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 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!

There are still a few days of the summer left, and it hasn’t been all bad, but 2022 has been right up there with 2020 as a summer that was not good for me.

Head Injury

It was after getting a head injury that I coined the term “Summer of Suck” in my mind.

It’s not even a very good story to tell: my indoor cat ran outside when my neighbour came to the door. So I tore out after the cat, with my hands making contact, just about to snatch him back up… when I ran head-first at full speed into the overhanging bay window. What they say about scalp wounds is true: they bleed a lot. Within a breath or two I had a big puddle of blood at my feet. My neighbour grabbed some paper towels for me, collected the cat from under the bush, took her dog back home, and kindly drove me to the hospital for some stitches and glue. No cracking under pressure with that one!

I had a ~3″ long slice across the top of my head, deep enough to bleed ridiculously but not showing bone. Thankfully I was seen fairly quickly, and was in and out of emerg in just over 2 hours.

In a bit of comedy, my mask’s straps ended up inside the bandages the doctor put on, so I had to wear it the whole way home until I could cut it off.

The wound healed up fairly well — I’ve got a small pink scar (with a palpable dent) where the stitches were, and the other ~1.5″ of the cut that was glued together seems to have healed without a trace.

Amazingly, I didn’t seem to get a concussion, even though it seems like I exploded my head from the force of the impact — I was wearing a hat which didn’t get cut, which casts doubt on my theory that I got sliced open by a sharp part on the siding.

Grant Conjunction

It was also an insanely busy period at work, another one of those projects where you’re thankful for work-from-home because there simply weren’t enough hours in the week to fit in commuting too (assuming, as we do, that running on 3-4 hours of sleep/night was already on the wrong side of the insane line and that there was nothing left to cut for train time).

It is not done to bite the hand that feeds you and criticize the agencies that provide research funding. But I have to note how crazy this summer was, and it was not because of so many researchers demanding my services. This year an agency launched a call on top of another agency’s major call (they often attempt to coordinate their deadlines better than that), and even just the one competition was so over the top on the work required and the lack of time provided that it was essentially a denial of service attack on the administrative hearts of the research institutions involved.

But the response was their hands were tied because their funding agreement with the federal government required such insane timelines on our end to make it work. And perhaps they have the same don’t-bite-the-hand-just-suck-it-up attitude we have (esp. as we’re the ones dealing with the fallout), but, like, funding agreements can be amended if you realize there isn’t enough time to complete the project on time. Just sayin’.

And that’s all I’ll say about that SNAFU for now.

Site Attack

Oh and speaking of attacks, I also had someone decide to attack the Value of Simple shop with hundreds of fraudulent orders, which soaked up what little blog/writing/side business time I set aside this summer.

Thankfully, Stripe, my main credit card processor, flagged the fraudulent transactions and stopped them after a handful had gone through.

You may not know this about running a small business, but when you issue refunds, you’re still on the hook for the credit card processing fees for that transaction. So if you buy my $7 e-book and then demand a refund (say for the very legitimate reason that someone stole your credit card), and I refund your $7, I still have to pay the credit card processor roughly $0.50 for handling that non-transaction. So I was out about four bucks, which is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.

But here is where things get ironic: you cannot pay your bill to the credit card processor with a credit card. They want a wire transfer. I haven’t actually ever done a wire transfer, so I went to Tangerine to see what I should do (and how much they’d charge me to do one). While I was afraid it was going to be like a $20 bank service charge to pay my $4 debt, it turned out to be even more of a Catch-22: they don’t offer wire transfers, period.

Eventually my (concussed?) brain caught up with the obvious work-around: I bought a copy of my own book to get money into my Stripe account to cover the deficit.

At the moment, direct sales are suspended until I can figure out a way to help prevent a future attack — Stripe suggests adding a captcha, and I honestly can’t believe that’s not included as an out-of-the-box option in WooCommerce. There’s a third-party plug-in that will do it for $38/yr, which is right in that valley of being much more than the economic loss I’ve suffered while also being less than the brain damage and time I’d have to commit to re-learn a minimal amount of PHP to functionally drop in the code snippet myself.

The book is still available from Kobo, Amazon, Indigo, Google Play, etc., so I’m not in a hurry to make my direct-from-the-author webstore work again, so that may be a while.

I Was Once an Adventurer Like You

I picked up another fun injury this summer: apparently from sitting too long at my desk in suboptimal positions (hundred-hour workweeks will do that), I have blown out my ankle. It certainly wasn’t from physical activity or sports! Too busy to see anyone about it, of course, it seems to be healing slowly (very slowly). Nice big lump in my Achilles’ tendon, and it kind of gives out and won’t hold my weight if I lean to the right. I just hope it’s fully healed by curling season!

