Scrabble

Life :) - Scrabble

Seeing some light

December 9, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last night I had a blissful nine hours of sleep, and finally I can see light at the end of the tunnel. It’s almost like I just have a cold now. This is one of the (few?) downsides of being self-employed: sometimes you get sick. Last year I was “lucky” enough for my illness to coincide perfectly with Christmas (I’d forgotten what that was like until I re-read my blog posts) so it had virtually no impact on my bottom line. This week I’ve got lessons scheduled with four new students, so I really hope I can re-enter the world of the living.

S is staying with her grandparents this weekend. They’re in their mid-to-late nineties, so S clearly has good genes. She said she’d just attended a traditional Christmas pig-cutting, er, event? Ceremony? Exercise? I think I prefer exercise. You can watch several of these exercises on Youtube, such as here. (Look at all the downvotes.) Since S is a vegetarian, I wonder what she thinks of it. My body corporate Skype meeting is on Friday night, so we might push off to Sibiu on Saturday and spend just one night there.

My illness has been terrible for getting out and entering the festive spirit, but good for Scrabble. In addition to the odd occasions I’ve used it as a stress-free educational tool with my students, I’ve played a fair few games online, and mostly I’ve been winning. Learning some high-probability sevens has been a huge help already, but I feel the biggest progress I’ve made has been in scrapping, finding ways to offload awkward tiles, finding less-obvious moves, and making better decisions about what to play and what to keep. I’ve certainly become better at endgames. Yesterday I won eight games out of nine, including three come-from-behind wins in a row. In the last game of the day I stormed out to a 163-point lead thanks to two natural bingos, but my opponent drew both blanks and found two impressive bingos of his own. On multiple occasions I had bingos on my rack with nowhere to play them that I could see, and I became more and more indecisive. I clung on for just a 14-point win. My favourite game was a remarkable one: despite being out-bingoed 3-0, I won 444 to 416, thanks in part to NOVELLA for 52, a double-double that hooked other words. It’s that kind of play that keeps me coming back.

Family - Life :) - Scrabble

Under the weather

December 8, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve had eight pretty awful days since I last posted. I should be in Sibiu right now, but when I met S yesterday at a café in her work complex she said, that cough doesn’t sound good, so how about we don’t do this. At least not this weekend. That’s a shame, but it was the only sensible decision. Although I was a bit apprehensive about going there with S, I was quite excited too. It’s a beautiful city after all.

I’ve cancelled only three lessons; my bar for doing that is quite high, probably too high. Last Thursday night, right after my last blog post, was the worst. I hardly slept a wink and by morning I felt extremely feeble. I’d have to bike to my 9am lesson, the temperature outside was well below freezing, and it just wasn’t going to happen. Early this week I started to feel better, but by Wednesday I was running a mild temperature and hacking up all kinds of lurid slime that looked rather the stuff some of my younger students play with. That day I went to the doctor’s surgery, a completely baffling place, especially when you’re sick. You have to see someone to make an appointment, someone else to pay, someone else to do something else… There’s no “Pay here” sign or handy arrows pointing to Dr Smith or Dr Jones. The onus is on me to figure out, or rather guess, where I’m supposed to be. It didn’t help that the lady at the desk kept telling me it was Tuesday, with enough certainly that I believed her, when it was actually Wednesday. Eventually I saw somebody, and that part of the process is nearly always fantastic. I got some drugs, although no antibiotics, and with a bit of luck I’ll be back in business before long.

I’ve tried to simplify my lessons this week. Not too much complex grammar. I’ve certainly played the odd game of Scrabble, using the set I bought in Oxfam in Cambridge which has four of the requisite 100 tiles missing (they spell out LOVE; weird I know). In one game we made DICK and SEX.

After my only lesson today I met up with S again. She told me, no, you really don’t need to get your hair cut. It’s been ten months.

So that’s me. I spoke to my parents this morning on FaceTime. While I chatted to Dad, I could see Mum in the corner of the screen looking far from her best. She’s picked up a cold. “Really I’m fine.” Don’t lie. They’re flying to the UK, with a two-night stopover in Singapore, in little over 24 hours. The “I’m fine” thing, especially on the eve of a flight half-way around the world, is always a bit of a worry.

