Wow, it’s been a month.  I’m sorry to have been absent so long but I’ve been — Overwhelmed is the word that comes to mind.  He said I could write about him so here’s a glimpse:

Derek wears holes in his clothes.  Sometimes he wears a beard.  He calls it his homeless look.  I think he’s secretly vain and used to be fashionable.  He says when he climbed out of a car accident and looked down at his new pants it changed his perspective.  He was 16.  That was 17 years ago.

He’s giving up turning houses and is going for a job with the city.  Now his hair is very short and he’s clean-shaven.  We were painting the railing on my porch yesterday – He’d dropped by after his interview and grabbed the brush from me, showing me how you paint the edges first.  He wouldn’t give it back so I went and got another – and he was telling me about his last girlfriend.  It bothered him that she listened to her mother and not him. 

He took me to his church on Sunday.  I’m the first person who has ever taken him up on the offer.  I think he tries to save everyone.  Actually, I liked it.  I learned about a story in the Bible, something I’ve been curious about for some time now.  The music was like rock and roll.  No hymnals, just some lyrics printed out on a little piece of paper they passed around.  A kid in a baseball cap with a good voice played guitar and there was a pretty good drummer and bass player.  Derek didn’t approve of the cap or the drums. 

Then we went to buy me a 40” HD TV.  I made lunch while he set it up.  We planned our strategy for when the market opened Monday morning.  We are shorting the S & P 500 and now I can see the tape from my desk.  I’m up $800 in 24 hours.  He’s suggesting I buy a call on corn, thinking it is close to a bounce.  When he had me paper trading he was teaching me futures.  But now that it’s real money we are doing options.  So the most I can lose is what I paid. 

He calls me a lot.  Like five times a day sometimes if the market is crazy.  And he’s been coming over a lot to watch TV with me.  Maybe because he doesn’t have a TV.  He got caught with his last house.  It’s still on the market.  He never lives in the house he’s selling and since he is just trading now he is staying with a friend from church who is in a wheel chair and needs someone to do the yard and the house.  The guy has always been in a wheel chair.  He has a beautiful house and great taste if you like modern.  Derek keeps the house and yard immaculate. 

Once I realized he was a clean-freak, and once he’d installed the TV and we’d moved onto dinner preparation, he began cleaning my kitchen.  He met with resistance when he tried to combine my two paper piles but in the end I noticed they were one.