Blessed by the Potato

The Value of Simple site has been off-again on-again broken for over a month now. The culprit turned out to be WooCommerce, which in recent versions required more memory and to explicitly define the site’s base URL in the config file (which it hasn’t needed for the last 10 years… but whatever).

Now that’s finally up and running again, I figure hey, I have a few hours, taxes are in, I’ve already got FileZilla and my hosting management site up, maybe now it’s finally time to knock off something that’s been on the back burner for years: adding https to BbtP! (Plus the warnings from Chrome in particular were getting particularly obnoxious about it)

I don’t know how smoothly this is going to go: I have nearly 2000 posts with all kinds of embedded links and images that were hard-coded to non-secure links. Maybe the security warnings will only increase from here…

(I should also probably upgrade my theme to be responsive, but eh, it looks fine on my phone so that can probably wait another decade…)

And the winner of our ultimate cause of Horner’s is… vascular!

I figured once the CT report came back that I had a soft tissue thickening around my carotid artery that it was indeed a carotid dissection causing the Horner’s syndrome. I got to spend two nights in the hospital hooked up to monitors to catch if I had a transient ischemic attack (TIA, in other words a mini-stroke, which a dissection puts you at risk for) while they started me on anti-platelet drugs, and also as a way to expedite getting an MRI.

Then things took a turn for the weird: the MRI did not look like a dissection. There was a thickening there (it’s still the carotid as the culprit behind my Horner’s), but there wasn’t a little pocket of deoxygenated blood trapped in the wall of the artery like you’d expect with a dissection. The radiologist suggested vasculitis instead.

So they did a bunch of blood work looking for the immune markers of vasculitis… and nothing. There’s a few super-rare ones we’re still waiting on the lab to process, but after a lot of head-scratching they let me go with basically a shrug on the exact diagnosis.

I had a bad round of covid about a month before all this started (two months ago now), so the leading theory is basically “covid can do weird and bad things to blood vessels so I guess that’s it.” Maybe it’s a small dissection (which could have been caused by the extreme coughing I had), and maybe I’ve already mostly healed it by now which is why it didn’t have the characteristic appearance on MRI. Maybe it’s an inflammation from the covid itself.

Which leaves me with a bunch of shrugs from a bunch of doctors. We now know I don’t have a brain tumour, but I do have something funky going on in my carotid artery, and that’s causing my Horner’s syndrome. We don’t know exactly what’s happening in that carotid, or what caused it.

Will it get better? shrug.

Will it get worse? shrug.

Will my Horner’s go away? shrug.

They stopped the anti-platelet meds because now there’s no telling if those would help or harm. I’m back home and told to go back to regular life and just be a little extra vigilant for signs of stroke.

The one thing I do know is that this year I’m dressing up as a Zebra for Halloween.

Aside: Hospitals are Hell

I technically work in a hospital (though nowhere near patients), and have ever since I started grad school. I have a great deal of respect for the work that gets done there, the pressures the staff are under and have to juggle (patient comfort, safety, efficiency, etc.), and the limitations of funding and ancient buildings. I don’t mind being prodded, poked, imaged, treated, whatever has to happen there.

But it is impossible to sleep there. The beeps, the lights, the talking, the other patients (snoring, screaming, moaning, watching TV, talking on the phone), and in my case the shining a flashlight in my eyes to check my pupils and taking blood pressure every 2 hours. The first night was annoying but fine — I’ve pulled many an all-nighter, one more sleepless night was nothing I couldn’t handle. But the second night of not being able to sleep was torture.

There’s only so much we can do: while it would be great to build enough hospitals that are large enough for every patient that has to stay overnight to have a private room with a door that can close, that would be a huge investment and not anyone’s top priority for our limited healthcare dollars. However, I believe if I change the trajectory of my life to become an advocate with a single-minded mission to take all the fucking unnecessary beeps off every future piece of medical equipment, we could at least make it so that the wards get quieter as the various monitors get turned over. Indeed, alarm fatigue is a thing so it’s also bad for healthcare quality and safety.

I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, and my pupils were different sizes. That’s gonna need a trip to the doctor, I figured, but it went away when I turned on the big light to get a better look, and again in the morning things seemed fine.

I stayed up late to see the lunar eclipse, and couldn’t focus both eyes on the moon at the same time. Took a few days until I figured out that one eye wasn’t dilating in the dark, but in well lit settings everything seemed more or less fine.

So I finally scheduled that doctor visit.

I wasn’t sure whether this was a GP issue or optometrist issue, so started with GP. She gave me reqs for a bunch of tests and suggested I see the eye doctor, who was able to identify it as Horner’s Syndrome — a collection of symptoms from an interruption in the sympathetic nerve on that side of the face. He asked if I also wasn’t sweating there, which sounded crazy, but I hadn’t been feeling well enough to work up enough sweat to notice. Sure enough, I hopped on the exercise bike afterward and only sweat on one side of my face, which somehow is even more viscerally freaky-deaky than mismatched pupils in the mirror.

Now the syndrome points to a common proximal cause for those symptoms — that sympathetic nerve block. But the ultimate cause of that block could be a dozen things… Most of them bad.

Tumours (brain, spine, neck, lung), vascular complications (esp. carotid dissection), MS (already an S-tier fear for me), or perhaps an upper lobe lung infection or abscess in the jaw or sinuses can all potentially be the cause.

Never thought I’d be rooting for the bacteria.

An MRI will go a long way to figuring out the culprit driving this, and nothing to do now but wait and try not to worry until I get one (it’s in the works).