If we go to Sibiu next weekend, the last chance before I go away for Christmas, it’ll coincide with a fairly important body corporate meeting, or workshop as they’re calling it, in Wellington. They told me I could Skype in. It takes place between 11pm and 1am my time. There’s about as much certainty as to what we’ll end up doing with our apartment block as there is with Brexit.

Life :) - Romania - Scrabble

Centenary celebrations

November 30, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

One of my students is a chemistry teacher at a very good school called Waldorf (I can’t help but think of the Muppets when I see or hear that word) and she invited me to the school’s celebration of Romania’s centenary, which took place this morning. She gave me precise details about the two buses I needed to take, and stupidly I never looked on a map to see exactly where the place was. If I had, I’d have known it was almost right next to the apartment block of one of my students, and I would have walked or biked there. As it was, I went too far on the first bus (I didn’t realise it was only a five-minute ride) and had to call her. Um, what do I do now? I walked back to the stop I should have got off at, then took the second bus, and I got there just in time, or la țanc (an expression I picked up two weeks ago, meaning “in the nick of time”).

Inside the school, a drummer, one of the older pupils, gave everybody a rousing welcome. My English student led me upstairs into a hall, and a couple of hundred kids, most of them dressed in traditional Romanian attire, formed a spiral. (I didn’t have any clothing along those lines, and was concerned that I’d stand out in jeans and a plain white shirt, but I was fine.) The national anthem was sung. It was a good job the words were projected on a screen: “Deșteaptă-te, române!” is about as far as I get otherwise. The singing, sometimes accompanied by guitars, was lovely. After a video explaining the unification in 1918, some more songs and some readings, we joined hands for a hora, a traditional Romanian dance. I said “Am două picioare stângi” (“I’ve got two left feet”) but I managed, just about. (If you’re uncoordinated, or “unco” as some Kiwis say, you can say in Romanian that you have two left hands.) The kids filed out, to the beat of the drum once more, and I met some of my student’s colleagues, including Bogdan, the history teacher. He was the only man amongst them, although supposedly two other male teachers weren’t in attendance. Downstairs we ate bread covered in pork fat and red onions (some of the traditional food can be interesting) and that was that. In a funny way I felt quite privileged to be there. I could quickly tell that it was a good school; the kids behaved extremely well.

Otherwise things haven’t been so great: I’ve picked up a cold once again. Let’s hope it passes reasonably quickly. I spoke to Dad last night; he’s been having a terrible time with migraines. He said the only saving grace was the interminable spell of rain, which would have put the kibosh on a lot of activities, migraine or not.

The 100th anniversary of the unification is on 1st December, the day after tomorrow. The market stalls are all up in the square; they’ve been painted white unlike the last two years. Tomorrow they’ll be up and running, with the pleasant waft of chimney cakes and mulled wine. Outside my window is a sea of blue, yellow and red. I doubt I’ll see the parade because I’ll be working on Saturday, but I should get to see the lights being switched on and the fireworks, which last year weren’t until 11pm.

On Tuesday morning S and I had a text conversation while I was at Piața Badea Cârțan, the big market. She said, isn’t it wonderful that your job allows you to start the day in a marketplace among the vegetables and cheeses, and I said, yes it absolutely is. I’m certain that the fundamental change in lifestyle has been hugely beneficial to my wellbeing. I’m a different man. (Heck, I sure look like a different man. It’s nine months since I had a haircut.) It would take a helluva lot for me to go back.

Scrabble. I’ve played four games in the last 24 hours. Last night I started with a shocker. I couldn’t get anything going at all. Just one of those games, and I went down in a heap, 283 to 418. My opponent played extremely well; she seemed to actually know words. Perhaps that’s what happens when you’ve played 9000 games. The next game went considerably better: I found an early bingo, my opponent hit back with two of his own but I made RITZ for 69 and that was enough for an 83-point win. I had TOASTER on my (toast) rack towards the end, but I couldn’t find anywhere for it. After the game I realised that of course it has an anagram, ROTATES, that would have gone down. Everything seemed to go right for me in game three. Four bingos and a 536-332 win, just four points off my record game score, which happened way back last New Year’s Eve. I’ve played one more game (so far) today, a 390-all draw. After an early bingo I held a three-figure lead, but my opponent slapped down a trio of bonuses. I continued to score well, without seeming anywhere near another bingo, and I still had my nose in front as we entered the endgame, but my opponent put down EXEC (which I hadn’t seen) for 45 and I was perhaps fortunate to have an out-play that allowed me to escape with a draw.

Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

Unashamed

November 26, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

When I met up with S on Friday I felt pissed off: my work day had been just about wiped out by last-minute cancellations. I asked her if she could help me write a short contract to give my students, starting in the new year. I knew what to say; she just needed to ensure that the Romanian was right. “Pay for lessons in advance, in blocks of five. If you cancel within 24 hours or don’t show up at all, that counts as a lesson. End of.” But a bit more politely. S surprised me by saying that a contract might not be such a good idea. Romanians are unashamedly late and unreliable; perhaps I just need to get used to that. Hmmm. It’s hard, because where I come from, cancelling an appointment half an hour before the start because you’re “not in the mood” (yes, I’ve had that) is laughably bad form. This weekend I took stock of what S said, and realised that my cancellations are running at the same 15% or so that they always have – it’s just felt as though I’ve had more recently because they’ve come in flurries. And heck, when I came here I didn’t know whether me teaching idea would even be viable. It certainly has been. I’ll finish 2018 with more contact hours than a schoolteacher would get in a year.

On a not totally dissimilar theme, today there was a blessing at the yet-to-be-completed monster cathedral in Bucharest. I saw the half-finished monstrosity when I visited two years ago. The final bill will be something like £100 million. In such a poor country it’s an enormous, and very sad, waste of public money.

More positively, buildings are being renovated all the time in Timișoara. There are a lot of them, and limited funds, so it will take a while. Today I saw this beautifully restored building near Piața Unirii. The picture doesn’t quite do justice to it. It’s on quite a narrow street; this was as much of it as I could get in the frame without doing anything fancy.

Today I sold my bike. That was my first bike, which I bought in March. I put it on OLX (Romania’s equivalent of TradeMe) this morning and within 2½ hours it was off my hands. I got the same 200 lei I paid for it, although I had to cough up a 20 lei fee. That’s a pretty good outcome.

Scrabble. I’m trying to learn some seven-letter words, which are extremely important for bingos. Eights are equally useful, and very occasionally you’ll even play a longer bingo. One of those occasions for me was yesterday – the nine-letter MENTIONER, through TI, as a 94-point double-double. That’s one of my best plays to date. Anyway, the sevens. Some people prefer to study alphagrams – seven-letter strings in alphabetical order, which they can map onto the correct word, such as ABEITUX for BAUXITE. This seems a terrible way for me to study. My brain doesn’t work like that. So instead I’ve been studying six-letter “stems” made up of common letters, such as ORNATE, and then coming up with mnemonics for the letters that combine with the stem to produce valid words. For instance, the mnemonic I use for ORNATE is “I’d pinch curving bums”. Any of the letters in that phrase can be added to ORNATE to give a valid seven. The first letter (alphabetically) is B, and that combines to make BARONET and the rather obscure REBOANT. Add C and you get ENACTOR. Adding D will give you TORNADE, which is another word for tornado. (Ashburton had a pretty impressive tornade last week.) The next is G, which makes NEGATOR. And so on, up to V, which gives VENATOR. I had to find a method that was an least vaguely interesting, or else I’d give up.

Three lessons scheduled (!) for tomorrow.

Language learning - Life :) - Scrabble

Apprehension

November 23, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I haven’t written for a while. I just haven’t had a whole heap of news. Last week somebody flicked the big black switch marked “WINTER”; it was going to happen eventually. Now the wooden sheds are being put up in the square in preparation for the Christmas market. Everything is now coming around for me for a third time. S and I decided to see Sibiu’s world-famous-in-Romania Christmas market the weekend after the centenary celebrations. We’ll head over there on Friday 7th December – two weeks tomorrow – and come back on the Sunday. I must admit I’m quite apprehensive about spending a whole weekend with S. Although come to think of it, I’d be apprehensive about spending a whole weekend with almost anyone.

