Scrabble

Coronavirus - Music - Politics - Scrabble

Work slowly picking up

April 17, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Tomorrow I should have four lessons. I’ve picked up another student, a woman who is friends with Cosmin, the ex-student of mine who recently contacted me. She called me today and she spoke so fast that I had put all my concentration into understanding her. I was very stuttery in reply. The difference in speed and clarity between people is vast – Cosmin, for instance, is much clearer and more deliberate. This woman said she’ll need to start from zero, which probably means she knows only 10,000 words and seven verb tenses.

Yesterday I switched on the radio and just caught the incredible last minute or so of a song I recognised but couldn’t put a name to. They played it right to the end. Then this morning I remembered it was Lucky Man by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. It’s just a beautiful song, and that synthesiser solo at the end takes it into the stratosphere. Hats off to Radio Timișoara for playing it and not cutting it off. I read that Greg Lake wrote the song when he was twelve. Sadly, both he and Keith Emerson died in 2016, leaving only Carl Palmer, the staggeringly dynamic drummer.

This afternoon I bumped into the woman who lives next door but one. She told me to be ultra careful because of all the people heading out to get supplies for Orthodox Easter. She was glad that Romania is not (yet?) at the levels of Spain or Italy, and was open-mouthed when I told her how many people had died in the UK. Yesterday I saw Bogdan, who lives on the second floor. He invited me over for birthday beers today, but I had to refuse.

Some figures from John Campbell’s latest video make the UK situation all the more alarming. There are considerably more additional deaths (i.e. deaths in excess of the average for the time of year) than there are deaths caused by Covid-19. That might be because some people are dying of coronavirus without being diagnosed, but it’s quite possible that people are dying of other causes because they are no longer receiving due care and attention, and if that’s the case it’s terrible. As far as I know, deaths in care homes still aren’t being included in the UK total. Common sense would suggest that the death toll is very high in care homes – they act as a petri dish for the virus.

Mum seems to have fallen out with her younger brother. He came to my brother’s wedding two years ago and then had a dreadful time with a bowel cancer operation that went horribly wrong. He’s also a Trump supporter who watches plenty of Fox News, and that’s where they fell out. When she told him to stop watching that piece of shit, he put the phone down on her. I don’t blame Mum, who after hearing over and over again from her brother how wonderful Trump is, finally snapped. Trump is a total arse, who in a parade of total arses manages to have no redeeming features whatsoever. He is quite simply all arse, and if you’re supporting him right now when far too many Americans are dying, that says quite a bit about you.

Finally, I played a game of Scrabble this evening for the first time since June. I was abysmal (which would have made a nice bingo). In the same vein, I played hangman with one of my younger students on Tuesday, the best we could on Skype. He found a site called something like “really hard hangman words” and gave me yachtsman. I got there, but heck, those five consonants in a row had me, um, all at sea for a while.

Books - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble - Tennis

Dribs and drabs

May 20, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday I had a lesson with the 17-year-old girl, and then had a half-hour wait while some family member delivered her nine-year-old half-brother for my lesson with him. I was scheduled to see the boy immediately after the girl, but they had made a detour to a phone repair shop on the way. I told the girl that I won’t stand for that kind of crap from her family. Lesson first, phone second. Got that? During my lesson with the boy, my phone rang. My parents were FaceTiming me. Obviously I couldn’t answer. This frustrated me because the lesson should have been over by then. After we finished, I called my parents back from nearby Parcul Dacia. It was a pleasure to show them the park – a hive of activity on a sunny Saturday lunchtime, with games of football and four table games in full swing. Dad is still waiting for the results of his colonoscopy. We talked about the books that Mum had ordered for my birthday. They’ve been coming in dribs and drabs. When she read out the titles to me, I told her it sounded like a horse race commentary. Nobody’s Boy coming up the outside; Chasing the Scream bringing up the rear. I’ve made a start on A Death in the Family, which admittedly doesn’t sound a lot like a racehorse.

I’ve managed to pick up a cold, after what had been a good run by my standards. Last night we also had a thunderstorm, so I didn’t sleep a great deal, and I’ve felt sapped of energy today.

I failed to mention that ten days ago I had my first knock of tennis for two years. I wasn’t up to much, but the exercise did me good. If the weather plays ball I’ll book myself in for a session on the wall next to the courts in Parcul Rozelor. In 2014, after an extended spell off the court, I did some long wall workouts using the squash court in our apartment block. They were a great help.