Road Trip

Once the grants were in, I was off to PEI on a road trip with Blueberry! This was actually a really nice part of the summer, I’m sure she’ll remember her daddy-daughter road trip for a long time. I was really nervous about it — I used to drive 2 hours at a time every week before she was born, and did the trip out East almost yearly. But in the last 10 years the longest road trip I’ve taken has been 3 hours, and I felt worn out after that. So on the way out I decided to space the ~19 hours of actual driving (plus meal breaks and pit stops makes it even more in the car) over three days, which also gave us a bit of time to hit some tourist attractions.

The driving itself was fine, and she was a great little passenger. So on the way home I decided to do the drive in two days.

And we’ve been home for 8 days as I write this and I still have motion sickness — like when you’re on a boat all day then feel as if you’re swaying when you get back on land, I feel as if I’m rumbling along the highway and get dizzy if I look anywhere but straight ahead. I keep hoping one good night of sleep will fix that… and am just waiting for that one good night of sleep to happen!

The Cat

Not too long after our return, the cat got sick. He threw up in every room of the house (more than once in a few), and stopped eating. I took him to the vet, and he had all the signs of a blockage in his digestive tract. A quick surgery found a section of diseased intestine, like bowel ischemia… but no foreign object causing it! Quite the medical mystery.

He’s forbidden from any climbing or jumping activity, not even going up or down stairs for 14 days while he recovers. Yeah, try telling a cat that. The first few days he was so sick and tired and low energy after not eating for a day and then surgery that it was easy to comply, but we still have the better part of a week to go and he is done with recovery.

More Injuries

And then I fell down the stairs randomly. I’ve tried to replay what happened but while I remember the landing, I don’t recall exactly what caused me to fall in the first place. I don’t think I was dizzy from my weird road trip motion sickness, but it could have played a part. I don’t think my weirdly injured ankle gave out, but it was the one that I fell on.

I managed to land pretty much on my kidney, catching a riser across that lower back area. On the plus side, I didn’t hit my hip or a rib so no broken bones. On the down side, everything hurts. And honestly, who lands on their kidney?

The Next Quadrennial

The past few years I’ve gotten more serious about curling (by which I mean, I play more often. I’m still plenty silly on the ice). I even have a team in the team-entry league! We have matching jackets!

Or, had. After the Olympics, many of the pro teams broke up and re-formed for new configurations to try to win their medals in the next 4-year cycle. And I guess that happened to us, too? So now I’m sad because I have to find a new curling team.

My Mom

And of course the worst for last: in case you weren’t aware, my mom has MS, and has been living through the gradual loss of function for years, but up until recently was still walking with assistance (i.e. a walker), could stand up, etc. Early in the summer she very suddenly and unexpectedly lost a lot of lower-body function and requires significantly more help in the daily activities of life. She apparently didn’t want to tell any of her relatives out on the east coast, and had just mysteriously cancelled her planned trip out there on them. So I got to be the herald of bad news while I was out there.

I had originally written that we were waiting on PSW support from the Province, but before hitting publish (and after two months) we finally got coverage for two visits, five days a week, which should help with some of the burden (which is falling mostly on my sister).

The Summer of Suck Comes to a Close

So, as August comes to a close, hopefully that is it for injuries and stress and bad news and health problems.

I haven’t had a chance to work on any of the site/side business goals I had for this year yet. No fun blog posts. And the health goals are way out the window, there’s no getting those back.

Perhaps Commissions Aren’t So Bad

Dan Ariely talks about the difference between free and nearly free. Nearly free and free have basically the same effect on your overall net wealth: whether you pay 14 cents in ECN fees every month or zero as you accumulate your investments is going to have no measurable impact on your ability to retire. But the difference between a few cents and free on your trading behaviour is huge — people will trade a lot more when it’s free. Plus the sales commission on the selling side for Questrade is good for investor behaviour: not high enough to actually be a real barrier to selling, but puts just that little bit of psychological stop in before selling and prevents dabbling in day-trading.

So I’m worried these days that so many people don’t ask “what’s a good brokerage to use?” but “which investing app should I use? Is Robinhood in Canada?”

And as much as lower fees are better, perhaps there’s a behavioural benefit to paying a little bit of commission and we shouldn’t encourage zero-fee platforms. Plus these companies make money somehow, which may include providing worse fills (though that doesn’t seem to be allowed in Canada).