Last weekend S and I wandered around the area just on the other side of the river from where I live. We stared at and talked about the beautiful buildings – she knew some of their history – and ended up in Scârț, the fantastically bohemian bar with all the communist memorabilia on the walls. As S said, Romania has got to stage where it feels it take the piss (just a little) out of its communist past. When I got back home my sinuses flared up, and I suffered two hours of horrific pain. Even when the pain had subsided I felt knocked for six, and the next day I wanted to do absolutely nothing. Unfortunately I’d sort of committed myself to seeing Fantastic Beasts 2, the ninth or tenth (or whatever) Harry Potter film. Not my cup of tea even if I was feeling 100%, but we saw it in 3D, and that made it kind of fun. The best part was getting to speak some Romanian on the way there and back.

I speak Romanian whenever I can, except with S, because her English is that ridiculously good (she hates me telling her that). I will insist that we speak Romanian for at least part of the trip. You might think I’d be almost fluent by now, but I’m an awful long way from that. My student at the university asked me how I’d say simple phrases like “She washed her car” and “The film we saw last week”, and I felt all at sea, because of the pronouns which are still a mess in my mind. “The big blue building was destroyed in the war” or “The weather will be foggy tomorrow” pose no such problems.

I’ve played four games of Scrabble this evening, winning three, despite being out-bingoed 5-4 over the four games. In the last game my opponent played strangely, seemingly fishing on every non-bingo turn. He played two bingos, but I might still have won without the solitary bingo I found late in the game. As well as playing, I’m trying to study seven-letter words. In my next post I might describe how I’m trying to learn them.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

Heavy stuff

November 12, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Friday night I picked up a cold. Again. It’s not a lot of fun. Last night S invited me to see Luna Amară (Bitter Moon), a rock band from Cluj that have been around a while, at a venue called Capcana (The Trap), only a ten-minute walk from here. I didn’t expect her to have two female companions, and that totally threw me. They communicated in that way that some people do here, mixing English words into otherwise Romanian sentences, because they think it makes them sound so damn sophisticated. It gives them an air of superiority over those who don’t know enough English to be able to do it. For me, a native English speaker who takes words fairly seriously, this kind of speech is at best comical and at worst extremely jarring. We arrived at eight, but the band didn’t start playing till ten. The crowd, who weren’t that young, were restless by that stage. The band weren’t young either, but they certainly put their heart and soul into it. At times I thought the frontman might burst a blood vessel. About 20% of the music was beautiful; the rest was heavy, headbanging stuff. S, it turns out, is a headbanger. For me it was an experience, and what’s the point of living in Romania if I don’t experience things, but I breathed I sigh of relief at around 11:30 when it was all over and I could go home. I wonder what S thought of me.

Today I haven’t felt like doing much at all. Eight games of Scrabble – six wins, two losses – might have been the highlight. I won the first five games to extend my winning streak and reach my highest rating yet, which seemed slightly inflated. The run came to an end with a fantastic game in which my opponent got off to a flying start and played very well throughout as far as I could see. I did my best to claw my way back, and towards the end I was in position to slap down SHOREmAN for what would probably have been a game-winning bingo, but my opponent blocked it and in the end I fell 46 points short. The next game was one of those horror shows that I experience from time to time. Getting stuck with a Q and nowhere to play it, being sure I had 24 bingos on my rack (containing a blank) but being unable to find any of them, and at times seeing absolutely nowhere to play. My total was abysmal as I went down 260 to 394. In the final game I drew both blanks on my opening rack and immediately bingoed, and later drew all four S’s, but only scraped home by 15 points.

I taught 28 hours last week. In some of my lessons with kids I saw both spoilt-brat syndrome and pushy-parent syndrome, simultaneously. A funny moment came with Matei, my ten-year-old student. I asked him to answer a series of “What if…?” questions, one of which was “What would you say if you could address the whole world?” Matei simply said, “Donald Trump sucks.” My lessons with adults were generally enjoyable.

