My house; for one more month

Well, here's my house when I bought it. For the following two years, I had no idea how to landscape or garden, and the weeds become overgrown. Heck, even the bushes that were supposed to be there became overgrown. But I am forced to put my house on the market, which means I need to learn how to care for my lawn as quickly as possible. And no, I'm not defaulting on my mortgage; my former (current?) employer merged with Delta Air Lines last year, meaning that my new home will be in Atlanta. I'm guessing that a four bedroom home is most desirable during the summer, when kids are not yet in school and families are interested in moving.

What I didn't realize is how much work it would be to maintain a house with less than a quarter acre of land. True, I've exacerbated things by letting things go for two years now, but here is a run-down of my weekend of outside work:

1. Cutting a tree - the big tree on the right side of the picture - to look like the big tree on the right side of the picture. The damned thing has grown so many branches that the shrubs below are dying. At least they were until yesterday.
2. Cutting the tree on the left side of the picture. You can't really see any branches in this picture, but they would've taken up 25% of this picture if I retook this same photo three days ago.
3. Cutting the shrubs around the house. Yeah that's a lot of pruning. But what worries me most is that I don't think the shrub under the middle column exists any longer - wtf??
4. Taking the branches to the compost site. This is no small task. After cutting down the branches, they piled up 5 feet tall by about 15 feet wide. I don't have a pickup truck, only an SUV, so it took some effort to break down those branches for transport.
5. Adding concrete to my staircase. That took 450 pounds. Still drying. Not level at all. Not even sure it is all the same color. Hopefully an artist will see it, thinks it speaks to them, and will instantly want to buy my house.

I still have some painting to do, but I hope I can take a picture next week that is identical to the original. Luckily, you can't see the cement staircase from this view.

Well, That Was Fast

I guess I don't have enough hours in the day, but it seems to be a strain on life to blog once a day. Maybe I'll keep up this blog by posting after returning from my travels, but I doubt it. Thanks for reading, though, and I'll still be here, bored at work...

The Problem with Stock Charting (Why I Didn't Become a Psychiatrist)

Well, let's start with the part about psychiatry. Dedicating your career to helping others seems like a noble task, and that always appealed to me. What did not appeal to me were all the crazy antics therapists would take to "cure" their patients. Things like making patients run around naked to cure one's social anxieties, or having a patient sit below a pile of pillows while naked to simulate their mother's womb, only to have the patient slither out of the pillows to mimic birth (and yes, a lot of these crazy therapies revolve around nudity; no, I have no idea why). Too bad patients have suffocated to death under the pillows.

Why do such crazy therapies exist? Because almost everyone suffering from something will get better with time? Just got divorced? Give it a year. Suffering from a psychotic episode? You probably won't be in a month. Roughly 50% of the effects of any therapy can be attributed to this variable, time. As a result, even the worst therapists will see an improvement in their patients.

Now you're probably asking what in the world this has to do with people who chart stocks. I'm glad you asked!

People who use a charting method to pick stock piss me off. I liken them to the wacky therapists, but maybe that's unfair; after all, day traders have never killed anyone. But they will say things like "wait for this stock to reach $11; if it does, it's going right to $13"...Bullshit. This line of reasoning doesn't consider competitors, changes in costs, market demand, or anything else that is essential to making a good business decision. Market prices are not decided in a vaccuum; they're based on real world economics.

This awful thinking is exasperated, I think, because they put very little skin into the game with each stock (so they don't lose their shirts if one stock goes down) and the stock market generally increases in value over time. Every risk aversion equation I've seen in my investments classes would say that no one should be averse to investing if you have a long investment horizon. In other words, You can have the worst investment strategy and you still may be fine after a few years.

So there you have it. Rogue therapists and charters should be put on a tiny island together. They should not sit in the cube next to me.

Literature Musings: Portnoy's Complaint & Indignation

Recently, I read Philip Roth's new book, Indignation, and was disappointed. It was a fun read, but not nearly as memorable as his other works. Or, maybe it was too much like his other books to be memorable on it's own. I decided to reread Portnoy's Complaint, written in the 60's, and realized that some of the passages were blatantly plagiarized. Well, maybe "plagiarized" is a bit strong; he took small (but meaningful) ideas of his old works and expanded them to mean much more in Indignation. But once you've heard the idea, it isn't so interesting when it's repackaged into a shiny new profitable novel, am I right?