Scrabble. I’m on a winning streak, and my rating is now tantalisingly close to 1500. A lot of that might simply be dumb luck. Yesterday I won all five of the games I played fairly handily, playing eleven bingos to my opponents’ one, but I did draw eight blanks. My favourite play of late is CHIRPED, a 60-point double-double. No bonus, no parallel play, no big X or Z spot, just a good old-fashioned word. I’m still trying to learn words, and my attention has shifted to fours. Learning words is like a giant game of whack-a-mole. Every time I learn a new word, it seems another has vanished from my memory.

Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

Fitting everyone in

May 5, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s business as usual again here, after “normal” Easter, Orthodox Easter (that’s the big one), and Labour Day on 1st May. They call Western Easter “Catholic Easter” which is a little weird to me, coming from a place where Catholics, Anglicans and non-religious people all “do” Western Easter. People often ask me if I’m a Catholic, which they pronounce with the stress on the second syllable and with a “t” instead of a “th”: Catolic. I explain that, well, I went to a Catholic church every Sunday as a kid, but now I only go once a year at the most. I sometimes also say that where we come from, religion is a personal matter.

Anyway, after a bit of a lull (which was nice) I’ve got plenty of work again. Last night I was lying in bed thinking about the coming week (when I worked in insurance, I never did that), and I realised that fitting everybody in at the times they want (or even at times they don’t want) will be an impossibility. Somebody is desperate for a lesson tomorrow because he has a job interview the day after, and accommodating him has thrown everything else out of whack, not that it was exactly in whack in the first place.

Last Monday I had another attack of severe sinus pain. I had moderate pain from about lunchtime, but at around five or six, it ratcheted up several notches. I tried to soothe the pain with ice, and it subsided two hours later. Hopefully I’ll get the result of my CT scan in the next few days.

I’ve got back on the Scrabble horse, and things haven’t been that easy. A lot of tricky racks, bad draws, blocked boards, hard decisions (for me) that led to time trouble, and so on. After a run of 70 games out of 71 where I played at least one bingo (I doubt I’ll repeat that sort of record for a while; it seems so unlikely), I failed to play one in three of my next four. One bright spot was in a game yesterday, where I trailed by 138 but ended up with a 43-point win, without a bingo. The key moment was when I played off two tiles and drew two E’s (from a very E-heavy bag), allowing me to play ENQUEUE for 72. Do I really have enough E’s and U’s for that? Seems I do! I learnt that word early on; it’s one of the 60-odd seven-letter words containing five vowels, and from memory it’s one of only two such words where the consonants are side-by-side, the other being EUPNOEA, which means good (or normal) breathing.

In other news, it looks like I might finally have someone to play tennis with. We’re having our fair share of iffy weather, but fingers crossed our Tuesday morning game (or bash) goes ahead.

Life :) - Scrabble

Fair-weather friend

April 29, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today is Orthodox Easter Sunday. It’s as big a family occasion here (if you have one) as Christmas.

On Thursday I had the CT scan done on my head. The procedure lasted ten minutes, if that. After the scan the nurse gave me a CD, but my laptop doesn’t have a CD drive. Anyway, I’ll need to wait a couple of weeks for the proper results. As I was waiting I had to fill in some forms, and then the nurse asked me, “Ce greutate aveți?” I thought she was asking what problem I had that necessitated the scan, because the word greutate (meaning “weight”) is often used to mean a burden or difficulty. But then she gestured; she was actually asking how much I weighed. I came out with a figure of 76 kilos, but it was a guess. I hadn’t weighed myself for ages.

Yesterday I went further along the track to Serbia, just past the 22 km sign, so it was a 36 km ride in all. I turned back when I could see the weather was rapidly closing in, and rode as fast as I could back to Sânmihaiu Român 5 km away (which wasn’t that fast; I was now facing a crosswind). I made it to the pokie machine-filled café in the village just in time: there was a huge downpour with thunder and lightning. Soon after I got my coffee, water cascaded through the entrance, flooding the floor, and they shut off the power. The storm passed quickly, though, and I was soon on my way back home. It was a nice feeling to be amongst nature as soon as I left the city. I saw a majestic kestrel flying overhead, a heron on the riverbank, and the odd pheasant. On the outskirts of the city, the Bega was teeming with frogs. At one point I stopped and there was a school of fish, with an old man trying to explain to me how and when they spawn. (They’re spawning now, and fishing practically anywhere in Romania is illegal until early June.) Apart from that man, there was hardly a soul for miles around. People must have, like, families and stuff.

