CheetahhhhhhhBlog Mark III

It’s 10PM Saudi time and I just want to say, I hope somebody took my advice in the last post, because you will have been making a lot of money today!

So word has gotten around the office about my official resignation. Every day somebody comes and asks me why I’m leaving and what’s my plan.

The Bug is learning a new word every day. Yesterday he said “bed”. In the grocery store he learned “cake” which he pronounces “gutty”. Also new on the Bug front, he is extremely afraid of monkeys, and you’d better turn off the TV when a monkey comes on unless you want a hysterical toddler.

Don’t say I didn’t give you any advice about this. Tomorrow, Monday, I would advise you to sell gold. Specifically I would sell the future after YMM8 falls below 882. I do not guarantee you money (I’m not God) but if I didn’t think it was pretty damn certain, I wouldn’t write it, and I’m certainly not alone. Do not deal in futures unless you know what you’re doing or you have somebody holding your hand, FYI. But yeah, gold should be going down. And one final caveat, place a 5 point stop, and don’t bother until gold falls below 882 (could be Tuesday, who knows), and don’t bother after the fact either. There’s my advice.

We have made a long list of everything we need to take care of to exit Saudi… we will be rather busy the next 3 weeks until Van and Bug take off for their Philippines holiday.

We have gotten 7 Skype calls, I see, but never heard it. On investigation it seems our Skype wireless phone is broken. Pisses me off because it was $100. Our webcams have also been broken for a while. I don’t know whether to blame Little Chris for all this but it seems likely considering he likes to grab anything electronic. Anyway we went out and bought webcams so our Skype should be up and running again.

My students have been skipping a lot. This is typical of Saudi students. Normally I would scold them and mark them absent,  which would be the normal teacher’s response. However I’ve grown rather apathetic. In retrospect I don’t know why I bothered scolding them for 3 years, as it never made any difference. Marking them absent also makes no difference, because the admin will change their attendance records if they’re in danger of flunking out over poor attendance. With this in mind, I had an epiphany. I’ve been surprised to realize that apathy is actually the most functional attitude here. This sounds crazy to me even as I write it, but I suppose it’s a “Saudi thing” and you’d have to be here to fully grasp it. But here’s another example. Last semester I had no textbooks for 5 weeks, which would be completely unacceptable under most circumstances. Here, though, if you get worked up about it, you’re just beating your head against a brick wall. Why can’t books be properly procured? Who knows, and there’s nothing to be done about it from my perspective, because some sheikh in some other building is in charge and I don’t even know who he is, much less why he can’t seem to order things, nor will he even listen to my complaint. Instead of being worked up about it last term, I really should have just sat back and relaxed. So anyway there you have it. The land where apathy is functional.
Today I gave my resignation letter to the Royal Commission. The guys in the office were surprised, they didn’t think I’d actually do it.

I received my contract in the mail from the uni in the Emirates. It’s a very good contract, I must say, including AED20,0000 for furniture, free education for my family, etc etc, and they also ship all your stuff home in a container.  It’s actually the best contract I’ve ever been offered.

We went to Jeddah for 3 days. The Bug has crossed some rascal-ness threshold and it is near impossible to do anything in public now, because he’s running around like a wild dog. He wants to grab everything and run everywhere and is not too inclined to listen to our suggestions. We were in the Megamall and Bug had a booger. He has recently learned how to pick his nose. In the mall, he picked his nose and wiped it on a girl’s abaya. He’s learned several new words, including “fish” and “duck”. The Bug also has discovered ketchup, and loves it. It’s very cute to watch him dipping french fries in ketchup.

Anyway it’s back to work tomorrow.

The Cheetahhhhhhh is on spring vacation now. We may go up to Jeddah for a few days if we get restless.

The Bug still cannot speak, but he clearly understands English. We give him instructions, like “Go get your shoes,” and he will do it. He also reacts appropriately to comments in English. For example, Vanessa said, “Do you love mommy?” and Bug kissed her. So I assume he will be talking soon, though at the moment, the words he says are dog, daddy, goo, dirty, no, one, and shoes.

We watched a bootleg of Charlie Wilson’s War and quite enjoyed it. We also watched The Other Bolyn Girl and liked it, but I rather prefer the Showtime series The Tudors.

Several of my colleagues have asked me to change my mind and not go. I said sorry, but the king could double my salary and I’d still be leaving.

In the last post I predicted an upward move in the stock market in 3-4 days. It happened in 2. I was quite surprised by this myself, especially by the large scale of the move.

This was another one of those situations where I wish I had more money invested in the market. I have a bit of a cold at the moment and just didn’t feel like sitting in front of the computer for 6 hours watching the stock market, so I was only minimally invested in IWM calls. These calls did, however, make a nice and quite effortless profit.

I predict a fairly quick (2-3 days) rise to the Feb 4 resistance levels (which would be around 72.54 for IWM, in which case the Cheetahhhhhh will have made several hundred dollars). The reason I say fairly quick is because most investors, myself included, have been sitting out, waiting for market turmoil to pass. These people are going to be very keen to get back in. We should see a big surge of investment tomorrow and this surge should carry us up to the Feb 4 resistance.