Blessed by the Potato

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).

I know, it’s a bad sign when half of a blog’s recent posts page consists of “not-dead” posts, but it’s been a hell of a year. Here’s a quick recap of the woes, which I will promptly bury with something completely different.

So first off, we got kicked out of our house. It’s explicitly a risk that renters have to accept in the rent-vs-buy debate, but it still sucks when a risk is realized and slapping you in the face. It was extra sucky because our landlords decided to tell us that they were moving in in mid-August. They gave us much more than the minimum notice, saying we could stay until the new year… but that would mean Blueberry would have had to switch schools mid-year. We were under some pressure to not only move against our will, but to do so on an extremely tight timeline.

It was extra super-duper sucky timing because we had looked at a place in the maternal grandparents’ neighbourhood just a week or so before and passed on it, largely because we didn’t want to have an unnecessary move. If we had known a week early we would have jumped all over that place. Grr.

So we hustled and bustled to find a new place in a matter of weeks. Holy crap were some of the houses in complete shambles. One we were sure was possessed it was so grungy and grimy and gross feeling that it had to be the work of the supernatural. We did manage to get a lease on the last possible day to register for a new school year, and even that was crazy. I don’t know how realtors managed to sneak their greasy incompetent mittens into the leasing world, but they did, and we had to go through this realtor who knew nothing rather than being able to talk to the landlord directly until after we had been approved to sign a lease. Then the lease was some legal shambles spewed out by someone who clearly had no idea how leases work, with weird illegal, illogical clauses inserted. The biggest one being a clause that gave the landlord a rescission right for a number of days to check our credit. The landlord can absolutely check our credit, and we provided an invasive amount of information to let him do that… but that happens before signing the lease. Even if you allow for the idea of a conditional period to check in on credit, the clause was written so that the lease would be self-cancelling if he didn’t proactively provide a written notice of his approval, with the rescission period extending well into the period where we would have moved in. Let alone legality, it makes no common sense to have a lease self-immolate because a landlord forgot to send an email long after a tenant had already moved in. And then going through what felt like 10 different people to get that fixed (when Ontario has a standard lease template anyway!).

Whatever, it all sucked tremendously. Then the actual effort of packing and moving, which also sucked. But we’re here now.

And I skipped a step, this was preceded by moving my mom into a facility that was better able to care for her, so lots of work and effort there (and lots of thoughts to come on that). Then after packing up and moving our place, it was time to pack up and clear out mom’s place, and list it for sale in one of the slowest markets the GTA has seen this millennium.

So that was a big part of the fall/winter/spring I was away from the blog. Then comes this summer. I had called 2022 “the summer of suck” and 2024 was another contender for the title. To just rapid-fire out the news in one long paragraph, we went on a family road trip out East (so far so good), to the Potato holy land. The first day we arrived, it was unseasonably cold and the heat and hot water weren’t working. It was a dumb, simple to fix thing in the end (there are like 4 different emergency shut-offs for the power, gas, and water feeding the furnace and hot water heater, included one outside, and whoever had winterized my parents’ place had redundancy/paranoia in mind and had flipped them all) but took all of the first night and then all of the second day to go through all the troubleshooting steps to figure it out and get it working again. I thought that was going to be my big “ha-ha bad luck vacation story” but then the next day one of my aunts on my dad’s side got a sudden and severe case of pneumonia and had to go to the hospital, and died a few days later. On my mom’s side of the family, one of my uncles was struggling with some weird symptoms for a little while, and found out it was a super-aggressive brain cancer. He died barely a month after finally getting a diagnosis. And my mom had a bad, bad accident, rolling her wheelchair down a flight of stairs, ending up in a coma for a week and has been in the hospital for almost two months now (though is now in stable condition).

Anyway, I will bury this bad news post with another post right away, but some other rapid-fire updates:

• I hate hate hate the new WordPress. I haven’t figured out how to make some equivalent of a classic editor plug-in work, but having to add a “new block” for every paragraph disrupts writing so much, and it creates so many ways for me to screw up the layout. I had to set up a new site from scratch and even though I’ve built like 6 or so sites on my own and worked on quite a number of other ones, I just kept getting stymied by this new approach to writing and design that they’ve taken on. The new site is live now (see next post!) and is reasonably ok-ish but I just can’t figure out how to tighten up the layout any more or add the elements I want to and I give up at this point, it’s good enough for people to get what they need out of it. But way harder than previous versions of WordPress, and seems to be actively hostile to users doing anything (even changing the stock photos in a pre-designed theme seemed to break things!). Zero stars.
• I also haven’t posted on The Bird Site since the take-over, though I’ll probably go on it to promote the next post. I tried setting up an account on Threads with my usual username, and was instantly banned before I even posted anything — apparently holypotato is hate speech in Meta’s eyes? Anyway, the community on Threads appears to be more vibrant than Mastodon, but I’m still trying to figure out how to use it (esp. as it seems more mobile-oriented, so my ancient desktop-based brain can’t even figure out how to link you to my profile [oh there it goes]). Anyway, after my first round of being insta-banned I now have the oh-so-catchy handle of valueofsimpleca.
• In the various house moves, I inherited my sister’s Peloton. Though the membership isn’t cheap, it is actually motivating me to “sweat every day” so yay for small health wins? There is some kind of social aspect to Peloton that, to echo a point from above, my ancient desktop-based brain has not figured out yet. I have #curling on my profile if that helps make friends?
• I’ve made very little progress on the third edition of the Value of Simple. Instead, I wrote an entirely different book (see next post!). But the third edition is still on my (very long, very slow to clear) to-do list!