Mum has been on a golfing weekend in Alexandra. That gave me the rare opportunity to talk to Dad. We talked for more than an hour. He told me how it really is. Mum gets wound up by certain people at the golf club, as she did at school in the UK, as she does pretty much wherever she goes. She’s unable to just let it all wash over her or take a back seat; she must get fully involved. Apparently the looming golf trip (and having to be with those people) dominated their recent trip to Moeraki and made the whole thing miserable. Then last week Dad received a final bill for the MG that he’s having restored. The figure was less than Dad expected and he thought Mum would be pleased when he showed it to her. Au contraire. Last week Geraldine had a decent fall of snow. In November. He showed me the mountains covered in the white stuff when we spoke on FaceTime. Timișoara has continued to be bathed in sunshine. Weather, like so much else in the second decade of the 21st century, has ceased to make sense.

Talking of bills, I did a double take last night when I saw the rateable value on my near-worthless Wellington apartment had risen by nearly 50%! You couldn’t make this shit up. I’ll have to appeal or do something.

Anybody reading this blog – and I know there are many thousands of you out there – please read this article from last weekend’s Mail on Sunday. Especially if you have any experience in dealing with autism. It’s horrific and will probably make you angry as it did me, but it gives you some idea of what a shitshow the treatment of mental health problems has become in the UK.

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

Social life – what’s that?

November 5, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

After last week I was absolutely knackered. To be honest I still am. I had 30½ hours of lessons, which is a healthy rather than a ridiculous total, but it was my biggest week since April. With more work comes more exercise: the most convenient way for me to travel to my “off-premises” lessons is by bike.

On Friday night I joined S for drinks to celebrate her recent purchase of an apartment. After my experience, why entering the property market should be a cause for celebrating is beyond me, but I got to meet some of her work colleagues and we ended up at the Bierhaus where we tried some locally-brewed craft beers. S invited me to play board games last night, but I had two more lessons yesterday morning and after that I felt extremely sluggish so I said no. Normally I might have agreed, but tonight I’ll be seeing the film about Bohemian Rhapsody (which has the makings of a treat) with S and some of her friends. Three social events in a single weekend are one too many for me. Whatever happens with S, it’s great to have a semblance of a social life in Timișoara at last. I’m planning on joining S on a trip to Sibiu, either for Romania’s centenary on 1st December, or the following weekend. Either way, we’ll be there for the amazing (from what I’ve heard) Christmas market.

Interesting moments keep cropping up at work. One of my female students is a 23-year-old in her final year of a medical degree. Sometimes I also see her younger sister, who speaks English at a very basic level, at the same time. One time, when both sisters were in attendance, I did a lesson on directions, because the topic seemed appropiate for both of them. At one point I talked about pubs. “Is there a good pub near here? How do you get to the nearest pub?” The older sister then said that she didn’t do pubs, and could we please make the destination a church instead? She’s a devout adherent of the Pentecostal church.

After yesterday’s lessons I read a few chapters of The Handmaid’s Tale (S had given me a copy) and played eleven games of Scrabble, winning nine. I am improving, without doubt. My last game had just a 12-minute clock but I coped with that without too many problems. My next step (and it’s a big one) is to learn the words. I need to have the threes down pat and get a handle on their front and back hooks. I got my fingers burnt in a recent game by not realising ADRY was a word (why would it be?), and voilà, my opponent was able to hook an A onto the front of DRY and make use of the triple word square in the endgame, leaving me a-high and a-dry. I lost that game by three points. I get down plenty of bingos, but the vast majority of those are words I know from everyday life, and at some point I’ll actually need to study them in a way that isn’t a chore, if such a method exists.

Yes, the Red Sox are so-called world champions for the fourth time this century. Great city, great fans, you can’t say they don’t deserve it. What an incredible season they had.

The midterm elections take place on Tuesday night, my time. The Trump factor has focused the world’s attention on them in a way I’ve never seen before. According to Fivethirtyeight, one of my favourite sites, the Democrats will take the House but the Republicans will keep the Senate, so long as there isn’t a systematic polling error in one direction, which you can hardly discount.

