Scrabble

Cat - Family - Life :) - Scrabble

Spelling it out

October 24, 2025 by 0 Comments

It’s a dark, dank, windy Friday here. Tomorrow night the clocks will go back, meaning any final summery vestiges will be officially gone. I got up later than usual this morning; I woke up in the middle of the night and went into the living room where Kitty was being particularly affectionate. In fact, she’s chosen to clamber and walk over me, blocking the screen, as I attempt to write this. She’s purring loudly. This is all a far cry from when I first got her. Back then, she was unfriendly at best and positively evil at worst.

On Tuesday night I talked to my brother about his ambitious golden wedding plans for Mum and Dad, even including a blessing at the church. When I told him what I thought, he said I was being overly negative. “I’m not annoyed with you, but I just won’t talk about it anymore.” Actually, you are annoyed with me. I wouldn’t want to fall out with him over something like this. (Normally if he and our parents disagree on something, I end up siding with him, but not this time.) Thankfully we moved on from the subject and reminisced about our childhood Guy Fawkes nights. Yesterday I talked to Mum and Dad. It was pretty clear what they thought of the golden wedding business. Nice in theory, but wholly impractical. And I said to my brother, what even is negative about a simple meal with just the immediate family? Dad even said that after travelling halfway around the world, it would be another bloody thing that we could do without. That’s assuming they come at all.

Dad has been renewing his passport. He got an email back from the British authorities with a name change form attached. Huh? He’d misspelt his middle name on the application form. He’s also been trying to get a new gravestone made up for his mother’s grave in Wales. When the stonemason was about to get to work, Dad realised (or more likely Mum did) that he’d misspelt his mum’s name. He’s almost certainly dyslexic, though kids weren’t diagnosed back in his day. Thirty years later, my brother was diagnosed as having dyslexia, but wasn’t given much in the way of help. Yep, you’re dyslexic, now deal with it. Things have moved on since then.

Loosely on that theme, I had some annoying cancellations yesterday, though they allowed me to play Scrabble last night. It was a good session for me: five wins out of six. The first game was the tightest. I’d built up a healthy lead, but with the bag empty my opponent had great tiles including a blank. He (or she) would clearly find a bingo to end the game. I made a low-scoring play to offload as many of my tiles as possible – not a bad idea sometimes, but here there was higher-scoring play I should have made, even though it kept more tiles. It was easy to spot and I had plenty of time, so there were no mitigating factors. After my opponent went out with a 77-point bingo, I scraped home by five points. I noticed he could have scored 82 with a common word, leading to a draw, so I was lucky to still win after my blunder. In the second game I lurched from one crappy rack to the next and unsurprisingly lost, but then I won the next four games. One play of note from my side was the opening move of UMIAK. I’d learnt a few useful Q words including UMIAQ which is a boat used by Eskimos. It has an anagram of MAQUI which is a kind of shrub (with edible berries) found in Argentina and Chile. I was happy to remember that UMIAQ could also be (and is more commonly) spelt with a final K instead of the Q. (The dictionary tells me that there are seven valid spellings: OOMIAC, OOMIACK, OOMIAK, UMIAC, UMIACK, UMIAK and UMIAQ. How you’re ever supposed to remember this stuff, I have no idea.)

On Monday there was a huge outage that knocked out a whole load of Amazon services. Whenever I hear about such things, my initial thought is great. (I don’t use Amazon. Not intentionally, anyway.) I’d love to see the whole rotting tech edifice, dominated by five or six behemoths, come crashing down. The only sad thing about the episode, and it is a big one, is that it took out the payment system for Amazon staff at the same time.

It’s a light day today with just three lessons. Tomorrow I hope to catch up with Dorothy who has just got back from a trip to Greece, and also Mark. Maybe I’ll play squash with him on Sunday.

Cat - Dreams - Family - Scrabble

What dreams are made of

October 6, 2025 by 0 Comments

Last night I woke up three or four times during the night. Each time I went back to sleep, I resumed a weird and unpleasant dream. This dream started off with me running late for a meeting – I first had to walk to collect my bike – and then when I got there I found it wasn’t a meeting but a game in which everyone was in teams except me who was on my own. The game consisted of a number of physical puzzles to solve. While the others were busily solving these puzzles in their teams, I was getting absolutely nowhere and wanted to escape. The game morphed into some kind of meal. I was on my own again at a table which I knocked over. I then lost my bike. My mother appeared out of the blue, then disappeared. The meal turned into a party in what seemed like student accommodation. Plenty of food was involved. I enjoyed the food but otherwise hated the experience. A power cut allowed me to escape the packed room with food in my pockets. I found an empty room and ate alone until the others located me, to my embarrassment.