Yesterday S texted me to say we could meet up today if the weather turned out to be sunny. A literal fair-weather friend. She’d obviously seen the forecast. It’s about time I found somebody else.

I haven’t played Scrabble online for two weeks, not since the time my opponent aborted the game accusing me of cheating. Instead I’ve been trying to learn words. I’ve devised mnemonics for the top 50 six- and seven-letter stems, and used a combination of random functions in Excel to select one of the 100 stems I’ve studied, plus a seventh or eighth letter, and re-order all the letters. For instance, it might select URINATE plus a P (ha!) and randomise that as APITUERN. From that I’ll have to unscramble that lot to get the valid PAINTURE. The next time it might give me NAAIESR, and I’ll have to think, hmm, SARNIE plus an A, what does that make? The answer is it makes nothing at all. Sometimes the combination might yield half a dozen or more words. There’s a program called Zyzzyva that does all of this for you, but it’ll never give you a barren selection like SARNIE + A, and I think it’s important to recognise when a bunch of letters don’t make a bingo.

My brother and his wife have been on honeymoon in Thailand. I think they got back today.

Language teaching - Photos - Scrabble

Headless chicken

April 15, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments
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I spent most of last week running around like a headless chicken, trying to organise lessons at the last minute, wading through the disorganised piles of crap on my table in the process. At the weekend I took advantage of the iffy weather to restore some kind of order, and feel much more relaxed now. This morning I had a short coffee meeting with a new student, who will be starting Skype lessons with me tomorrow. She lives in Timișoara but I guess she feels Skype is still a time-saver. Yesterday (yes, Sunday, which I prefer to keep free) I had my first lesson with another new student, who works for a coffee machine-making company. She asked me two questions I get a lot: “What the hell are you doing in Romania?” and “Obviously you do some English teaching, but what do you actually do for a living?”

A problem lately has been long preparation time. I hand-make a lot of my materials. I’d go as far as to say the slightly offbeat homemade-ness is part of who am I as a teacher, and my students seem to like it. “We don’t get this at school,” they tell me, or “My Romanian English teacher just used grammar books.” But all that thinking and writing and printing and cutting and sticking takes time.

There isn’t a whole lot of other news. I thought I’d mention another of my experiences on the ISC Scrabble site, which unfortunately seems to bring out the worst in people. On Saturday I played seven games, winning four, but they were mostly against people rated lower than me, so my rating actually dipped a little. Not to matter. I then fired up game number eight, against someone I’d never played before. It was me to go first, and I had this rack: AEIUTZ and a blank. Hmm, there’s probably a bingo here, and it’ll score a lot. This was void, which means it’s perfectly fine to try words without penalty. Is ‘azulite’ a word? It rang a bell (a blue stone, something like lapis lazuli, perhaps?) so I try it, but no go. Perhaps it’s ‘azurite’ I was thinking of. I changed the blank to an R, and hey presto, 100 points. I felt a bit guilty at my unprecedented stroke of good fortune, but didn’t expect what happened next. He accused me of using a word finder, promptly aborted the game (doing the online equivalent of tipping the board up and letting the tiles fly across the room), then put me on his no-play list. I contacted the site’s help desk, saying that this sort of behaviour detracts from what should be a friendly game, but was told in no uncertain (and sarcastic) terms that if I wanted a friendly environment I should go elsewhere. It’s sad that basic civility seems to be in such short supply.

The Easter market from my window
Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Scrabble

A beautiful day

March 25, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

It has been a glorious Sunday, with weather I’d describe as just about perfect. This morning I biked to Sânmihaiu Român, a village about 13 km from here but it feels a world away. Typical of a Sunday morning, there was almost nobody around, save those fishing in the Bega. There were plenty of animals though, such as a mother goat with her two kids that could only have been days old. At the village I drank a cheap coffee in the sun, then sat in a park to do some Romanian homework, then rode back. Though my bike is probably 40-odd years old, it has been a godsend. I’m able to get a decent amount of exercise and travel to lessons in a reasonable time. This afternoon I asked the lady at the nearby tennis courts how and when I can play. It isn’t a club as such; I’d need to actually find someone to play with. Not that easy. I’ve suddenly got the urge to play again.

