I'm so lonely that Jehovah's Witnesses are welcome

(If we start getting more than eight cars per day past my house, I am going to request a traffic light from the town.)

As I have described, we live 10 miles out of Ithaca in the small hamlet of Danby. Our house is in the woods and we can't see any of our neighbors, which are few and far between. Almost no one visits the house, the kids are grown and gone, and my wife is working almost non-stop in her office at one end of the house. The bottom line is--I'm lonely.

I know this because two days ago a small, beige car drove up the driveway, parked at an awkward angle, and sat there for a moment before anyone got out. I knew then exactly who they were. A nicely dressed man and a teenage girl got out of the car, and began walking piously toward me carrying something in their hands. You guessed it. They were from Jehovah's Witnesses and they had their usual copy of the Watchtower to offer me. Normally, I brush off strangers in a New York minute who come to the house trying to sell me anything. But in this case I was never so glad to see another human being. We had a pleasant talk for about 15 minutes, about everything in the world except religion. At several pauses in the conversation, the man shook my hand, but then I thought of another topic I wanted to cover. The guy must have shaken my hand at the end of what he thought was the finale of our conversation at least three times. I honestly believe that he thought I was trying to convert HIM. I realize now, they were anxious to leave.


I have taken to walking down my country road and talking to any neighbors who make the mistake of venturing outside at that moment. The letter carrier woman speeds past our mailbox if I am in the driveway, but I know she has mail for us. The UPS guy tosses the package from his moving truck as he passes by our garage. The electric company lady checks our meter in the dark with a flashlight. It is amazing how hard of hearing she is. She must hear me calling as I run after her little white pickup in my pajamas. And because we signed up for that program, even telemarketers don't call anymore.

But I think I am solving the problem. I have joined Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Xomba, Helium, SheToldMe, ISayToo, Squidoo, and Moli. I have worked my way through my old gradebook going back to 1980, and invited every former student I can find to be my friend. I belong to four social chat rooms and three stock trading message boards. We actually have two landlines (with a phone in every room except the bathroom, but I'm fixing that this weekend), a cell phone, and a fax machine, and, of course, I have email, Skype, and several instant messaging accounts. If you get a busy signal, try another device. If you are in Ithaca, just drive out.

On the bright side, I have been spending a lot of time with myself, and I've gotten to know me pretty well. All in all, not a bad friend to have.

Sell in May and go away, or not?

I used to love to go to casinos to gamble. I was never a big player, far from it, but I could sit there for hours and play blackjack or video poker. But since I started trading stocks, I have no desire whatsoever to go to a casino. That "need" is completely fulfilled by watching my Fidelity Active Trader screen during the day, reading stock messages on iHub, and watching the streaming ticker at the bottom of the screen on CNBC. It is really the ticker showing live trades that matters for me on that channel, and the background discussion by the talking heads often gets in the way. Now, I don't want to imply that trading or investing in the stock market is just like gambling in a casino. After all, in a casino you have that cute waitress in that skimpy outfit bringing you free drinks. I have to fetch my own here. But there are similarities, because whatever it is about the chemistry of my brain, trading stocks satisfies what I used to get from time to time by visiting a casino.

Most years, the Wall Street slogan is "sell in May, go away", meaning that traders reduce their positions in May and quit trading for the summer. Summer is vacation time, so volumes (and I believe stock prices) typically decline and it is tough to get anything that exciting going. I thought this summer would be different because of the extraordinary economic events of the past year, but I was wrong. I am wrong a lot in this business, but when you are right, it can be really fun. Today is potentially one of those days. (So far this year, I have done pretty well. At this moment, I am up about 20% year to date. At the beginning of the summer, I was up about 50%, but the past couple of months have hindered my progress. I currently hold 10 stocks, and I am in the red in every one of them).

One of the stocks in my current holdings is Cell Therapeutics (CTIC), which I bought a couple of months ago. I bought the stock at several prices, but my average purchase price was $1.78. The stock closed on Friday at $1.69. CTIC is a start-up biopharmaceutical company, and their potentially big breakthrough is a drug called pixantrone, which is a treatment for "relapsed or refractory aggressive non-Hodgkin's lymphoma". I have no idea if this drug is any good, but there has been a fair amount of hype (meaning market action) surrounding this stock for weeks. In fact, several institutions (e.g., Barclays and Goldman Sachs) have taken large stakes in this company, and that gives me hope. Plus, if you watch the daily trading, the stock acts like it "wants" to go up. Let me announce at this time that NO ONE WHO READS THIS SHOULD BUY OR SELL ANY EQUITY BASED ON WHAT I SAY HERE---CAUSE I KNOW NOTHING. This vignette is simply to illustrate what excites me currently and how a retired baby boomer spends his day.

The big deal with these biopharma stocks is getting FDA approval of your drug. When that happens, the stock price always goes up, usually significantly. CTIC is waiting on approval for pixantrone, but first things first. We had been waiting to hear that the FDA might "fast-track" this drug for approval, and that news was to come out today. Instead, news was released early this morning that the FDA would accept the new filing for pixantrone and that they would decide by September 4 whether to "fast-track" the drug. So the news was not all that we wanted, but it was something.