Smartphone Addiction

Your smartphone is an ingenious device, carrying more power than the desktop computer I had in university, and able to carry out many very useful functions. It’s no wonder many of us have them practically welded to us. But they are an insidious thing: they short-circuit our brains in some of the worst ways.

Paying by mobile phone reduces the pain of paying even beyond that of using a credit card, so it’s all too easy to impulse buy something and not even notice how much you spent with that tap. And so many apps are addictive (sometimes purposefully so) that just touching your mobile phone short-circuits all of your careful reasoning faculties. [only a modest exaggeration on my part]

Do. Not. Trade. On. Your. Phone.

Investing Apps

Long before there was daytrading involved, WealthSimple bragged about how a third of their users checked in with the app daily. Daily! For a robo-advisor. There’s nothing to do! The whole point is to have a long-term investment plan that you don’t have to babysit!

From their point of view it was great: more mindshare, better odds that someone is checking on their phone and a friend goes “oh hey what’s that.” So of course they loved it. But I was horrified. Setting aside the unhealthy relationship people had with their phone and this app, it was setting investors up for loss-aversion disappointment (or panic): the more often you check in on your portfolio, the more likely you are to catch a downturn and see that you’ve lost some money.

So mobile phone investing apps had a horrifying relationship to engagement and addiction before they threw day-trading into the mix.

Do. Not. Trade. On. Your. Phone.

Dark Patterns, Advertising, and Active Investing

The trailblazer in no-commission app-based trading, the brand that has become synonymous with the product itself, is Robinhood in the US. And Robinhood has been criticized for its dark patterns, gamifying parts of the user experience to encourage people to trade more often and make more speculative bets. For example, they’d flash digital confetti up on the screen as a kind of reward/congratulations for placing a trade, and list trendy stocks.

Now WSTrade looks to be copying some (but thankfully nowhere near all) parts of the playbook, with a mobile-only [update: mobile-first, as I took forever to publish this and got scooped in some ways and they now have a desktop web version] app, offering zero commissions and fractional shares. And they’ll give you a free stock, to really drive home that idea of trading individual stocks, with a lottery-like component (will your sign-up bonus be a penny stock or a really valuable share?).

They also moved beyond stocks into an even more speculative space with crypto trading. And while not a dark pattern within the app itself, their ads are highlighting all the new speculative investments you can trade with them (rather than focusing on the good parts, like that you can do long-term investing in an all-in-one ETF with no commissions — in fact I can’t say that I’ve seen a single ad along those lines).

In the US case at least, there are plenty of stories of people getting caught in things they don’t understand and losing lots of money — whether through mistakes, or through functionally a fully enabled gambling addiction. Thankfully, here in Canada investing apps don’t push users toward derivatives to add risk on top of daytrading, though they are moving toward “instant deposits” to wipe out any chance for cooling off periods and do include crypto. And the “first stock” promotion of “up to $4,500!” reinforces the gambling aspect of investing, and fractional share ownership promotes speculating in individual securities long before a user is ready for that.

And that’s not to mention fat-finger trades — how many typos have you made texting on that device?

Do. Not. Trade. On. Your. Phone.

Academic Research Backs Me Up

Two recent papers back up my instinctive refrain that you should not be trading on your phone.

First, Does Gamified Trading Stimulate Risk Taking? looks at the gamification aspect:

“We find that gamification “nudges” participants to take on more risk, particularly when trading high-volatility assets. The effect is stronger for inexperienced traders with lower financial literacy.”

You can read a more lay-friendly version here.

Their finding on the moderating influence of financial literacy gives me some hope. However, it also worries me, as people with low financial literacy are the ones now searching for “investing apps” rather than “best brokerage” – the term brokerage is almost entirely missing from new discussions on Reddit, for example, so the people using these apps are much more likely to be the low-finlit ones most susceptible to the gamification, gambling, ads, and dark patterns.

Next, Smart(Phone) Investing? A within Investor-Time Analysis of New Technologies and Trading Behavior looks at people’s behaviour when trading on their phone.

