Rodents, rings and riding

First and foremost, I beat the mice.

It got cooler, they migrated inside and then they got just a little too comfortable stealing my groceries. I was watching movies at my computer one night after work and noticed the little bastards had actually been coming out of my closet, running against my wall and then going under my door into the kitchen.

In the past, my landlord had used a humane, trap-door device to capture them unharmed. But when I woke up one night to a sting on one of my toes and saw two small, bloody teeth marks on it, I signed a mental declaration of war. Let me also mention that I have, in fact, gotten my shots.

After work the next day, I stopped by Home Depot and visited their pest control aisle for the most potent of domestic munitions. Did you know they make sticky pads for mice? They apparent just stick to them and... starve? I'm partial to the other kind... the, "Oh. Wow. That was probably really fast," kind.

I got eight little traps for four dollars and as it turns out, they apparently have a soft spot for cheap Mexican sugar wafers... the strawberry kind.

I placed them all strategically around the house and loaded them with grade "A" Bimbo bait. I went back to my movie and the first one snapped no more than 30 minutes later. My housemate, who was apparently unwilling to do anything about them for 12 months when he lived here alone, was already looking at it in amazement when I came out of my room. The little bastard (the mouse, not the guy) was pinned by the metal arm and motionless. Upon closer inspection, he was still breathing. I quickly donned my rubber gloves and headed out back with my bamboo-killing hatchet. You know how the screen quickly turns black in a movie to suggest impending doom has just turned into definitive doom? It was kind of like that.

I went to sleep and woke up before my alarm went off the next morning. There was a strange flopping noise. Apparently one had triggered the trap in the corner of my room by the closet and had just gotten terribly maimed. It wasn't able to move (had inexplicably escaped the trap itself) and was slapping its tail against the floor. Considering my bleeding toe hours earlier, I rolled back over and slept until my alarm went off. I'm not proud of it, but those 45 minutes of sleep were critical.

I got up, grabbed another pair of disposable gloves and started my Monday morning by beheading a mouse with a hatchet in my boxers in the back yard. It was incredibly strange.

I went back inside and checked the other traps. A third mouse was caught on the shelves as he was trying to steal our food. This one had fired correctly and the mouse was done instantly.

Three mice were caught in about 8 hours. It was amazing. Since then, I've gotten one more (also a swift event) and we've not seen or heard any trace of a mouse since. It's good. I'm all for humane treatment of animals, but one of them thought my toe was edible. When house-guests themselves constitute a health hazard, it's time to get mean.

I've been working a lot and it's... endless. I come home and do one or more of the following: watch movies, listen to Rosetta Stone Italian or play guitar.

I've been trading all the while and I think I've stumbled onto a good thing. My win ratio is solid and volume has been excellent recently. I'm using a multi-timeframe approach with moving averages between the daily, 4-hour and hourly charts. I finally was able to finish a script to export all the relevant information for use in my trustworthy monstrosity of a spreadsheet.

The hardest thing about trading the foreign exchange market is waiting for the right trades. Some movements take quite some time to manifest. And others crash like lightning in an otherwise quiet evening. The market itself is open from Sunday night until Friday afternoon.

My broker, Interbank FX, offers 16 different securities, 16 different pairs of currencies to trade. A while back, I had good success with a hedging strategy that was running automatically. I would basically drop it on a chart and it would do its thing. Other than monitoring the trades a little, the hard part was already done: identifying and deciding to take the good trades.

The NFA banned hedging after the financial debacle and all brokers effectively banned the practice entirely. So I had to come up with a new way to trade.

I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of hedging, but it's effectively the maintenance of several trades in different directions on the same security. You can basically change your mind as often as you like to make sure you're on the right side of the market when it moves. This is an alternative to single positions which either make or lose money, end of story.

So US brokers all had to follow the NFA's rules and now only permit trades in the same direction. You can have multiple trades open at once, but they all have to be on the same side of the market.

As you might imagine, the trader now has to be a bit more specific and accurate in choosing which trades to take. So I've made enough really good and really bad trades to know that there are always trades lining up and it's a bad idea to rush into one because it looks "decent enough." This is why I'm so happy to have finished my script. I drop it on a chart and it spits out information from 16 different currency pairs on five different time frames. I can then drop all the information into a nifty, color coded chart I created in my OOo spreadsheet and easily look at the relevant information. To do this manually would mean looking at 80 different charts in my MT4 platform every hour and recording the data the old fashioned way. Needless to say, I'm happy. Now I can take comfort in the fact that, by having a view of what everything's doing, I can wait for the real trades to develop on their own and I won't rush into one thinking there won't be others available. I ended +14% last week on two trades. Now I have to automate it so it can run 24 hours a day. Right now I can only watch the charts about 25% of the trading week around work.