Yesterday I joined S and her friend at a wine-tasting session at The Wine Guy, a small wine store near Piața Unirii. We spent 3½ hours there, almost half of which involved listening to the Wine Guy himself talk (in Romanian, so a good lesson for me) about the way wines are produced and classified, the process of becoming a sommelier, the varieties produced in Romania, and so on. Finally we got down to business, and tried out seven wines in all: three whites, one rosé, and three reds. We swilled them around, sniffed them, and eventually tasted them. People came up with all sorts of exotic aromas that they could supposedly discern, but to me it was a bit like the Emperor’s New Clothes. Still, it was interesting, and I realised how much we neglect our sense of smell in 21st-century life. Wine tasting seems enormously subjective to me, and at times I was pining for a ten-dollar bottle of full-bodied Pinot Noir, instead of the far pricier stuff we tried last night with their subtle notes of raspberry or caramel. This was only the third time I’d done wine tasting; my best experience by far was in Birmingham back in 2001, when our session was hosted by Oz Clarke of Food and Drink fame. On that occasion there was no messing about as we drank New World wines in proper quantities.

The topic of wine came up twice in lessons last week. Once because cork oak trees happened to be the subject of an IELTS reading exercise; the other time was in my Romanian lesson when I told my teacher I couldn’t for the life of me pronounce the first word of the popular Romanian wine Tămâioasă Românească. It’s a beautiful-looking word, but the pile-up of vowels in Tămâioasă requires a form of mouth gymnastics for me. She then said she struggled with pile-ups of consonants in English, and wondered why the difference. I told her that English was considerably more consonant-heavy than Romanian (at least 60% consonants, as opposed to around 50% or perhaps a shade over), she then looked at a line of text in both languages, and saw what I meant.

The New Zealand government’s response to the Christchurch shooting, in particular that of Jacinda Ardern, has been very impressive. Decisive, compassionate, genuine, in touch with the people, everything you could want. Whatever your political persuasion, New Zealand’s 21st-century prime ministers have all been very good adverts for the country. The leadership shown in Britain, of course, has been the exact opposite. There were several “We want Jacinda” placards at yesterday’s anti-Brexit march. I watched Theresa May’s brief speech from Downing Street on Wednesday night and it all felt so wooden. As Dad said, it was typically British. I might be more inclined to say English. Regarding the shooting, when the subject came up in conversation last week, my student made an inadvertent joke. When I mentioned that the shooting was in Christchurch, he said, no it didn’t take place in Christchurch, it happened in a mosque.

Albert, my 7½-year-old student, is certainly a live wire. Last time I spoke to Mum, I asked her how on earth she managed with thirty kids of that age, five days a week. Albert is a nice kid, although games present a problem, because he isn’t quite mature enough to realise that you can’t always win.

Scrabble. You meet all kinds of weird and wonderful people on ISC, the Romanian-based site I play on. A little while ago I played an 80-year-old woman from Sydney who talked very positively about the tournament scene down under. She mentioned somebody by the name of Bob, assuming I knew who he was. Excuse my ignorance, but who’s Bob? Apparently she was referring to Bob Jackman, a veteran Scrabble expert. I’ve also now played three games with a semi-retired actuary. Last weekend I played a lady from Scotland who had played 31,000 games. She was bemoaning her bad luck and lack of improvement. Maybe it would help if you took a break. She then mentioned that she suffered from ME, or chronic fatigue syndrome, and often struggles to leave the house. Yesterday I had perhaps my worst experience to date. My English opponent’s notes consisted of screeds of information about all sorts of things that piss him off about all sorts of players. I quite often see this (seriously, get a life people), and it rings alarm bells. Anyway, we play, he starts, I reply with a bingo, and then play short words on my next three turns because I can’t see any other options. Then he writes “you won’t be playing with me again”. I ask why, but a message flashes up on my screen to say my opponent has already added me to his no-play list, which means no-speak, too. Lovely. He then plays an obscure nine-letter bingo (a rarity which I would always congratulate, but of course I’m on his no-speak list) and I fall behind. Late in the game I find another bingo and lose by a single point, not that I particularly care by then. Perhaps that’s his tactic all along. Unsettle people by being an arsehole, so they no longer care about winning. To me it’s baffling.

