Blessed by the Potato

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).

I had been off, away from the blog, working on a third edition of the Value of Simple (mostly struggling with how much I could excoriate certain robo-advisors for not listening to me before it became libel), and it’s been going very slowly. Instead, I accidentally wrote an entirely different book on, of all things, Curling.

How do you accidentally write a book??

Well, I ran a development league at the curling club. The idea was that we’d have a mix of experienced curlers and lot of new curlers, and it would be a home for those fresh out of our learn-to-curl programs. As part of that, I wrote a weekly email with a development tip to send around. And you know me, that wasn’t a short tip like “line up to the target before you get into the hack”, no, it was pages and pages with diagrams.

So by the end of the year I joked that if it felt like they had read a book from me, they weren’t too far off, all together those emails were almost book length. So of course a few people chip in with “you should make it an actual book!”

And, well, here we are.

What’s it called?

Curling for Beginners and Improvers. In a bold, highly unusual step for me, the branding and title are actually very descriptive of the book’s scope and target audience.

What is it about?

Curling! It’s a how-to guide (I seem to be building a specialty in that field) with a big focus on helping relatively new players. It was written in the first place as a supplement and extension to our 4-week learn to curl program, so includes the basics like how you deliver a stone, along with some discussion of common errors and why we do things the way we do. It includes a discussion of the theories behind directional sweeping, and a very light touch on strategy.

I know that the directional sweeping stuff in particular is something that is missing from the market — there are no books covering it yet, and even on YouTube there are precious few resources to help get newbies up to speed on the topic.

When is it coming out?

The release date is set for Oct 16th, to line up with the start of the curling season. With all of the tragedies of the last year, I had to squeeze all of the slack out of the publication timeline so there is a small chance the print edition may get pushed back if there’s a hiccup in the process (I’m expecting the ARCs to arrive any day now, and if there are mis-prints and I have to start over with the printer that will add delays). But e-books are finalized and available for pre-order, and I expect pre-orders for print editions to open up around Oct 1.

How does it compare to other books/resources out there?

I know I’m a bit of a weirdo when it comes to writing/publishing in that I do an environmental scan to make sure I’m actually filling a need and not just piling one more book out into the world (which if I ever decide to write fiction I will have to get all the way over), but I was surprised at how few curling books are out there. I know it’s a niche sport and all, but given how many dividend investing books are out there, I was surprised…

Anyway, What’s Your Call? only came out two years ago, and is entirely devoted to strategy. So I kept the strategy section fairly light and focused on the club-level, first-time skip.

Curling: Steps to Success would be the most similar competitor — that one and mine are both basically books on how to curl. It came out just before the directional sweeping effect was discovered, so doesn’t have anything about that in there. It’s a bit of a different voice — I’m more focused on the casual player/newbie, while Sean Turriff has more of a focus on turning you into a competitive player (so more on teambuilding and drills to do, mental performance issues, less time on the basics). Mine has more Star Trek references, which really is what people come to a curling book for is it not? His has more drills to use in practice sessions. Overall I think if you finished mine and wanted even more with a different voice (hearing/reading the same information different ways does help it sink in more) I would say that’s a good one to get next.

Curling for Dummies has the recognizable “for Dummies” branding, but is ancient (don’t be fooled by the 2020 release date that Amazon shows, it’s just a reprinting of the 2001 edition). It has a lot of non-how-to content that still holds up that I don’t bother getting into (like how the ice is maintained and where granite comes from), but the descriptions of the equipment and methods are (a lot, a little, respectively) out of date now. They do cover the no-lift delivery at least, but the idea of how to line up hadn’t quite matured to where we are today (it was still close enough to the transition from the old backswing delivery). The sweeping section teaches sweeping on a slider, which is how I learned but generally discouraged for beginners now.

Curl to Win is also out of date (it says it was published in 2009 but feels even older than Curling for Dummies, with Russ Howard’s anachronistic-even-for-the-time promotion of the backswing delivery, and anyway looks like it’s out of print now). I didn’t manage to finish Coleman’s books, which were more autobiography than guide (at least as far as I made it).

And that’s about it. It’s a pretty small field for books, which I was surprised by when people told me there was a need for such a book after I made the joke about the weekly emails. Even if my Curling for Beginners and Improvers and the other books on the market had perfectly overlapping scopes, there would probably still be room for it just to hear the info in different voices and approaches.

Of course the scopes aren’t perfectly overlapping: most of the other books also seem to split their focus on helping someone totally new to the sport while also including “become a champion!” type aspirational sections (and right in the title of some). I don’t know if that helps sell books, and maybe I’m missing out by limiting my focus. The simple fact is that I’ve taught hundreds of people in various learn to curl sessions, clinics, and special events, but coached/played zero national champions, so it’s simply not in my wheelhouse to talk about anything other than getting started in the sport and then getting a little better at the recreational level.