There has been a huge shift in the weather in the space of a few days. It’s like September and October have been ripped from the calendar and we’ve lurched from August straight to November. At the weekend Dorothy went to Păltiniș, a mountain resort not too far from Sibiu. She sent me pictures of the (rare) early October snow. In Timișoara we had major downpours last Friday and Saturday. The sun has hardly shown itself.

Last week was an exhausting one. My 31 hours of teaching were nothing too unusual, but the scheduling became a real pain with messages batting backwards and forwards constantly (I felt my batteries being further depleted with each one) and one 17-year-old girl in particular being annoyed that I couldn’t see her at a time that perfectly suited her. Saturday started off in inauspicious fashion when Matei’s father invited me to “take off my clothes”. Matei’s dad doesn’t lack confidence when it comes to speaking English, even if he makes plenty of errors. (The cause of that rather amusing error is that the singular Romanian noun haină means a coat, while the plural haine means clothing in general.)

I worry enormously about my parents. So often they look drained when I talk to them. Dad hasn’t slept. Mum has the weight of the world on her shoulders. On Tuesday they both looked so bad that I guessed something really terrible must have happened to them or to a friend or family member. But no, it was the usual stuff – the tangled web of tech problems and their flats in St Ives. Dad mentioned that the property manager for one of their places had just changed, leading to no end of issues. He later emailed me to apologise for mentioning that. God no, Dad, there’s no need to apologise – your problems are my (and my brother’s) problems too – but I’m much more concerned about the effects they’re having on you and Mum than on the problems themselves.

Yesterday I called Mum and Dad from my car. I was in the village of Bucovăț, which is only a short drive from Timișoara. I’d parked next to a farmhouse which had a large gaggle of geese – dozens of them – outside. I got out of the car to show my parents the geese when a burly bloke asked me what the heck I was doing. Six dogs soon appeared. I told Dad that I was getting flashbacks to New Zealand when I was a kid. Dad was taking pictures of a farmhouse at Hanging Rock when suddenly the farmer levelled his gun at us all. At some point in our conversation, Dad said “shuffling tiles like in Scrabble” and I mentioned that I’d played two games the night before. I also said that I learnt that “hikoi” was a valid word. This was a bad idea: they both said that the inclusion of Maori words is ridiculous. I then countered that it isn’t so simple. “Kiwi” is obviously fine, so where do you draw the line? What about weta? Or weka? By the way, hikoi also functions as a verb, so the rather strange-looking hikoied and hikoiing are also valid Scrabble words.

I played seven games in all over the weekend, winning six. As is often the case, it was my loss that taught me the most. My opponent, who had a higher rating than me, simply knew more words. His (or her) opening play of ZAFTIG scored over 50 and though I competed well, I fell to a 474-423 loss. My losing score was in fact more than I managed in five of my six wins. In the last week I’ve been concentrating on committing the three-letter words to memory.

When I talked to Mum and Dad on Tuesday, I said half-seriously that they should get a cat. Though she was hard work at the start, having Kitty has helped calm me down.

Cat - Family - Language teaching - Scrabble

Catching up

September 25, 2025 by 0 Comments

I’m struggling a bit this morning with a cold. It’s possible I even have Covid. (Remember that?) There’s a lot of it flying around.

I’m in the middle of a catching-up-with-people period. On Sunday I had a Teams call with my cousin in New York state. His wife briefly came on the line too. We talked about our parents. His father (whose 84th birthday it is tomorrow) recently lost his driver’s licence after badly flunking a memory test. I’ll have a chat with him and my aunt tomorrow. On Sunday I plan to catch up with my Wellington-based cousin who seems to have recovered from her jaw cancer. I was very pessimistic about that, but I was just speculating; she didn’t tell anybody, not even her immediate family, what was happening, so I feared the worst. Last night I spoke to the lady who lives above me (she’s in Canada and will be until January) on WhatsApp. Then yesterday morning I got a very quick call from my parents who are in Moeraki. They said they’d been sleeping a lot, which is fantastic. Something about that place allows them to relax.