“we find that smartphones increase the purchase of riskier, lottery-type, non-diversifying assets, and of past winners and losers. […] following the launch of smartphone apps, investors are—if anything—more likely to purchase risky, lottery-type, and non-diversifying assets as well as chase winners and losers on non-smartphone platforms. […] We find evidence against investors offsetting these trades on other platforms and against digital nudges mechanically driving our results. Smartphone effects are neither transitory nor innocuous: assets purchased via smartphones deliver lower Sharpe ratios. Our findings caution against the indiscriminate use of smartphones as the key technology to increase access to financial markets.” [emphasis mine]

That reinforces my more instinctive view that even touching your phone short-circuits your self control thought: simply trading on your phone increases the likelihood of buying riskier things, and it infects your trading even off your phone. They also include a reference to another study on purchases, supporting the idea that smartphones reinforce system 1 thinking, where people ordered more unhealthy food on their mobile devices.

Conclusion

If you’re looking to start investing, do not look for a zero-commission “app”. Start by reading, and then open a brokerage account and only use your desktop/laptop to trade. Even if the brokerage you ultimately choose has a mobile app, don’t use it, as even occasional usage may change your appetite for lottery-like stocks. Controlling costs is important and a virtue, but zero costs changes our behaviour in ways that may be counter-productive. A few dollars here and there (or even $10 big bank commissions) are not going to derail your long-term plan, but may keep you from trading more than necessary. And finally:

Do. Not. Trade. On. Your. Phone.

I’ve been very quiet about covid over the last two years, and I feel bad about that. I’m a science communicator, and this is one of the biggest science stories ever, yet here I am largely sitting it out. I admittedly haven’t been writing much of anything these days with my own issues on the go, plus it seems to be a topic that attracts such controversy that I just didn’t want to even go there. And besides, lots of other science communicators are on the job, and virology wasn’t my field. But still, I kick myself wondering if perhaps if I wrote and article and said “folks” enough maybe it would be the one to get through to DoFo. Anyway, the past is the past and I’ll have to sit with my private-mode ranting. Why am I finally inviting a war in my comments section?

A recent article in the Star really resonated with one aspect: how the heck our kids are dealing with this nightmare.

So far Blueberry is handling things fairly well, but as much as I love getting to spend time with her, the kid needs to hang out with kids her own age and not her parents. She’s been at in-person learning whenever the schools have been open. And for the most part we’ve been dealing with the risk of contagion there: she has decent custom-made masks (we even did a fit test with nutrisweet and recorded it all for a podcast that we then never followed-through with publishing /fail), she’s good at wearing them, her hand hygiene, and getting tested whenever she has any symptoms.

And those are the key ways to manage the risks: the kids need in-person learning, but balanced against the risks of the disease. Closing the schools in the prior waves was ~the right call (though they should have closed them earlier so the duration could have been shorter but then we get back to me raging about the mis-management or enacted other restrictions earlier to try to save the schools) because community transmission got too high and that has to stay down to keep the schools at a reasonable level of risk.

But now with the Omicron-driven wave and this most recent re-opening, we have lost two of the layers of protection: our testing system is overwhelmed, so kids with the sniffles aren’t getting tested, and we have not kept community transmission down. So the odds of someone in her classroom having covid is much higher than before, and chances are good that it will go undetected. Which brings us back to the big weakness in the in-person learning model: lunch (and snack) time.

You simply cannot maintain the layer of protection from masks and also eat (and by the same token, in-person dining should also be the first to close and the last to open). And it’s -20 in January so the school isn’t sending them outside to eat (which also has the issue of trying to eat in gloves or freezing little fingers).

Which brings us back to that Star article I mentioned:

According to Dr. Anna Banerji, a pediatrician and University of Toronto professor, lunchtime is the riskiest period of the school day for COVID-19 transmission because of the removal of masks, even if it is partial or brief.

Banerji said bringing kids home for lunch if possible is “not a bad idea.”

I had the same thought, and have been taking Blueberry out of school for lunch every day that they’ve been back. I know that most parents can’t do that: they don’t have the flexibility in their schedules, or don’t work from home in the first place, so I get to do this from a place of privilege (but also a place of necessity — Wayfare is ~immunocompromised so we have to be extra cautious even with her 3 doses). But I was surprised that I was the only one showing up at the school’s front door every day.

I don’t know if I should be trying to convince the other parents who are BbtP readers to look at take a wild guess at the rate of transmission in their community and think about whether they too should pull their kids out for lunch (or have their kids eat outside or just do intermittent fasting to skip lunch entirely), or if I should be encouraging you all to talk me off the ledge of paranoia.

For now, it’s working well for us, and we feel like our risk of catching covid is lower because of it, and the only cost is that my work day stretches into the evening to make up the time. Hopefully in a few weeks this wave will have crested and we can get our testing infrastructure back online and maybe reduce the risk that any kid in a class is carrying covid for that moment when they all take their masks off to eat.