Scrabble

Language teaching - Scrabble

Monopoly (and a bit of Scrabble)

January 13, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

I put up some more ads about ten days ago (online and at the university) and I’ve now got half a dozen new students, more or less, depending on how you count them. As for how many students I’ve got in total, I haven’t a clue. As far as I know, I have a monopoly – I’m the only native English speaker in Timișoara giving private lessons. It’s a mad situation to find myself in. As I recently mentioned, I did put my prices up, but perhaps I was a bit conservative.

Today I had only new students. I had my first appointment at 9am with a couple in Moșnița Nouă, one of several towns or villages that are officially outside Timișoara but, thanks to recent development, have now joined up with the main city.  I went to see them; getting there was a bit of a mission. There’s no bus or tram that gets particularly close. At about 7:55 I took the number 4 tram from Piața Libertății to the end of the line, which was even further from my destination than I thought. I traipsed along a main road, in the mud, past urban chicken coops, urban sheep pens, the milestone (or kilometre-plastic to be more accurate) telling me that I was 5 kilometres from Timișoara and 54 from Lugoj, then the one that said 6 and 53, and I wondered whether I’d ever find this place, even with the map on my phone. Maybe I should just walk to Lugoj. Streets were unnamed, houses un-numbered. Relieved, I arrived at 9:01. Not only were the couple present but their children (21 and 17) as well, all four of them in an upstairs study. We really just chatted. Next week I’ll have two lessons with them: one with the parents and one with the children, who are at a higher level than their mum and dad. Their dad drove me home, and said he’d pick me up in future. He told me that I might be able to get a new watch strap at the Bega shopping centre. I went there before my next lesson, and they did indeed have a leather strap that fitted my Swatch. It was pretty damn expensive: 80 lei. But I guess that’s to be expected when, as far as I know, they’re the only place in Timișoara that does Swatch straps.

At 2pm I had a lesson with an older man who said he was a quantum chemist. He came with a fairly long text about Hans Hellmann, a German quantum chemist who was executed in the Great Purge. My student wanted to practise reading a complicated text, and it was certainly that. I also think the piece had been slightly awkwardly translated from German. Then at four I had my first session with a 25-year-old Italian guy called Luca who works at the main hospital in town. When he phoned me earlier this week, he said, “My name is Luca.” I wanted to ask him if he lived on the second floor, but thought better of it.

I’m trying to learn the three-letter Scrabble words. There are 1300 of them, and because they’re only three letters long, they’re hard to distinguish from one another. It isn’t that easy to remember that KAM is a word but FAM and VAM aren’t, or that RET is acceptable and DET isn’t. But as much as I hate learning short strings of letters that someone has arbitrarily decided are playable, unfortunately they come up all the time so they’re vital to your success or otherwise.

Life :) - Scrabble

Happy New Year!

January 2, 2018 plutomanby 0 Comments

Last night’s New Year celebrations seemed even more chaotic than last year’s. Probably 50,000 to 100,000 people (but how do you count them?) crowded the city centre, many of them cracking open bottles of bubbly as the clock struck twelve. Some people set off fireworks randomly, both before and after the main ones. Mum asked me if I was going to stay up for it. Well, if you live where I do, going to bed before 1am isn’t a serious option. You certainly won’t sleep.

When I was younger I disliked New Year’s Eve because of all the clubbing and partying you were expected to do; more recently I’ve disliked it because it’s a reminder of the passing of time. Shit, it’s twenty-what now, and what have I done with my life?! Nothing! At least this time around I actually had done something in the previous twelve months, but I still felt a bit sad not to be seeing in the new year with somebody.

Earlier today I called my brother to wish him a happy new year. In under five months, touch wood, he’ll be married. His fiancée turns 35 (I think) in April, so I doubt they’ll hang around with the whole family thing. It’s very likely that Mum will become a grandmother a few months either side of her 70th birthday.

As for me, I had a good end to 2017 work-wise. I checked my records, and my half-way point in terms of hours was the middle of September (I got as much work after mid-September as I did prior to that date). I hope the early part of 2018 brings me as much joy. There’s also a whole bunch of stuff outside work I’d like to work on, but I don’t yet know where or how to start.

After feeling like utter crap for a week and a half, I’ve now just got a normal cold. As much as I like Timișoara, I had planned to get away for a day or two, but my illness put the kibosh on that. I shouldn’t complain too much; I was lucky that it happened during my downtime.

I’m still Scrabbling. Yesterday I played four games, recovering from a pair of losses to win my last two. In the final game I smashed my record, winning 540-326 thanks to three bingos: WAsHIER, LAUNCHES and COTERIEs. Yes, I drew both blanks along with most of the other good stuff. The aggregate score of 866 in that game is just two points off the highest of any game I’ve played in; that came in a 389-479 loss in which my opponent slapped down three bingos. I’ve played just one game today, an 83-point win that took my rating into four figures once more, at 1001. I’ve now installed Quackle, an extremely useful tool that, among other things, lets you review previous games.

Life :) - Scrabble

Sorted for Christmas

December 24, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

A quickish update from me, on a beautiful cloudless Christmas Eve in Timișoara. It’s good to see the sun again after four or five cold, grey and foggy days. I heard that it reached an utterly ridiculous 29 degrees in Wellington on Friday.

I’ve been very lucky not to lose out on lessons due to illness all year, but right now I’ve got a nasty cold. I’m hacking up green and yellow gunk. Living on my own has numerous advantages for me, but when I get sick I kind of think, yeah, I wouldn’t mind having just a little human contact. So I pressed ahead with my lessons on Friday and yesterday – just one each day, thankfully, and I didn’t have to leave the house on either occasion. Had I been in any of my old office jobs, I wouldn’t have thought twice about taking a sick day. I am slowly improving: on Friday I felt so weak that I struggled to put one foot in front of the other.