And that’s not all. Yesterday I went to the local produce market (which runs twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays) and bumped into Domnul Sfâra who I used to play tennis with. He’s now 90; he told me about all his birthday celebrations with friends. Though frail and diminutive, he’s still as sharp as a tack. I mentioned that I passed the halfway point to his impressive milestone earlier in the year.

I’ve had some interesting lessons this week. On Monday I had my fourth lesson with a 16-year-old boy. What different worlds we inhabit. The idea of visiting a local produce market wouldn’t even cross his mind. In fact I showed him some pictures of people eating in different places (this was part of a Cambridge speaking test) and he said he’d never had a picnic in his life and never intends to do so, opting for restaurants instead. I figured he’d been to more restaurants than I have, despite me being nearly three times older. (At that age even the word restaurant sounded so damn fancy to me.) We then talked about social media. I think he was surprised when I said that social media (an indispensible part of life for him – no, let’s rephrase that, it is his life) was the worst invention in the last 80 years. Or maybe he just thought, here we go, another old man yelling at clouds. He was also amused when I said I manage to avoid it pretty much entirely and have never even been on Instagram. But I’m utterly convinced of its toxicity. I’d love to nuke it out of existence. He said that any news he gets (which isn’t much) is via social media. How do you know it’s true? I just assume it is true, and even if it isn’t, I don’t care. And besides, what goes on in the world doesn’t affect me and I’m too young to vote anyway. That’s why you’re too young to vote. There’s been a push in some countries to lower the voting age to 16. (In Austria, for example, it is now 16.) Sometimes I think it should go up rather than down. Maybe it should work like driver’s licences and you get tested at both ends of the age range.

Kitty is now asleep on the sofa, on top of an open file which I’ll have to pick up before my next lesson starts. I often get envious of her life’s simplicity. She’s become a real positive in my life – a calming influence – as well as just part of the furniture. She’s a boon to my face-to-face lessons at home with kids; the majority of them like her being around. It’s all a contrast to the early days of Kitty when she was fearful of me, prone to biting at any moment, hyperactive, and a general pain in the arse.

Scrabble. I played two games last night. In the first I began with a blank but complete junk alongside it. I exchanged all but the blank and drew six vowels, giving me no sensible options other than to exchange again. Meanwhile my opponent hit bingos on his opening two turns, putting me 158-0 down. In the end I was able to score well, losing a high-scoring battle 505-441. Despite the loss I was happy with how I played. Then came the second game which was ridiculous. I obliterated my personal best score with a 650-253 win, slapping down five bingos. My play certainly wasn’t perfect in that game – at my level of experience, it’s never going to be – but hitting a mammoth total like that was encouraging all the same, even if it was the definition of a massive outlier.

Update: I’ve just taken a test for Covid and the flu. I’m negative for both. I still haven’t knowingly had Covid. Summer is properly over now; a run of unseasonably high temperatures (30 or above) came to a welcome end today.

Family - Life :) - Scrabble

Weddings: pressing all the wrong buttons

September 21, 2025 by 0 Comments

I’ve just spoken to Mum and Dad. No real news there. A vicious storm had been forecast for their local area, but it didn’t fully bare its teeth. On Friday I spoke to my brother who was nonplussed after Mum and Dad failed to make a call or send a message for their grandson’s birthday. (He turned three last Monday.) And it’s not like they forgot; Mum, who has a good memory for such things, chucked some birthday money in his direction, but they consciously decided not to make contact. What gives, my brother wondered. They spent all that time with their grandchildren over the summer but now they simply don’t care? He speculated that maybe both Mum and Dad had been hardened at a young age by attending boarding school. Just throw money at him, that’ll do.

A video popped up on Youtube last week which is an absolute must-watch for anyone with a friend or family member on the autistic spectrum. It’s about how weddings are sheer hell on about a dozen levels if you’re autistic. (Honestly, they often aren’t much fun even if you’re not because of the eye-watering cost. And these modern “destination weddings” are the epitome of wastage and selfishness. I’m worth you all spending thousands each to fly to my wedding in sodding Tahiti. Sorry, you’re not. You’re really really not. And because you’re so selfish, it’s fifty-fifty that it’ll be all over within five years.) The guy who made this video (and is married!) has a great sense of humour, as you can see at the beginning when he struggles even to utter the word “wedding”. And oh god, the expectation to dance. Someone asked me once to name my three greatest fears and I said dancing, weddings, and dancing at weddings. He did make one big omission, however, and that’s just how triggering weddings are. All the time you’re thinking, this is something normal people do but I’ll never do – certainly not like this, anyway – because I’m not normal. I should mention here that my brother’s one on the army base in Plymouth was fine, but that’s because it was my actual brother and I was very happy for him. Even then, I wasn’t too disappointed to get back to the hotel room at around midnight.