Let's watch this one together today, just for fun. I will add an addendum to this post when the market closes today to tell you the stock's closing price and any other details that I think are interesting. If this stock pops today, I will celebrate this evening with a scotch and a cigar. If it does not, I will have a scotch and a cigar. Either way, I do ok. But that cigar tastes so much better when you win.
(Addendum: small irony today. CTIC started off strong but actually closed down $.05 or about 3%. But I bought more of CTIC today. On the other hand, my two other biopharma stocks woke from a sleep of several weeks. AGEN closed up 4% and HEB closed up a whopping 17% on big volume. I am now green for HEB. The latter two are developing flu vaccines, and the swine flu story got another boost today. So there you go.)

The working conditions around here stink

(The road in front of DrTom's.  A major traffic jam can occur here at any minute.)

I don't like to complain about my new life at home, which involves working outside on 12 acres of forest and gardens, trading stocks from my Command Center in my new office, doing some house repairs or painting, feeding the dog, watering house plants, paying bills, etc. But though the work is not all that bad, the conditions under which I have to operate are sometimes oppressive.

Here are some examples:
1. waiting for the dog to finish his nap on our bed before I can take one

2. shielding myself from the sun at the exact hour I prefer to have Happy Hour in the Butterfly Bush garden (too much squinting)

3. having to go about 100 yards to get the mail on a noisy riding lawn mower (ever hear of a muffler), and they only deliver the mail six days a week

4. dealing with the noise from the 8-9 cars that drive past our house each day

5. trying to keep the humidity in my cigar humidor between 65-70% RH

6. needing to untwirl my hammock before I can use it, which the wind keeps spinning round and round

I have spoken to Management about these annoyances on several occasions, but she does nothing. All she can suggest is that we move Happy Hour later to avoid the sun, but if we do that, it coincides with the rush hour when 30% of our daily traffic goes by the house. That is simply unacceptable.

So I continue to do my chores, trying not to complain. If I act too dissatisfied, Management will stop bribing me with her home-made coconut cupcakes to keep my mouth shut. And besides, the new management is such an improvement over the last. Sometimes I feel like such a slut.

Banana seeds

(DrTom's banana plant grown from Ugandan seed.)

In 2007 I returned from a trip to Uganda with a special botanical prize, or so I thought? I had gone there as part of an ecoagriculture project with colleagues Louise Buck and Jeff Milder. We were there to learn what we could about the challenges and possible solutions to raising food while protecting as much biodiversity as possible, working with the Benet people of the eastern part of that beautiful country. Jeff and I got the assignment of taking a hike in the Mt. Elgon National Park, the original homeland of the Benet before they were moved by government decree to an area nearby.

We hired a guide and spent several wonderful hours walking a loop trail through the forest.  At the end of the walk, our guide showed us a small grove of wild banana plants growing at the edge of the forest, and he told us that this was the ancestral species from which domestic varieties were derived. I took that to mean that Uganda was the original location from which this important plant evolved and later spread throughout the world.

So I did what any competent biologist would do--I collected a sample to take home. These plants bear fruit that is not edible; the banana is bitter and mealy, and it contains large black seeds. I took four of the seeds and put them in the pocket of my field pants. When I got home, I unpacked. Later that day, my wife did a load of laundry. She ran those field pants through the washer and then the dryer, not knowing anything about the precious cargo in the pocket. My life was ruined, or so I thought. I punished my wife by cancelling our trip to Tahiti. However, I planted the seeds anyway, and two of them germinated. One of them is still with us as you can see from the associated photo.

For two years, I have been telling everyone who would listen, the story of the ancestral banana plant from Uganda and how I have one growing right here in my house, based on seeds I collected on Mt. Elgon, the laundry episode, etc. About 15 minutes ago, I discovered that my cherished story is apparently wrong! According to Wikipedia, the banana plant is native to Southeast Asia, and it was probably first domesticated in Papua New Guinea about 7,000 years ago. It spread to Africa much later, which is considered an area of secondary diversity. I have perpetuated what has become an urban legend in my circle of friends, I obtained a degree of status that was not deserved, and I prevented my wife from going to the South Pacific for nothing.

The lesson here is to go to Wikipedia before you open your mouth about anything. If you are not sure who the 16th President was, go to Wiki. If you can not remember which state elected Sarah Palin to be their governor, go to Wiki. If you forget your wife's birthday, go to Wiki. (I once got our anniversary and my wife's birthday mixed up. Don't ever do that!). Assume that you know almost nothing about anything, and check Wiki first thing in the morning when you get up, and last thing before you retire at night. Most people don't do this, so most of the information you hear from other people is wrong. Be the first to start getting everything right.

So from now on when visitors ask me about that banana plant growing in the corner of the dining room, I will have little of interest to say. In fact, because I can't stand to go through the entire saga with them, I will just say, "I bought it at Walmart".