There are a bunch of non-book resources, too. Jamie Sinclair’s YouTube channel is terrific (if not quite structured for a start-from-scratch viewer — an advantage books still have). Matt Bean has a well-structured online course available. Both of those offer videos which can really complement written descriptions well, so be sure to check them out, too. For strategy, there’s resources like Chess on Ice.

Interesting, I’ve never heard of this “Curling” that you speak of.

The book is also for you. Curling is a sport that I love, and I try to share my joy in it with the reader, and help bring you along. It’s so inclusive because you can have multiple generations playing together in a single game, which also means it’s a sport that can keep you active for life. It meets you where your abilities and passions are: you can have people putting their all into it with incredible physical effort that spikes even an elite athlete’s heart rate to the top of their range, alongside people who are just trying to focus on the strategy aspect and keep their exercise to nothing more intense than a light walk.

Most importantly, the Canadian winters fly by when you’re curling every week.

I’m sold, where can I preorder it?

I will update this post when more options become available. For now, the e-book is available for pre-order at ~all of the major e-book retailers. And many of them are offering a pre-order discount! You can also pre-order a print copy through my Value of Simple store (yes, set up for a totally different book) — note that those can only be shipped within Canada, but if you want it signed I can do that (though honestly, defacing the book like that will probably only decrease its value).

Pre-order the e-book from Amazon Canada or Amazon US (rest of the world should get taken to their country from the US link) if you have a Kindle reader.

Pre-order the e-book from Rakuten Kobo, Google Play, or Smashwords, Apple, or many other retailers if you have a Kobo, android tablet, or other device that you don’t want to go to Amazon for.

Should I sign up for curling now?

Yes! Most clubs are accepting registrations for new members right now (September, if you’re reading this later), go ahead and sign up if you’re interested in curling, take their learn-to-curl clinic, and the book will come out in time to help supplement those on-ice lessons. Or just sign up and hope with the book and some YouTube videos you’ll figure it out in time. It’s fun.

I see you have a “blog” section on the site for the book. Are you transitioning into a curling blogger?

No, that’s to put up a few posts talking about the book and the writing process, and to act as an “errata” section for any errors or changes that may be needed (e.g., if an academic study in the future debunks one of the competing theories on directional sweeping, that’s where the update will go). I’ve got a few little teaser posts scheduled leading up to the book’s release, including one talking about the behind-the-scenes editorial decisions and the scope I decided the book should have.

So for example, Curling for Dummies is roughly twice as long as Curling for Beginners and Improvers. It’s not because CfD has that much more information on how to curl — I haven’t done a quantitative word count comparison but I’d estimate it’s actually got a little less on delivery and a lot less on sweeping. It’s because CfD’s scope includes so much extra stuff that I thought was unnecessary: a history of the sport (yawn), a description of how curling ice is made and maintained (cool, but not something the average player needs or likely wants to know — the equivalent of including a chapter on Zambonis in a book on hockey or a chapter on lawnmowers in a book on golf), a bunch of “top 10” lists, most of which aged like milk, a section on becoming a coach yourself… you quickly get a lot of pages that, IMHO, weren’t relevant to the core purpose of the book. Anyway, discussing those decisions is that post.

I plan to put up some bonus content (e.g., a chapter that I cut that I was really on the fence about keeping in there), a bit more behind-the-scenes info, and then the page will be mostly a static sales page for the book.

Seriously now, how do you accidentally write a book? Like, how exactly did this go from a bunch of emails to a coherent book?

That is the topic of another blog post on the new site.

In brief, I made the joke about my emails being so long that I had basically forced everyone to read something close to a book by the end of the year. And some people encouraged me to make it an actual book.

Even with a lot of words written, it was a bunch of tip-of-the-week things — I had a few that chained together more coherently for a broader topic, but before it could become a book nearly all of it needed to be restructured and anchored to some coherent order. Plus some of it was stuff specific to our curling club (like how to find a spare, information about our other leagues, etc.), which didn’t make sense to keep. I had to create a detailed outline of everything I’d want a book for new and developing curlers to learn.

Oh, and I had to do it fast — that joke was in my end of season message, so if I wanted to shoot any photos on ice, I had to get to it ASAP before the ice was all gone. The original emails had a bunch of good-enough-for-an-email pictures and illustrations, including pictures I may not have had copyright to, a bunch of figures mocked up by freehanding in MS Paint (one of which I kept in the book because it was cute and to be able to show where this all started). So I worked feverishly, got an outline hammered out, then listed all the photos and poses I might possibly need for every chapter, then got to shooting with Alexis, the book’s official photographer (and it’s partly her fault — I asked her if trying to turn all the tips into a book was a dumb idea and she was actually supportive so she got dragged into the project).

In the end, we had a bunch of new photos and I created many new figures (or re-made them but cleaner). The tips had to be extensively re-written, and a bunch of new ones added — just under half of the word count is new stuff that was missing from the original set of tips. Once the ice was out I spent the early summer writing and re-writing (and thankfully finished before the serial tragedies started hitting).