After my lessons yesterday I played six games of Scrabble – three wins, three losses. I’m finding 50-point bonuses at a decent clip but am hampered by my lack of knowledge of shorter words.

Today I’ll take the bike to Padurea Verde (the Green Forest) where I haven’t been for ages. We’re getting incredibly warm weather still – we’re forecast to hit 31 this afternoon. When I get back I’ve got a video call lined up with my cousin in America.

Cat - Life :) - Scrabble

Not too smart right now

September 10, 2025 by 0 Comments

I put on the TV this morning. A normal day in Romania. Another fire in an apartment block – this time nobody injured. A report stating that 30% of adult Romanians have no bank account. Then they dropped in on a factory that processes 20 tonnes of pickled cabbages a day. (Cabbage season has just started.) But nothing feels normal to me. Since Saturday night I’ve been stuck in the crawler lane. I’ve been sleeping poorly and constantly fatigued.

Yesterday was a case in point. My Romanian lesson started at eight and I knew I’d be buggered for that. I set my alarm for seven. As soon as it went off I killed it, intending to get up. I hadn’t slept well. Next thing I knew it was almost eight. No time for breakfast or even a cup of tea. The lesson, which overran a bit, was really a waste of time. Luckily I had no lessons until later. After a belated breakfast I knew I needed to pick up my bike which I’d taken in to be repaired last Thursday. The bike shop was five kilometres away. Walk or drive? I decided to walk, thinking the exercise could do me good, and there were a few things I wanted to pick up from the mall on the way back. The walk to the bike shop took me just over an hour. It took me past, among other things, the shaorma kiosk I frequented when I lived in town. Back then, a shaorma cost 11 lei. Now it’s 28. Yes, I’m putting my prices up for lessons again – I have no real choice. The repair – a new chain and a whole new set of gears – set me back 240 lei (£40 or NZ$95).

Then the mall. A bad idea when I’m so tired and I can’t face noise or bright lights. What I felt wasn’t far off what I experienced in a supermarket in 2001 when I’d just started taking medication for panic attacks. It struck me that most of what you find in a large mall like that is pure unadulterated shite. And these days a lot of it has an added sinister edge to it. A crypto ATM, for instance, with flashing surrounds. I’ve never even liked the Americanism ATM. The Samsung shop, if it was even a shop and not just a display, was even more frightening. SmartThings. AllOneWord. Start your SmartThings journey. In English, of course. The display included a smart washing machine and a smart fridge and a smart TV showing Aardman-like claymation figures watching their smart TV. Presumably there are people out there who want this stuff. There must be; I recently had a lesson in Dumbrăvița with an eight-year-old girl in their smart kitchen and she explained her mother’s smart electric cooker to not-very-smart me. Her mum was in the middle of baking something smart. I think I’d rather have one of those ubiquitous seventies gas cookers you saw all the time in New Zealand, the ones with the digital-dial clock. Similar cookers were made on a vast scale in Romania, all in a single factory in Cugir, 200 km east of Timișoara, not far from Deva. That factory also produced arms.

I walked past all of that crap – all I wanted was some bits and pieces from the Auchan supermarket. I found the tablecloth I needed, eventually. Next stop electric toothbrush heads. These aren’t cheap and I couldn’t find the price anywhere. They used to have barcode scanners dotted around the place but now people have become too affluent to even care… Look, this is too hard. Getting everything on my list will take me hours. I came out with only the tablecloth. At least its price will mean I’ll have change for the coffee machine once I negotiate the smart bloody self-checkout. A woman had to help me with the initial screen. The shops around the coffee machine were in a quieter area and not sinister at all. A dry cleaners’. A shop selling detergent. A place that does printing and medals and trophies. Then I went home.

This really isn’t great. What’s causing it I don’t know. It’s still pretty damn warm; today we’re forecast to reach 32. I hope I’ll be better when the temperature drops, but who knows, I might be low in magnesium or something. I’ll ask my doctor the next time I see him. At the moment I’d struggle enormously to hold down a normal job. (I have had spells like this while in a normal job. That was horrible.)

