The wheelbarrow or Deepak Chopra?

(DrTom doing his morning yoga exercises.  I look so much better now than when I was teaching at Cornell.)

I can only imagine how many tons of material I have hauled around DrTom's in 29 years, usually in a wheelbarrow. One of the lessons I have learned from working on my property is that nothing found here is worthless. Everything has a use and a proper place. When I find stones in the garden, I throw them in the gravel driveway. Larger stones are used for rock walls, or for accumulating them in a large pile for snake habitat. Soil from a hole I dig is dumped in a low spot in another place. Weeds I pull are thrown into the compost pile along with the dog's manure where, you will remember, the temperature does not reach 170 degrees. All this material on the property is useful, it is just in the wrong place when I encounter it.

On the other hand, maybe it would be easier to change my perspective than to move all this stuff around. If I just decided that I liked a stony garden, or a weedy flower bed, or dog manure squishing between my toes, then I could save a lot of time and energy. Forget about any artificial Judeo-Christian sense of order in the world and follow a "what happens, happens" philosophy, or "what it is, man", or "it's all good", or "don't worry, be happy". Can I awake tomorrow and actually think like that? Can I adopt a new philosophy of life without attending a week-long course in the California redwoods with Deepak Chopra? Would I need drugs to make this transition, other than the 81mg aspirin I take every day to prevent a heart attack, the fish oil capsule to lower my cholesterol, and the calcium tablet to maintain my bone density? Can a 63-year old retired college professor become something he never was before?

I conclude that to effect the transition to this new state of being is more work than moving stones around my property. Sometimes coping with the way you have always been is less stressful than getting a makeover. And with that, I'm going out to the garage to oil the wheels on that old wheelbarrow.

How much wood could a woodchuck.......

(Logging at DrTom's.)

Cutting up logs from my property with Dierk-red maple, white ash, and American elm. Lumber for 2010 projects; new interior doors of ash, and new kitchen cabinets of maple. No time to blog today. And I have someone to talk to all day outside in the woods. And he is not even from Jehovah's Witnesses.

( 6 hours later) Got rained out, but not until after gathering up all the logs around the property I had cut over the past year for this purpose. Dierk is a master at using that Kubota tractor and winch to fish 8.5-foot logs out of the forest. He used to use draft horses for that, but as he says, "I got too old for that and the horses got too old". So I have this pile of logs waiting to be sawn, which we will do tomorrow. One of the white ash logs is really huge for this age of forest, and as my students would have said jokingly years ago about this species, "that is a nice piece of ash". They also would have said that using lumber from your own property to use in your home is really "kewl". I agree, it is really cool.

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.)