I hope this fantastic weather continues.

Family - Films - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Scrabble

9/3/99

March 10, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last week was an exhausting one. I’m not sure why – my 30 hours of lessons were pretty standard – but after yesterday’s final lesson I didn’t feel like doing a whole lot. It might have been the late finishes (on five consecutive days) and all the extra to-ing and fro-ing that happens when I teach kids. With the exception of one boy, a 14-year-old, all my lessons with kids involve a trip.

When I turned up nine days ago for my lesson with seven-year-old Albert (I’d seen a Victoria earlier in the day), my heart sank. He stood almost pinned to the back of the sofa, cowering, wondering why this strange man had entered his lair. I felt sorry for him. Look, I said, it’ll be fine, knowing of course that I had an hour and a half with him, and it was likely to be anything but fine. But to my surprise, I was able to put him at ease. Being able to communicate with him in Romanian was a huge help. Unlike some kids who expect me to be fluent in their mother tongue, Albert seemed quite impressed with my Romanian skills. He had a pretty good knowledge of the basics: numbers, colours, animals, simple food items. We played a simple board game I’d created involving frogs, and before I knew it our time was up. On Friday I had my second lesson with him, and he ran up to me when I arrived. It was quite incredible to see that. He spent half the lesson wanting to run: he was a bundle of boundless energy. Simon says for god’s sake stop running! It truth it’s much easier to teach someone like him than a kid who looks perpetually bored and whose favourite words are “no” and “I don’t know”.

Yesterday I had a pair of new students – an ambitious 20-year-old couple – who want to do the Cambridge exam and perhaps move to the UK. They were both at a good level, around a 7½ on my 0-to-10 scale. They specifically mentioned Birmingham as a city they’d like to live in. The bloke marvelled at what I see as my extremely standard British accent. I get that from time to time from people who have been brought up on a diet of American movies and games. With this couple, I’ve now had 76 students (but no trombones) since I started back in November 2016.

My grandfather (Dad’s dad) passed away twenty years ago yesterday. It was a Tuesday, I was in my first year of university, my brother was in his first year in Army uniform, and my parents had been in London to try and fix up a teaching exchange for Mum in New Zealand. As it happened, New Zealand was booked out, so my parents decided to spend 2000 in Cairns (Australia) instead. My grandfather, who had been a physically strong and debonair gentleman, with quite a sense of humour to boot, spent the last decade of his life in the ever-tightening grip of Alzheimer’s. It was all very sad, and extremely hard for my grandmother. His problems came to the fore when they visited New Zealand in the summer of 1989-90 (we were living there at the time). He, who had always been a lover of the outdoors, became dizzy and disoriented when exposed to the sun. From then on it was a downward spiral. My grandmother tried to keep things as normal as possible, even going on holiday in Barbados with him and my father as late as 1996, but it was very hard work. I remember the speech my dad gave at his funeral – a very good one, especially for someone who doesn’t normally speak in public.

Last weekend S and I watched an unusual film about Dick Cheney, George W Bush’s vice-president. It wasn’t an easy watch – it brought back some ugly memories of the early 2000s: that awful election, 9/11, and the Iraq War which Britain, and of course my brother, got dragged into. I learnt plenty about Dick Cheney and the machinations of American politics at that time, but it was hard not to watch it and feel angry. It was all just a bit too close to home. S disagreed with me, but it showed to me that elections can and do matter. Had Al Gore been the victor in 2000, which he perhaps would have been if the Florida recount hadn’t been stopped by the Supreme Court, the world would be a different place now. That doesn’t necessarily mean that people’s votes in elections matter, but that wasn’t my point.

Scrabble. Five games yesterday, and just one win, despite averaging 402. At the level I play, that kind of average is likely to give you four wins rather than four losses, but it wasn’t my lucky day. I lost one game by five points when my opponent played an out-bingo, and in another game I was a long way behind, but found a bingo and some other high-scoring plays, only to fall short by three points. Even in my final game I was made to sweat a bit when my opponent played a 97-point bingo to the triple, making several overlaps, but I managed to edge over the line. My rating has dipped into the low 1300s, which is probably an accurate reflection of where I am right now.

Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

Normal rules don’t apply

March 1, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last Wednesday was a terrible day. I had to go to the doctor, then I faffed around with paperwork for ages, then I managed to lose some pretty important paperwork that might still mean I have to go to Bucharest. Or not. The next day, when I’d just about come to terms with my situation, I ended up in an argument with Mum on the phone, my first for a while. Mum, you should try living in Romania. In hindsight I shouldn’t have told her; it would have made both our lives easier. My difficulties stem from the fact that I’m not a Romanian citizen and I don’t have the national ID card that everybody else has. Anything admin-related becomes so much harder because normal rules don’t apply to me. I shouldn’t complain; being off the grid is otherwise quite nice, really. As I said, normal rules don’t apply to me.

S told me that if I do need to go to Bucharest, we can make a proper trip of it. That could be good. I now have major doubts as to whether anything will happen between S and me. Heck, it’s already been over five months. It’s odd that she (temporarily) lives with her parents, but I’m still yet to meet them.

Yesterday I celebrated my 100th lesson with Matei; Zoli (my first-ever student) is just two behind. Tomorrow I’ve got four hours with the Cîrciumaru family – two hours with the mother followed by two with the son. It won’t be easy with either of them. She’s fixated on grammar to the point where I wonder exactly what her aim is (tomorrow I’ll ask her), and he’s Mr I Don’t Know. I say it isn’t easy, but when I think back to some of the bullshit I faced in my previous jobs, it’s an absolute breeze. After that I’ve got my first lesson with a boy of just seven. Ninety minutes. For a boy that young, that’s an absolute age. In the evening I’ve got a Skype session, not with the young man who lives in England, but (for a change) with his mother, who lives in Focșani in the east of Romania.

This morning I attended a performance of Puss in Boots, in English, at Waldorf School. The cast were aged around fourteen. I didn’t know what to expect but it was actually rather good, with plenty of comedy moments. An incredible amount of work must have gone into it. Learning lines in a foreign language is no mean feat.

Today is the last day of winter, according to one definition (and the one I tend to use). It’s been quite a tough three months, probably the most challenging spell since I arrived. My main goal for the spring and summer is simply to be well. I’m taking a new nasal spray, and eventually (when my paperwork is sorted) I’ll be having a CT scan. That’s a positive development. The weather is improving and that always helps too.

Scrabble. Three tough games tonight. I was starved of high-point tiles, eleven out of twelve falling on my opponents’ racks. In the first game I out-bingoed my opponent 3-1 but still fell to a 41-point loss. In game two I couldn’t get anything going at all, and was thrashed by 159. The final game had an attritional feel about it, but finding DAIKERS gave me a second bingo to my opponent’s one, and a 42-point victory. I’m getting better at the game. Learning a bunch of bingo stems has helped me memorise and find words like DAIKERS (which is RAISED + K). That’s still a sticking point, however. There are many thousands of highly playable words, many of them fours and fives but lots of sevens and eights too, that I have no knowledge of whatsoever. Compared to some regulars, I’m playing with one hand behind my back. I’ll keep persevering though; I enjoy the challenge.

Life :) - Scrabble

Slowing me down and tiring me out

February 19, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

My mood is certainly better than when I last wrote. The spring-like weather, the snowdrops coming out, and the people filling the squares, might have something to do with that. Yesterday Piața Unirii was heaving. This permanent state of being a bit ill is one thing I really could do without, however. It’s slowing me down and tiring me out.

Last week I had 31 hours of lessons. Right now, that’s about my limit. They included two hours with my eleven-year-old Mr I Don’t Know, preceded by (for the first time) an hour with his mum. I could see where he gets it from. She was terrified to actually speak English, preferring to focus on grammar instead. I kept telling her that gaining the confidence to speak is more important (at the beginning, at least) than learning grammar rules. Her son had to contend with a day of school, followed by two hours of me, followed by three hours of Romanian. This was a Friday. Poor chap. I made sure we just played games during the second hour.

I now have a bookcase. On Saturday S an I went back to one of the hardware stores, and surprisingly the two-metre-long flat pack fitted in her rather small car. I put it together yesterday. My level of practical nous just about stretches to that.

Scrabble. I’m not playing all that much, concentrating on learning words (sevens and eights) instead. When I have been playing, I’ve mostly been winning, and my rating on ISC has hit the low 1400s once more. Come the middle of this year, the lexicon will have expanded to include three extra two-letter words (EW, OK and ZE, with OK being the most controversial), half a dozen additional three-letter words, and many more longer ones.