Both books are about a smart Jewish guy who's life gets screwed over due to his over-protective Jewish parents. Yes, there are extremely strong Semitic overtones in Roth's novels, and a good amount of sexual deviance. And yes, putting those two themes together makes for some extremely entertaining reading. Take this passage from Portnoy's Complaint:

"The bus, the bus, what intervened on the bus to prevent me from coming all over that sleeping shikse's arm--I don't know. common sense, you think? Common decency? My right mind, as they say, coming to the fore? Well, where is this right mind on that afternoon I came home from school to find my mother out of the house and our refrigerator stocked with a big purplish piece of raw liver? I believe that i already confessed to the piece of liver that I bought in a butcher shop and banged behind a billboard on the way to a bar mitzvah lesson. Well, I wish to make a clean breast of it, Your Holiness. That--she--it--wasn't my first piece. My first piece I had in the privacy of my own home, rolled round my cock in the bathroom at three-thirty--and then had again on the end of a fork, at five-thirty, along with the other members of that poor innocent family of mine.
So, Now you know the worst thing I have ever done. I fucked my own family's dinner."

I won't give away the plot because figuring out where the story will lead is half the fun of reading this book. If you're thinking about reading Indignation, you're probably better off reading Portnoy's Complaint. All I'll say is that there are some Communist Chinese songs and mention of Bertrand Russell that are strong undertones to both books (much less subtle in Indignation).

I know what you're thinking: how can a book that mentions sex with a piece of liver have any philosophical undertones? Well, that's why Roth is my favorite author - see what you think of his work.

Burrito Sticker Shock

I just had Chipotle for lunch: 1 chicken burrito and 1 soda. Total price? $8.01. What the hell. When did eating a burrito cost so much money? Because "supplier costs" went up? Are all Chipotles charging this much nowadays? I used to go like burritos for lunch because it was cheap and healthy. Now, it's just healthy, sort of.

Considering the economy, I wonder how the increased pricing is effecting sales. I would check their quarterly results but am too lazy to dive into the details of their 10Q. I also wonder if Qdoba has become more expensive as well, or if they are a "cheap" alternative. Quick answer could be the historical performance of their stock, CMG, which reached a peak of $151/share in Dec '07 and has dropped precipitously since, to around $50/share now.

As a side note, I was really impressed with my experience at the cash register. Although I paid with a $20 bill for my $8.01 lunch, the register computed $12 in change. Initially I thought "wow, marketing/sales and finance got together and agreed on something," but that's probably not true. A chicken burrito + soda has to be the second most popular order (right behind a chicken burrito with no drink) and giving out $0.99 to that many customers daily would require a cash register with a HUGE change drawer. And Chipotle can say that they gave something back to their customer. Win-win.

(yes, that was a long side note)

A New Look

Welcome to my site. The updated themes and the link to my wife's blog on the side are courtesy of - you guessed it - my wife.

Not sure I like the change, though. I was going with the FJM approach of I-have-no-idea-what-I'm-doing when it comes to site design.

In Search of Beer Variety

Three weeks ago, I read an article in The New Yorker about Dogfish Head Brewery (A Better Brew: the Rise of Extreme Beer; Nov 24th, 2008) and I became fascinated with the Midas Touch Golden Elixir. I love beer, but it's easy to go to the store, see the beer you always drink and take it home with you. But after a while, drinking Paulaner, Hoegaarden, Blue Moon, and Leinkugel's Honey Weiss gets old, boring, and too familiar.

The article mentions that Dogfish Head worked with an archeological chemist from UPenn to recreate one of the oldest brews in the world:

The historical Midas was a Phrygian ruler in what is now central Turkey. When he or one of his close relatives was buried, around 730 B.C., the tomb was filled with more than a hundred and fifty drinking vessels—parting toasts to the dead king. By the time they were excavated, in 1957, the liquid inside them had evaporated. But Patrick McGovern, forty years later, was able to analyze some residue from a bowl and identify its chemical content. By matching the compounds to those found in the foods and spices of ancient Turkey, McGovern gradually pieced together the liquid’s main ingredients: honey, barley, and grapes, and a yellow substance that was probably saffron. It was a beer, but like none we’ve ever tasted.

And Dogfish recreated this forgotten beer!

So now, my task is to find where this stuff is sold. Unfortunately, Madison, WI is the closest distributor to the Twin Cities. It is times like these that I miss living on the East Coast.

Once I find it in the store around here, I will follow-up with my own comments on this beer. It's more likely that I will have to wait until I travel back to Philadelphia to find it, but that may happen as early as Christmas. If you can find this beer, I'd love to hear your reaction!