I don’t know what’s been going on with the last few versions of WordPress, but my sites have been going down a lot. I had barely had things up and running, then a new update, and down again. I’ve disabled every plugin except Woocommerce (for the direct sales over at VoS) and now another update got pushed today and it’s down again (though BbtP seems to be up now, it was down yesterday).

I don’t know what is going on over there, but knock it off! I have a hundred productive things on my to-do list, I can’t keep trying to give CPR to my sites.

While browsing the web, I got served an ad for a fancy non-stick frying pan. It was a slick ad, with a lot of good-sounding reasons for why their claims might be plausible. They listed feature after feature, but I was kind of Jerry-McGuire-face going “you had me at a non-stick frying pan that can go in the dishwasher.” My current set of Teflon-coated frying pans are nearing the end of their life, and I hated my brief experiment with seasoning a cast iron pan, so I’m actually in the market for a good frying pan.

Of course, I’m not familiar with the technology existing for a non-stick food-safe coating that can go in the dishwasher (sure, Teflon says you can, but most sources I’ve seen suggest that even if it doesn’t instantly kill the coating, it reduces the life), so I went hunting for reviews.

It was featured on a “best and worst kitchen gadgets of the year” video from a reputable source… and it was one of the worst. They just slagged it as absolute garbage: eggs stuck to it almost immediately, even when they treat it as carefully as their Teflon pans (one of the selling features was that it was tough enough for metal utensils). It tests so bad they think they must have got a defective pan and go buy another one, and even with hand washing it starts disintegrating after 50 uses according to another review. The poor old lady in the video is visibly shook by how bad this pan is. And it’s marketed as super up-scale, and so it’s costly — but you’d be better off just buying the 10 cheap traditional non-stick pans it would cost and enjoying the 20-30 years of non-stick cooking they would provide instead.

Anyway, the rest of that video is the best gadgets, and I stuck around to see what that was. And it was a soft-sided cooler bag, which I also happen to be in the market for — on our road trip out east, I had resorted to duct-taping my old one together to squeeze one more year out of it.

The video goes over what makes a good cooler bag: a nice, flat lid (some messenger-bag styles have tented tops that waste space and make it hard to get stuff out). Having side handles is a nice perk, as you can lift it easier and hold it close to your body when it’s full and heavy (and I know my old one, which only had a shoulder strap, was a pain that way). They talk about the foam (closed cell insulates better), some other features to help keep things cold that their top pick has, and it’s doing a wonderful job of selling me.

This cooler bag checks all the boxes for them, for me, and as a bonus they say in their testing that when loaded up with ice and drinks, it was still cold 3 days later. I tell you, I’ve never needed a cooler bag to stay cold that long, but it sounds like a nice-to-have.

So I’m sold, and I go to actually shop for one. This thing is FOUR HUNDRED AND TEN CANADIAN LOONIES. For a medium-sized, soft-sized cooler bag.

I liked my old cooler bag (it had over half of the different features they mentioned), and use it in a lot of cases where I’m driving somewhere with cold food (road trips, trips to the ice cream store, even sometimes grocery shopping on a hot summer day), and I got a lot of years of use out of it (…perhaps one too many, given the duct tape this year). So maybe investing in a decent quality new one is not the worst idea.

While I haven’t been shopping for cooler bags yet and don’t know what they should cost, $410 was so far beyond my thought of what it should cost that my brain broke a little.

Anyway, while I might invest in a decent-quality cooler bag in the near future, I won’t be shelling out four hundred dollars for one any time soon.

But that got me thinking about luxury goods. There are people out there who can and will pay for nice things — certainly more than I would. Granted, that’s not a high bar as I’m a) a public servant b) who spent a decade in grad school/research and c) who is also by inclination cheap and writes a finance blog.

Still, there are people who would pay $410 for a cooler bag either because they legitimately needed it to stay cold for 3 days or wanted the best on the market and like having high-quality things. I know even in my own family that that happens — shortly after I moved out I got a set of pretty decent knives complete with knife block for likely something in the $300 range (adjusted to today’s dollars). My dad gave me some Japanese knives that are that much each.

Looking back in history, I used to have a rather unique side business where I would teach people how to invest. There really weren’t any other resources out there like what I could offer, so it made sense to me as a business model. Then after doing it for a few years I saw mostly the same sets of questions and stumbling blocks, and wrote The Value of Simple that answered most of them. I thought I was putting myself out of a job, but I actually got busier — more people found me, and had questions beyond what the book was providing in some cases, but in a lot of cases they just wanted a live person to teach it to them and be there to answer any questions about how ETFs worked, and were willing to pay consulting rates for the service.

That (and spite, we mustn’t forget spite) led me to creating the Practical Index Investing for Canadians course — more content, more questions pre-answered, and a mechanism to ask any additional questions, all at a cost of less than 3 hours of my one-on-one time. It seemed like a win-win and I directed any future clients there, shut down the site advertising my education services, and left it at that.

But now I wonder… I’m not exactly rolling in free time these days, but there are likely people out there who are willing to pay for one-on-one or small group live seminars, just for the premium experience of getting live instruction. Should I hang the shingle back up?

Are there other good ideas that I’ve dumped too soon because I thought there was no way someone would pay what it would cost to deliver? (An example that pops into mind is the mission binder project — I scrapped that one in large part because it was to help with disaster-preparedness and I was working on it in late 2019/early 2020 and whoops a major global disaster kind of stole all the thunder and made the point better than I ever could about how nice it is to have an emergency fund. Anyway, in addition to a traditional book one thought was to make up actual fill-in-the-blanks binders but those would be have to be $100 just to make up the materials and shipping costs).