Scrabble

It’s a stormy, muggy day here. There’s also a sense of déjà vu in the air, as Simona Halep faces off for the fourth time in a grand slam final. I’ve got a feeling that this time she’ll do it, mainly because she’s played with noticeably more aggression in her run to the final.

I’ve had some interesting lessons this week. My UK-based Skype student (he lived in Bucharest when I started with him in January) was complaining that his Kiwi boss wouldn’t let him use Facebook at work. Good on him, I wanted to say, but thought better of it. My student seems to like our lessons. Every week I pick out an article from a news website and prepare questions based on it. I have another student of 24 who is moving to the UK next month. He told me that he’s only really interested in making friends over there, or anywhere, if they can benefit him in a tangible (i.e. financial) way. I can believe that. I met somebody who worked for a bank; when I told him I taught from home, he shoved a bunch of credit card application forms in my hand for me to give to students. Um, are you serious?! I get the feeling that the guy with whom I used to play tennis gave up on me as a friend when it became obvious that I had no business contacts that he could use to his advantage. It’s a year since I last saw or heard from him.

I played three games of Scrabble last night. In the first game my opponent made bingos on his opening two turns, but even then I felt I could have beaten him. I knew I had high-probability bingos on my rack that included a blank, but somehow they eluded me. I did find a bingo at the end but it was too late; I fell to a 64-point loss. In game two it was a similar story: two early bingos by my opponent. Only this time he scored heavily, unremittingly, on his non-bingo plays too. A third bingo followed. Even though I found two bingos of my own, I fell to my heaviest defeat yet: 369 to me, a whopping 564 to my opponent. In contrast game three (12-minute clock) was a nailbiter, and as usual in sub-15-minute games I struggled with time management. I made two bingos but my opponent scored heavily with his X and Z and I held only a slender lead. I was soon behind when he later found a bingo. In a dramatic finish I spotted a place for my N with just three seconds remaining to eke out a three-point win, 413 to 410. That’s my closest game to date.

My parents’ train is due to arrive at 9:30 tonight. Dad emailed me to say that he was struggling with a bad headache after a very good run of relative freedom from them.

Update: At last! Simona did it! It didn’t look very likely at 3-6, 0-2, but she employed more variety and was more aggressive, while Stephens tired ever so slightly. What an absolute beast Simona is defensively though. Leading 3-0 in the final set but with Stephens holding a point to keep her in with a sniff, Simona was ludicruously out of position on her backhand side on each of the next three points, but was somehow able to win all of them. Quite remarkable. And a well-deserved first grand slam, finally, for the Romanian.

My parents flew in to the UK two days ago, and I’ve just spoken to my dad, who said he was coping surprisingly well with the jet lag. He was standing outside the library in St Ives. It was 7:20am so the library hadn’t opened yet, but he could get a wi-fi connection there. (English teacher note: It’s now become really common for Brits to say “he was stood outside…” in that situation. “He was sitting” has become “he was sat“.) Mum was back in the flat, and the first thing he did was take the once-in-a-few-months opportunity to talk about her misery-inducing stress levels. Then he talked about the ridiculous army stuff my brother has been forced to do by ridiculous army people, almost on the eve of his wedding. He’s had to travel through the night to Newcastle, at the other end of the country, for some stupid course. He and his fiancée are understandably angry.

Yeah, the wedding. People will be absent who I might have expected to be present, such as my dad’s sister. And people will be present who certainly should be absent, like my Auckland-based aunt and uncle, who were last in contact with my brother in 1997. I don’t think they should be within a thousand miles of Plymouth, and more importantly, neither does my brother. OK, they’re family, but so what? As my friend from Auckland said in our Skype conversation yesterday, they’re going to see and be seen, and to have a holiday. Maybe I’m just being curmudgeonly (now that’s a good word). It all promises to be a very happy occasion, obviously, even if I’m sure I’ll be breathing a sigh of relief when it’s all over.

At the weekend I bought a nondescript shirt and tie to go with the suit I picked up in Cambridge, and what I’d like to think are a nice pair of brown shoes, made right here in Romania. I bought the shirt in H&M at the mall. I remember way back when (early 2000s, when I actually bought clothes) that H&M had stuff that I liked. Now everything there is horribly drab and normal, often emblazoned with slogans with (for some reason) th vwls mssng.

I fly out on Thursday evening. I have no idea at this stage whether I’ll be able to get to Paddington in time for the last train to Plymouth, or whether I’ll be forced to stay the night in Luton and go down the following day. On Monday night I fly back to Timișoara with my aunt and uncle (69 and 76) who live near Geraldine and who I’ve always got on well with. I’m really excited that they’re coming over. I bet they never thought they’d go to Romania.

Not much news from my end. Just 27½ hours of teaching (it’s funny that I’m saying just, but it’s below my recent average). The “expansion” to my Space Race board game appears to be a hit. On Friday I had a Skype lesson with the guy who has moved to London. After our lesson, which involved an article on emotional support animals, we spoke in Romanian. He told me I was making mistakes and need to be using words like cărora. I know I’m all at sea there, and avoidance is how I try to get by. (Cărora is one of the many forms of “which”. Looking at an online dictionary, there appear to be exactly ten “whiches”.) He also noticed I now have a bike, and suggested I join a cycle club. My bike would seem comically cheap for that kind of thing, and besides, I can’t see myself in Lycra. Yes, I know I need to find a way of meeting new people, but a cycle club isn’t it.

I broke 500 in Scrabble for just the second time last night, with the aid of just one bingo. I also made JInX for 73 and two 50-point plays. I was extremely fortunate to draw nine of the ten power tiles. My rating now sits at exactly 1200. My two real handicaps are time management (I struggled recently in a 12-minute game and haven’t yet dared go lower) and knowledge of obscure words. Someone suggested learning definitions, even if they’re bogus, just to tie the words to something. (The word “bogus” came up in our Skype lesson.)

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.

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.