Alright. Enough trading talk. I bought rings. Gymnastic rings. The EXF Rings are quite possibly the best rings ever made, in my opinion. Please bear in mind I haven't touched actual gymnastic rings since I was six. So I was easily impressed :)

They were delivered on Thursday and I set them up Friday. I spent about an hour hacking away at bamboo so I could get a decent space where they can hang under a tree. I cleared it all (while feeding the mosquitoes heartily) and got to work setting them up. It took a little while, but after dangling perilously from the tree branch overhead for about an hour, I was able to affix them to the tree successfully. A few minor adjustments and they were ready for action.

What's the first thing you would do if you had gymnastics rings in your backyard?? Exactly. You would get upside down :)

I tooled around on the rings for a little bit but not too much. I had already ridden that morning and didn't want to kill myself on them before riding this morning. Suffice it to say that there are now rings in my backyard and I'm frighteningly happy about it.

So I've also been riding my bike a bunch. I've been riding with Ray, the lead developer up at work, and he's been pushing me to suck a little less at riding. He was riding about 120 miles a week around work at one point. This is about two hours of riding every day. I am not man enough for these sorts of antics. I can only do this on my days off.

So yesterday we rode 24 miles and it was good. The weather was nice, albeit a little cold, and the traffic was a bit heavy. If you were going to imagine the city of Austin, it's about 7 miles from North to South. Downtown rests about in the middle and there's a big river that runs through the city, West to East, just South of downtown.

Anybody who's anybody lives in South Austin. Everyone else is either a turbo-wealthy elitist in the hills or a grad student living somewhere in "North Austin" which lies about 15 blocks North of the actual center of the city. Although my powers of generalization are substantial, I forgot to mention the sprawling (not so sprawling) suburbs in true North Austin. Eighty percent of the residents up there work for Dell doing the things they couldn't outsource to India. For the life of me, I can't imagine what they do. They probably sit at desks and throw tennis balls at their walls all day. Beige volvos, oversized SUV's, bologna sandwiches and 2.5 kids come to mind. What was I talking about?

Riding. So Austin is basically enclosed in a square created by highways: one on each side. The hills in the city all go down to the river in the middle and that's where we start riding. We ride South out of the city and it's almost all uphill. I've got my uni-gear Schwinn and Ray has his... I don't know what kind but it's made out of titanium and is generally faster than mine. His would beat mine in a race if there were no humans on top of either of them. My gear is allegedly almost equal to his hardest so he's had to wait on me a few times getting out of the city. Anyone who exercises knows that heartrate is the key to working out. Ray has been great in that if I'm lagging on a hill, he'll drop it to a super easy gear and just grind away at the hill until I catch up. I usually catch up huffing and puffing, but I make it there just the same.

Yesterday we averaged 15mph over the route. And this morning we averaged 16.3mph, which was a pretty huge improvement. I almost burned myself out initially while getting over the hills just to leave the city. I was spitting and grunting and... being as manly as my spandex suit would allow. We rode pretty hard today and my legs were absolutely on fire when we finished. I rode my bike to the starting point this morning so all told, it was about 27 or 28 miles on the bike today. When I got home, my breakfast consisted of tuna, creamed corn and a bowl of cinnamon toast crunch. It was brilliant. Then I took a life-changing nap :)

Today was Halloween and I did absolutely zero things in the spirit. Work waits a few hours down the clicking reel and I'm just ready for Christmas so I can count down to summer again. My dad invited me and my sister to his ladyfriend's place for Thanksgiving. It's going to be both of our families so my sister and I are expecting some kind of an announcement. People and their romances. I feel like an alien. It will be good to see him again.

So I'm about to change my clocks and pass out. My house has no mice, my rings are dangling comfortably out back and my legs are successfully scorched.

I might as well mention that if you've been anywhere other than Central Texas over the last couple of days, you've unfortunately missed something very beautiful. The sunlight has made perfection a comfortable reality. The morning cold cuts like a knife but the afternoon sun invites sunbathing on all but the darkest of porches. The blue in the sky has no comparison and the air allows either a sweater or a bare back. So come to Austin already. It's supposed to be like this all week :)

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