Sodding Halloween, which shouldn’t be within 5000 miles of Romania’s borders, is mercifully over. It’s 4th November and it’s T-shirt weather here.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Scrabble

Flipping heck

October 29, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I wound up with 22½ hours last week, which isn’t a terrible total. This week I’ve got a total of 31½ hours booked – a fairly busy week in other words – and I hope I end up with something close to that. Saturday morning’s session (I hesitate to use the word lesson) with the 17-year-old girl was interesting. As is her wont, she asked me not to bother with the Cambridge reading test practice I’d prepared, saying she’d rather have a 90-minute chat instead. In this time she told me about her exploits in the swimming pool, and showed me the medals (including a national bronze in breaststroke) to prove it. Her description of her training regime sounded rather, er, Romanian. Three hours a day, seven days a week. She described her programme and coach in good English, but switched to Romanian to say, “He hit me.” What with? His hand? Did it hurt? She said, yes it absolutely did hurt, and it was some rubber implement. She rummaged around in a cupboard trying to find one without success, then she brought up a picture on her phone. It was a flipper. Her coach hit her with a flipper. “But it motivated me to go faster.” On her mother’s advice she gave up swimming when she was 14. This morning I had a Skype chat with my cousin in Wellington and her family. Her eldest son is 16 and a very successful swimmer. I regaled them all of the flipper story.

It’s a shame I can’t watch the World Series. Well I could, but my sleep is too important to me. This morning I wanted to get up early, taking advantage of the clocks going back, and go fishing. I only spent an hour there and didn’t catch anything, obviously. But yesterday the third game went on so long that I was able to catch a fair chunk of it, including the wild 13th inning in which both teams scored. But I missed the end of it because I had go to Strada Timiș for my lessons with flipper girl and her little brother. (The game went for seven hours and 20 minutes, breaking all kinds of records. The Dodgers walked it off in the 18th.) The Red Sox bounced back last night in the fourth game to lead 3-1, and could wrap it up tonight. It’ll be party time, no doubt, in Boston if they do so. I don’t know if there’s another city on the planet as passionate about its sports teams.

Scrabble. I’ve now won eleven of my last twelve games and my rating has been gradually edging up. A bit more solidity on the three-letter words is helping me. My most memorable game among that dozen was one against a higher-rated player where I held a three-figure lead, only for my opponent to play a bingo on the triple lane while I was swamped with vowels. I made a clear blunder on one of my final plays, but got away with it, sneaking a confidence-boosting four-point win. And the very next game I lost by just three. That game illustrated the importance of the letter E in Scrabble, and indeed in English in general, as I only saw one E all game. I had a couple of milestone games: my first with four bingos, and my first 400-point game without a bingo at all. In my last game I out-bingoed my opponent 3-0 thanks to both blanks, but my opponent scored heavily on just about every turn, while I struggled with my post-bingo racks, and I had to sweat a bit on the way to a 49-point win.

Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

A little less cancellation, a little more action please

October 26, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Too many cancellations this week. As there were last week. I’m going to implement a new system for any new students I get, as well as my current biggest offenders, whereby lessons are booked in blocks of five. At the end of the fifth lesson they’ll need to pay for the next five if they want to continue, and so on. If they cancel within 24 hours of the lesson, or don’t show up at all, they lose out. Anything else just isn’t fair on me. This might mean I get fewer new students but hopefully the ones I do get will be more committed.

All these cancellations mean I’m getting to play a lot more Scrabble than I bargained for. I got in nine games yesterday, six of which I won, although my rating only ticked up a fraction. The first game, against a slightly higher-rated player, was interesting. I found the first two bingos of the game but my opponent hit straight back with two of his own, and some iffy draws and sketchy word knowledge led to my downfall as I lost by 41. Until yesterday I hadn’t made a single 100-point play but, like my cancellations, they came one after another, as I found EXPUNGES (102) and rECYCLE (106) in successive games. What’s more, I drew a P immediately after the rECYCLE play which allowed me to front-hook it for 63 points on my next turn. My other bingos included such delights as FiEFDOM and pETERMEN. I broke 500 in four games and had three wins by over 200. The FiEFDOM game was an extreme form of the kind I try to avoid: almost the top-left half of the board was blocked off, and I had nowhere to play my Q or other high-point tiles. To my amazement my opponent missed an out-play that would have given him a two-point victory, and I scraped home by 20.

It’s getting chilly. And dark. And it’s only two days until our clocks go back. Will this be the last time this happens in Europe? I seem to be in the minority of people who actually like daylight saving. We get lovely summer evenings here, and seeing everybody out and about in the squares is very uplifting. That extra hour of daylight in the evening surely boosts both Timișoara’s mood and its economy. But in winter, when temperatures often fall through the floor, I’d rather it be light at 9am, which wouldn’t be the case if we moved to permanent summer time. Why can’t we keep the best of both worlds?