Tomorrow I’ll try and get an appointment with one of the ENT specialists. This has been going on for too long. I’m even looking into surgery, but I don’t like the idea of going under the knife unless it’s absolutely necessary. (I’ve just spoken to my brother about this, and typically, he says I should just get on with it.)

Language learning - Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

Making a difference

February 4, 2019 plutomanby 0 Comments

The last few days have been a struggle. I’ve picked up my fifth or sixth cold (I’ve lost count) this winter, and I feel feeble. All the colds have pretty much merged into one, and with all the sinus pain that never totally goes away, it’s a long time since I felt anywhere near 100%. Maybe I contracted this latest bout at the doctor’s surgery on Thursday night. As I do every four weeks, I went to the after-hours doctor to pick up my prescription, but that might not have been all I picked up. There had been a flu outbreak and the woman behind the desk was wearing a mask.

The good news is that I met S for coffee this morning, and we spoke for two hours in Romanian. Being able to speak someone else’s language is one of the most awesome things ever. I haven’t seen a lot of S lately. She got sick, I got sick, she went skiing in Austria, she got sick again, I got sick again, and so on. Before we met it was just lovely being out in Timișoara on a Sunday morning. It’s always so quiet and peaceful then. Then it was equally lovely having somebody to talk to. On the way back from the café I filled a pair of six-litre water bottles from the well, as I do every few days, but this time the bottles in my backpack felt unusually heavy. My life here is primitive in a lot of ways, and I don’t mind that too much. The water trips, the tram trips to pay my rent in cold hard cash, and of course work. My work is deliberately manual. The world we live in is automate, automate, automate, but manual is often way more interesting and fun.

I had a bunch of cancellations again last week, but the lessons I did have went pretty well. One of my latest exercises for kids is asking them to come up with 26 foods, or animals, or games, one for each letter of the alphabet. Last week one of my eleven-year-old students thought of Tasmanian devil, or diavol tasmanian in Romanian. He wanted to put that under D, but he already had “duck” there. Of course it needed to go under T instead, and that letter was free. It’s cool when kids come up with stuff that I hadn’t even thought of. I asked another eleven-year-old boy to write about his favourite time of day, expecting about four lines. Instead he wrote almost a whole page about why he liked evenings. I was bowled over, not just by the amount he wrote but also by how much his English had improved since I started with him in October 2017. Man, this is fantastic. All my work is making a difference, hopefully.

The men’s Australian Open final sure didn’t take six hours. It barely lasted two. Djokovic was brilliant and Nadal was very passive and indecisive, perhaps simply because Djokovic was playing so well as to leave him flummoxed. That’s the 52nd grand slam won by either Federer, Nadal or Djokovic. Thirteen years’ worth of majors. Extraordinary stuff. I’ve sat in Rod Laver Arena once, back in 2005 (I did also visit the Open in ’08, but didn’t have tickets for the biggest court). In ’05 the experience felt “big” but not too big. Not like today, with obnoxious electronic advertising boards pulsating in between games. Wimbledon seems to be getting too big as well. They’ve purchased the adjoining golf club, so more land, more courts, bigger, bolder, better. Bleuugh.

Scrabble. I’ve had a fairly iffy start to 2019, but I won all seven of the games I played yesterday. Although my results haven’t been fantastic so far this year, I’ve made some interesting plays: my first-ever triple-triple (ACTIONeD for 149 – he left the C in the triple lane, not particularly dangerous in second position, but I just happened to have a play that fitted perfectly); TOUZLED for 120; SqUARELY (the first time I’d ever used the blank as a Q); and two nine-letter bingos in ASPERsION and OVERDOINg (that last one in the final game I played yesterday; OVERDOg was also playable but I didn’t see it; I only saw its anagram gROOVED which didn’t play).

Brexit. Oh dear. Last Tuesday was a quieter than average day on the work front, so I watched a stream of the debates and series of votes, open-mouthed. One of the amendments was to extend Article 50 in the event that no agreement is reached by a certain day. A chance to sit down, have a cuppa tea, and think about what you actually want to do. It was voted down. So hang on, there are barely 50 days until the scheduled exit day, you’ve got no bloody clue what you’re doing, you’re fast running out of options, and you’ve just voted to deny yourselves the option of a bit more time in the event that no solution magically presents itself in the next few weeks. Are you insane?

Five lessons planned for tomorrow.