The Principles Instagram feed helps me think better. I’m going to paraphrase a couple:

• Highly believable people, who disagree with you in a way you can hear, are gold!
• Consider the believability of your sources of information => cull and curate so you are being feed the best ideas from believable people in their areas of expertise.

There’s more good stuff in the book.

My medical mentor sent me a note that’s different than the rest of my feed. He works in a network directly involved in treating COIVD-16. He has more skin in the game than the media, the politicians and risk experts who dominate my feed.

Thanks. I tested negative; I’m not sure I fully understand the benefit, though. There are false negatives and our transplant teams are finding the only reliable way to test is a deep nasotracheal swab, which very few tests are.

One has to assume everyone is going to get it and be positive. The social distancing is appropriate and we certainly should be mindful of doing our best.

But do you believe for a moment that all the canned goods, boxes, TP (fruits I’m assuming are getting a thorough washing) that are rapidly going through stores and into our homes are being sterilized?  The pickup meals at restaurants?  This is the largest area that is completely illogical.

If you test negative today, what about tomorrow?  And the next day.

All efforts should be directed to creating more supportive care products when people are ill and isolating those at highest risk until we have an effective vaccine or other treatment method.

Sorry for the rant but all of the focus on testing is misplaced. It’s creating a logistical nightmare for which we have no answers that are helpful.

It’s never been easier to curate your newsfeed.

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On markets, here’s a link to Howard Marks’ latest. It’s a generic URL so I am not sure how long it will be there.

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Yesterday, Colorado’s hospitalization rate popped upwards, significantly. My observation of our rate being low is likely to prove incorrect.

Our rate of positives continues to track upwards at ~25% per day (7-day rolling).

To understand the power of daily compounding, here is the increase per day for the last ten days: 29/23/33/61/86/112/116/129/192/174.

Starting this morning, we are under a statewide stay-at-home order.

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Friends are being fired without notice and told to file for unemployment insurance.

Community

Vail’s mayor is doing better. Welcome news.

The city opened a COVID recovery shelter for the homeless – they set it up at a recreation center that is shut down – volunteers needed for a range of jobs – see THE LINK.

Home School

We ended yesterday blasted! Despite being a little fed up with lockdown, Monz made an outstanding dinner.

By 3pm, patience was in short supply, except for our oldest, who had another strong day and cleaned the entire house, solo.

After school, Axel and I went for a hike.

Whole house in bed by 7:45pm.

Need to slow your kids down after recess? Ten minute movies on Amazon are useful. The Tiny Seed and A House for a Hermit Crab.

Movie night was Spies in Disguise on Amazon.

Cooking class (our 7th so far) was double chocolate cupcakes and biscuits. Chef Monsy is a tough coach! She will allow measure mistakes, spills, you name it – kids are forced to up their game AND do all clean-up, including put away.

Spelling/Writing – we did 24 words at from K-5 level – game was to write a non-fiction story – I joined in and my story included all three kids by name – at the end of the block we shared stories (youngest to oldest) – they loved hearing their names in my story. Lexi did a remix of the Grinch Who Stole Christmas, starring our pet cat => creative girl!

Spelling => numbers up to 20 (my grade one) and a quadrillion (my grade three). My son got a kick out of really big numbers => kinda like a member of Congress. Link to TALEB’s article on the National Bailout.

I discovered the kids have NO IDEA what the Pledge of Allegiance means! They don’t even understand the words. They have said it over a thousand times… geez! We are going to be digging deeper into civics. We started by having my two oldest write it out from memory, for spelling.

The pic below is a “can you see it game.” Great way to have your Grade 1/2 work on their addition/subtraction.

You need to find two numbers. You are given their sum, and their difference as a clue.

For example… We add to 12 and our difference is 4, who are we? 8 and 4. The game had our seven-year old thinking numbers for over half an hour. Useful!

We had an open conversion about “one thing I’m scared of” => got the idea HERE.

Cornstarch + Water + Food Coloring = SCIENCE

1/8th cup water + 5 tablespoons cornstarch. Kids loved mixing their individual bowls together at the end (as you can see above).

We are grateful for Colorado’s climate: exposure to bright sunlight. Get some when you can!

Looking Forward

We’ve started a list of things we’d like to address when we come out of this crisis.

On the list is back-up power and additional cold/frozen storage. A solar array with home storage, perhaps.