The Red Sox are on a roll. After beating two very good teams to make the World Series, they’ve now taken a 2-0 lead.

Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

Running the whole gamut: some of my new students

October 20, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s a foggy Saturday morning in Timișoara. Normally I’d be working now, but both the kids I’m supposed to be teaching are apparently sick. It’s been a little disappointing this week, with five cancellations and only 19½ hours of lessons, although with a plethora of new students the immediate future is rosier. The lowish volume didn’t stop my work week being interesting. On Tuesday I went to the nearby Universitatea de Vest for my first session with a teacher of Romanian and linguistics. She said it felt quite strange to be a pupil rather than a teacher. We had a great chat about all matters language-related. If she has time I’d really like her to give me some Romanian lessons. That evening I had a two-hour lesson with two new students: sisters who are both studying medicine. They were at very different levels; I’d put the older sister at a solid 5 on my 0-to-10 scale, while the younger one was at a 1½ so I communicated with her mostly in Romanian.

Thursday was a slightly strange day which didn’t finish until 11:15 pm following a late-night session with my student who once lived in Milton Keynes (she’s at level 9, almost fluent, so how do I help her?). Yesterday I had four lessons. In the morning I had a new student who surprised me when he said he was 47. He looked 55 at least. He then said that he’d inadvertently taken ten years off. We then talked about numbers – he struggled to hear the difference between “thirty” and “forty” when I said them. With my eleven-year-old I did a session on maps and directions. One of my maps included a pub, and I remarked that the boy’s surname was Cîrciumaru, which means “publican” – a cârciumă is a pub. (Under the spelling reforms of 1993, the letter “î” was replaced by “â” except when the letter was the first or the last in the word, but personal names generally kept the old spelling. As for place names, you’ll see both old and new.) Romanian surnames can be quite interesting; last night’s lesson was with a chap whose name was Tărbuc, which is some kind of fishing net.

Last Sunday I caught up with S. We had a lovely late afternoon and evening. We spent some time in the art museum which was fascinating when I think about it, and then just wandered through the botanic park on the way to the Timișoreana restaurant in the square (the prices had shot up since I last visited when my parents were here in June) and finally to my place. She says she needs to escape the fake corporate world before it’s too late, and would like to be either a university lecturer or a high school teacher, even though either of those (particularly the latter) would result in a loss of income. Of course I’ve been there, and for me the need was even more pressing. At least she seems to have found some success in that artificial environment, which I rarely did. We discussed books. She said she’d lend me The Handmaid’s Tale after I’ve finished reading a biography of Charles Darwin. She’ll be back in Timișoara again in a week.

This morning I made myself read about the likely fate of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi Arabian journalist who was brutally murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul earlier this month. It’s very hard even to comprehend. Seriously, where do you even start? Yesterday Donald Trump (finally) said something about the murder being “bad” and “sad”. WTF?

In much brighter news, this morning I had my first-ever draw in ISC Scrabble. It was a 13-minute game, a bit shorter than I usually play, so whenever I found a play that scored a decent amount I generally slapped it down. I got some high-scoring tiles early on, and used them to open up a useful lead, but my opponent found a fantastic nine-letter bingo (OUTRaNGED) using the OU that I’d just played, which greatly reduced my advantage. When he was able to score well with the second blank I thought I’d had it. I was lucky that he didn’t have a winning out play (I don’t think). The best he could do was block my winning play, and by playing out I could only tie the scores at 387 apiece. It also tied my best-ever score without a bingo. I had just four seconds left at the end, while he had over five minutes. Maybe I’ll be as fast as him when I’ve played 21,000 games, as he has done. Prior to that game I’d won seven games out of eight.

The Red Sox have stormed into the World Series with a 4-1 win over the Astros, thanks in part to a stunning game-deciding catch in the fourth game, one of several breathtaking catches in the last few days. Their opponents are still unknown: the series between the Brewers and the Dodgers has gone right to the wire, with the deciding seventh game being played in Milwaukee tonight.