Blessed by the Potato

I left off with a post about sustaining a head injury, then haven’t posted in over 4 months so some people are — perhaps rightly — worried about what’s going on here and whether my stuff is up for grabs.

I’m merely mostly dead.

Since that post in the summer, CIHR once again went on a denial-of-service attack against researchers, launching a major national competition with a deadline just over 4 weeks after the initial announcement. I picked up another tendon injury, managing to somehow injure the tendon in my elbow sweeping in my first curling event of the year. It’s fine with a tennis elbow brace, and a little over 6 weeks after hurting it I figured it was feeling ok, so I played a game without the brace, and immediately re-injured it. So I’m playing with the brace anytime I’m not skipping now, and will wait until next season to test how well it does on its own, but fortunately it’s not hurting in regular activities any more and I can turn doorknobs again. My ankle has healed enough that I don’t feel any weakness, but I still have a palpable bump in my Achilles tendon.

And after nearly 3 years of managing to avoid it, I finally caught Covid this year and was sick for nearly 3 weeks over the holidays (and still haven’t fully recovered my energy level or brain fog). It hit me somewhat hard — on day 2 I had a decent fever that tylenol & advil combined could not get rid of, and I was uncontrollably shivering to the point I was afraid I was going to break a tooth. So I got paxlovid, which got rid of most symptoms (just tired and then paxlovid mouth), but I got rebound covid just a day or two after my prescription ran out, and had another two weeks of testing positive and having just generic cold symptoms and some brain fog. And even though I’m “better” now, my energy level and focus is still noticeably under 100%. Perhaps not so bad to say that I have long covid/PCC, but it is not all the way back yet.

I got almost nothing from my big 2022 to-do list done, and some of them are getting rather ripe. I had wanted to set up a new dedicated site for the directory of fee-for-service planners, and Google is making that more urgent as someone keeps flagging the spreadsheet as a phishing attempt. But other than a few bullet points in a journal that’s gone nowhere.

I have a bunch of modules for the course to still either add or re-record/update, and I’ve been holding off on promoting it until that’s done. Those are all sitting around 3/4 done and I just haven’t quite been able to polish them enough to upload.

But a webinar I recorded with TD is going live this week — a promotional opportunity that I won’t have the promotion ready for yet! (Feel free to sign up and attend — the interview is on sticking to a simple index investing plan and what can get in our way to obstruct that).

I also wanted to update the rent-vs-buy spreadsheet’s default values. Way, way back in 2011 I had thought that it was important to make a rent-vs-buy calculator that could include the effects of interest rates going up in the future. It’s a risk factor I’ve repeated in many lectures, and while I was disappointed at how long the BoC was able to drag their feet and put off raising rates, even I was surprised at how fast they raised rates when they finally did start moving — the current default scenario assumed 10 years to get back to mortgage rates over 5%, and we did it in 1. So now the starting rates are too low (and the starting prices and rents could likely use some fresh listings searches for updated prices, not much left at the $500k price point these days). I may also need to make the instructions for editing it larger as I still get several requests per week to edit the template.

I had intended to release a 3rd edition of The Value of Simple in 2022, mainly to re-jig things for the all-in-one funds that came out right as the 2nd edition was published. All the material is there in the course already so it wouldn’t be too hard, but I was also debating whether I needed a chapter to go all super-skeptic on crypto since it’s such a common question. Fortunately interest seems to be waning lately so I may just skip it… but there’s still a lot of work to do to spin up another edition and I don’t know when I’ll have the time and mental sharpness coinciding to do it. In the meantime, don’t forget that the errata exists for a reason.

Anyway, I have a few draft posts I hope to finally push out to resuscitate the blog in the next few months, but for now, just know that I’m merely mostly dead but still hanging on.

Oh, and The Bird Site and The Space Toddler — I’ve opened a Mastodon account, but haven’t started using it yet. Hopefully I’ll figure it out before The Bird Site goes down.