It’s been great to see all the Romanian Christmas traditions from the vantage point of my apartment and the square (I moved in a few days too late to see last year’s festivities), and it would be rather nice to actually involve myself in them one time, but it’s hard to make that happen without a family connection. Who knows, maybe I’ll find a girlfriend in 2018. I can but dream.

Yesterday’s students, who will be moving to Austria next month but still hope to keep up their English lessons via Skype, bought me some beautifully presented chocolatey bits and pieces, along with a book: 27 de Pași (27 Feet), the autobiography of a Romanian ultra-marathon runner who had a rather colourful life before that. So with a Romanian book, some Scrabble, and all the sugary food I now have, I should be sorted for Christmas. I also have plenty of alcohol, but with the way I am right now, I’ll leave that alone.

After a bit of a break I played seven games of Scrabble yesterday, losing five, even though I outscored my opponents by 50 points overall and slapped down twelve bingos to their seven. My only wins came against players rated significantly lower than me, so my rating took a bit of a hit. In golf parlance, my long game is fine but my short game could do with some work.

I called my brother on Friday night, even though (or maybe because) I felt like crap. He wanted to talk about the wedding. He still resents his aunt and uncle, who have had zero contact with him in the last twenty years, inviting themselves, and I don’t blame him one bit for feeling that way. He’ll be spending Christmas with his fiancée’s family.

Life :) - Romania - Scrabble

Condemned

December 11, 2017 plutomanby 0 Comments

Towards the end of last week, our body corporate sent out the latest estimate for strengthening our apartment building. The figures were eye-watering: $10 million to strengthen to 100% of new building standard; $8 million for 67%. And that’s just the bit that I live in. The other section, which abuts our building but is separate for seismic purposes, has recently been reassessed as even less earthquake-safe than ours, close to red-sticker territory. So strengthening is no longer a serious option. At the weekend the body corp had a brainstorming session to figure out what to do next, and I’ll expect we’ll probably sit it out now until 2028, when the complex is due to be demolished if it isn’t up to scratch by then. The amazing thing to me is how accepting everybody has been of their fate. (During the eighties, when the English-speaking countries changed from societies into dog-eat-dog economies, everyone became more submissive; there has been some backlash in recent years but it’s been weak and misdirected.) To avoid a repeat of the CTV building collapse, which this policy will fail to do anyway, they’re financially crippling thousands of people. If you’re reading this blog, you might think it’s perfectly fair for apartment owners to foot the bill – however much – to make their homes safe, and if they haven’t got the money, tough. They made a bad investment, right, just like the person who bought shares in a company that goes belly-up, or the guy who went to Las Vegas and put his life savings on red. But that’s eighties thinking again: your home is no longer primarily a place to live but is instead a financial instrument to be bought and sold like any other. As affected Wellington apartment owners, we should be getting together as a group and lobbying the government to end this insanity. This is the capital city after all, and there’s a new (more compassionate?) government in charge now.

It’s hard not to feel somewhat bitter about all of this. My cousin, for instance, makes bucketloads of money by helping make parasitic American drug companies truckloads of money. She works exceptionally hard, is driven beyond what I or most people will ever be, and is extremely well qualified. All of that deserves to be rewarded, and I get on very well with her, but the fact remains that her work is of questionable benefit to actual human beings. And her million-dollar house isn’t affected by the earthquake policy at all, because it’s a house, not an apartment. Just imagine the furore if people’s $2 million mansions in Eastbourne (many of which would be matchsticks in the event of a magnitude-8 quake) suddenly came under the scope of the policy and were effectively condemned overnight!

The apartment business might have had a silver lining though. Perhaps it gave me the impetus to say “sod this”, where I might have otherwise muddled along in a string of jobs, inevitably in disorienting (for me) team environments where the only good outcome would have been to avoid bad ones. If I’d carried on in that vein, then in the words of Bob Marley, one day the bottom would have dropped out, probably with disastrous consequences. Instead I’ve completely changed my life and to write that still feels bloody amazing.

I had 21½ hours of teaching last week. I was chuffed with that after all the cancellations I had in the early part of the week. Unfortunately this week it’s déjà vu: two cancellations already and it’s still Monday morning.

Last week King Michael, Romania’s last monarch, died at the grand age of 96. He became king before his sixth birthday, but was forced to abdicate in 1947 with the advent of communism. Today Romania is a very divided country – we had anti-government protests here last night – but the death of the king seems to have united the country temporarily and might help the current government to survive.

I’ve started getting frustrated with Words With Friends. I live in an awkward time zone for all the Americans who populate the app, so many of my games progress very slowly or sometimes fizzle out completely. Also I recently had to download Words With Friends 2, a more gimmicky version of the app that veers into Candy Crush territory, and I hate it. I’ll still play my cousin from time to time because I like to keep in touch with her, but apart from that it’s a waste of time. So instead I’ve started playing real Scrabble, with a clock, on the Internet Scrabble Club (isc.ro), a site that was set up by a Romanian in the nineties and visually has never been updated since then. But the server is actually very robust, and it attracts some of the best players in the world. It’s altogether a more high-octane experience than Words With Friends. I’ve so far played seven games, winning five. My very first move of my very first game was BUM, which turned out to be possibly my best move of the whole game, a 70-point loss for me. My other loss (by just 18 points, 396 to 414) was a fantastic high-scoring game. I had quite a dramatic game yesterday where I struggled with the tight 14-minute clock, and incurred a ten-point penalty for running over time, but was able to play out for a 36-point win before forfeiting the game altogether (which is what happens if you go over time by a minute).

The cancellations mean my only lessons today are this evening, from 6 till 7:30 and from 8 till 9:30. Unless they get cancelled too.