but it runs gaming and then 30 min of benchmark without a hitch. So moment of truth, I took down my rig put up his. Hooked it up to all the same peripherals, then booted it up. First ran 3DMark and it went...Fine!! I stepped aside and he took over double clicked Quake III and... Quakey Worky! I shouted, he shouted, he spun up some Rage Against the Machine and we rocked out to our hard fought victory. Then I packed up all my stuff and left feeling secure in my technical superiority.
But was that the end? It was certainly long, but that's not sad enough.
Summer Solstice (June 20th) is a big day in Alaska the longest day of the year. People host BBQs and stay out late under the midnight sun. So it wasn't a huge surprise when our customer invited the whole tech support team out to his place for a solstice party. He knew how much work we'd put into making his computer the dream he had envisioned. We closed the shop a little early and headed out. When we got there there were a bunch of people, BBQ, beer, I think there was even a 3 legged race at one point. It was midweek so nobody was planning on staying too late but the host asked us to stay after everyone started to disperse.
When it was just us techies and our host he went in and brought a bottle of scotch and 5 glasses out to the deck we were all on. He poured, served, and toasted to hard work and perseverance paying off. We drank and then our host pointed out a beige box at the bottom of his field maybe 150 yards from the house. "I invited you guys out here today because you deserve to see this." he said as he went inside grabbed a .308 deer rifle off his mantle, walked down off the deck into the pasture and unloaded 5 rounds into what I then realized was a computer case.
He slung the rifle over his shoulder, went down the field and retrieved his target. Brought it back up for us to inspect. All this while we stared aghast after him wondering why he would literally shoot a dream computer to bits. We asked as much when he returned and he ushered us inside to his living room and attached a camcorder to his TV. There in full living color with a date in the corner of June 10th was a 5 minute video of a computer refusing to run Quake III...
submitted by 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)
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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.)
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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?
The 25 best online games to play right now with your friends (or foes) By Samuel Horti , Diego Arguello 19 January 2021 We rank the best online games you can play right now, so prepare to get friendly Codenames. This is a popular free multiplayer game to play in a group of two to eight friends, with two teams and a Spymaster for each team. Feel the rush of adrenaline as you guess the 25 codenames there are on the “table.”. Free online games to play with friends With the coronavirus situation in full swing, Singaporeans are encouraged to play their part by socially distancing themselves and avoiding going outdoors. Physical meetups with friends where everyone gathers and screams over party games will be missed for now, but there are still many online alternatives out there. So let’s get started with the best games to play with friends online list which will never disappoint you and your friends. Remember that all games included in this list are humongous in terms of graphics, with more realistic features, and require a good enough PC. 2. Fortnite. Another online game you can play on your PC, Fortnite is a massive survival co-op game that includes a great battle royale mode. If you love battle royales and want to play with other people on a vast open-world where everyone is out to get each other then Fortnite is definitely the best game for you. 10 Online Games You Can Play With Your Friends That Are Completely Free Since we are all in quarantine, host a virtual game night! By May Vin Ang — 03 Apr 2020, 06:44 PM Thanks to some phenomenal Fortnite player numbers, and the fact it’s a good deal more polished than PUBG, Epic’s last man standing extravaganza is one of the best multiplayer games on PC. Free online games are in again; ... 10 free online games to play with your friends Feel Good. Study International Staff 01 May 2020 Free online games are a student's preferred way to keep the good times rolling while away from friends. Source: Hanny Naibaho ...
These are great games to play with friends; especially being free to play browser games! .io games are interactive online games anyone can just click a link... https://www.patreon.com/skylentDISCORD: https://discord.gg/jx7cYPWSUB HUMBLE BUNDLE & SUPPORT ME! https://goo.gl/q95Vt9👪 Top Ten "Free Games To Play With Fr... -------------------Thanks For Watching------------------- --------------------------------- ---------------------------------- Don't Forget to "S... We've been craving games we can play together, apart - so here is Jared's list of his top 10 favorite cooperative online games to play that aren't Animal Cro... The Top 10 FREE PC Games of 2020 that are FREE TO PLAY on STEAM and other platforms, these are the BEST NEW FREE TO PLAY Games this year!In this Top 10 Best ... What are some great free or affordable online multiplayer co-op games to play with friends? These are the best ones to play on Xbox, Steam, and PS4.Support u... Being apart doesn't mean you can't play together. Here are 10 PC games best enjoyed with friends.When you want to push the boundaries of play, Play Advanced ... Hey friends! This is my top list of ten (really many more) for best fast free browser aka .io games you should play with family & friends! Join my discord t...