On Sunday I met Dorothy in town. We had a simple lunch, eventually – it took an age to get served. Nothing new there. But I was very happy to be eating inside especially on such a sunny day – I couldn’t face the brightness.

Some sad news from Dorothy. Her five-month-old kitten has died. She had a virus that she couldn’t recover from and on Friday she was put down. I hope that day she spent with Kitty (14th August) didn’t permanently traumatise her. You just never know. As for Kitty, she’s still going strong. You really notice your fatigue when you have such a bundle of energy around the place as Kitty.

I managed three games of Scrabble yesterday, winning two. In one of them I scored 527 – my highest since I got back into it.

Language teaching - Life :) - Maths teaching - Other sports - Scrabble

Mum’s good idea

August 9, 2025 by 0 Comments

Mum has always just wanted the best for me, even if she sometimes hasn’t known what “the best” is, which isn’t entirely her fault. Last week she said, wouldn’t it be nice if you were earning a bit more, and couldn’t you do that by giving online maths lessons? To Brits and the like, and be getting three times what you’re making now? That’s actually a very good idea, Mum. One of your best, in fact. Now, implementing it is a whole different matter. Drawing graphs, drawing shapes, writing equations – so much of maths is outside the realm of simple text, making online teaching quite challenging. I’d need a bunch of equipment, such as a stylus pad and a camera that focuses on my desk. That could get expensive. I’d also have the job of rigging up and dismantling all those gizmos as I switch from online maths to face-to-face English or whatever I happen to be doing next. Then there’s getting the students in the first place, and if I do, finding time in my schedule for them. I can envisage some late nights. Finally, if I go down this route, the stakes increase. I’ll probably have to set up my own company. I mentioned this to a student of mine (an accountant) on Wednesday; she said there were two ways of doing this that each come with their pros and cons. It would be fantastic to be earning enough to bomb around Europe for a month every year without feeling guilty about it, but although I’m often busy with work and don’t take much time off, my work life in Romania has so far been pleasantly low-octane, and online maths teaching would certainly change that. The idea is worth considering, all the same.

On Thursday I had a new student of English, my first for a while. He’s 16 and wants to do the B2 Cambridge exam in November. He was a nice enough guy, though I couldn’t help look at his tattoos. He had two Roman numeral dates (day, month and year in full), inked conspicuously just below his knees. They were dates in the seventies I think, so I’m guessing they were his parents’ birthdates. I have no idea why you’d want to do that, but each to his own I suppose.

This morning I picked some plums from the trees in Mehala. I picked a fair few from outside the cemetery, because they clearly didn’t belong to anybody. (Last year one lady complained that I was stealing them.) As well as the usual purple plums, there was also a greengage-type variety. They’ll mostly go into a crumble. I also went to the market there for the first time in ages – it was like stepping back in time in a nice way – then bought some eggs from a vending machine on the way home. I won’t be going anywhere for the rest of the day. It’ll simply be too hot. As for tomorrow, forget it.

The football is back up and running again. Birmingham and Ipswich were two divisions apart last season, but last night they faced off in the opening Championship fixture. I didn’t see the game, but Ipswich scored from a last-minute penalty to eke out a 1-1 draw after Blues had dominated. I don’t know much about footballers these days; I often just go by their names. Blues looked likely to sign a striker, currently at Ajax, called Chuba Akpom, which I thought was a great name (it even has pom in it), then Ipswich looked like they would get him instead. Maybe they still will. (That’s one reason why last night’s game was fairly high-profile.) Blues did ending up getting someone called Marvin Ducksch, which is a pretty fun name too, if hard to type. I doubt I’ll be watching much football this season. It’s too much of a time sink. And then next summer there will be the World Cup, now bloated to the max. It’ll never stop.

Last night I played Scrabble online for the first time in ages. I was strangely nervous; there were some crazy people on there the last time I tried. I just played one game and won by 130 points. I put down one bingo: SLATERS, another name for woodlice. (I just looked it up. It says the word “slater” is only used in that sense in Scotland, Australia and New Zealand. All that time in NZ made me think it was a universal name for the little bug.)

I’ve had a good few weeks on the weight-loss front. I’m down to 72.5 kg, or eleven stone six. I’ve dropped twelve pounds since March.

On Thursday there was a national day of mourning after Ion Iliescu, the controversial first post-revolutionary president of Romania, died at 95.

Coronavirus - Music - Politics - Scrabble

Work slowly picking up

April 17, 2020 by 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 by 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 by 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 by 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.