Scrabble

Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

Saddle sore

July 30, 2018 by 0 Comments

I’ve just got back from my bike trip to Sânmihaiu Român. I’m glad to be back: my arse was starting to really feel it, and I’d slightly underestimated the amount of water I needed on a 30-degree day. Just like me, my bike isn’t quite up to the job. People regularly eased past me in a blaze of lycra. (There wasn’t nearly as much lycra as you’d see in New Zealand though. This is Europe. You’re allowed to ride bikes even if you’re not training for a sodding triathlon. In fact a lot of the blokes who whizzed past me were bare-chested.) At the other end I grabbed an insanely cheap beer, spoke to my parents on FaceTime while at the bar, and read a book in a small park next to the town hall. For some reason my book piqued the interest of two kids.

goat_on_car
There’s something very Romanian about a goat standing on an abandoned car.

This morning I had another attempt at fishing. Still no luck. I’m competing with people who use four rods each, the maximum allowed, and one particular dynamic young fisherman who casts his line, reels it in 30 seconds later, and rides his bike to a different spot nearby to repeat the process. My latest batch of maggots had died in the fridge almost instantly, but I imagine fish will eat dead maggots just like live ones.

I’ve got a new student. She’s coming tomorrow evening. We spoke Romanian on the phone; she described her level as intermediate. People tend to underestimate their level, or are just modest, so I expect her to be quite good. On Tuesday I’ll have my first lesson for a while with Matei. He was telling me on the phone about his new dog, a pug.

My Skype lesson on Friday was interesting. My student was happy with my idea of studying a song. I chose Hotel California for him, and sent him a link to a YouTube video which showed the lyrics. I expected him to casually peruse the lyrics, but no, he memorised them all. Had them down pat. I was blown away. That song has a lot of words, some of which are pretty opaque. “Tiffany twisted”? I used that song with another of my students in one of our fortnightly “song and articles” lessons. That time I removed about 15 words from the lyrics, made a list of the missing words, and asked him to fill in the gaps. On Wednesday I had my usual double bill of lessons with brother and sister. The girl went first, and our 90-minute session passed without a hitch. As usual, however, the hour with her little brother was much more of a struggle. Anything that looks vaguely educational is strictly off the menu, as far as he is concerned. He’s getting bored of Last Card now. I’ll bring in the Formula 1 game next time; it’s certainly been a hit with one of the other boys I teach. In fact I’ll try it out on Matei too.

Scrabble. So yesterday I ended up with four losses, including two Jean Van de Velde-style ones, and finally two wins. To hopefully sort out my time troubles I’ll attempt a bunch of quick-fire, five-minute games on ISC. I’m bound to lose a lot and my rating is likely to plummet, but they should benefit me in the long run. My favourite word yesterday I thought was FILLIP. Six-letter words are relatively uncommon, but this one got rid of some very unpromising tiles and scored well, 32 if I remember rightly.

It’s now raining, and I can hear the rumble of thunder in the distance. It’s just as well I got out on my bike when I did.

Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble - Travel: Romania

Travel plans

July 28, 2018 by 0 Comments

I spoke to my brother this morning. He now has a beard. Yesterday was his 37th birthday. He and his wife have just put their house on the market: they might soon be expanding. The UK has been experiencing a heatwave the likes of which they haven’t seen since 1976.

I’ll have four work-free days in a row soon, so at the end of next week I’ll take the opportunity to do some travelling within Romania. I plan to visit the medieval town of Sighișoara, which is pronounced roughly “siggy-shwara”, just like the place I now call home is “timmy-shwara”. The -șoara suffix is some kind of feminine diminutive, and it comes up in a lot of place names, as well as in words like Domnișoara, which is the equivalent of the English Miss. (Mrs is Doamna.) Because of its prevalence in place names, I got really confused when I saw scorțișoară pancakes for sale. Where’s that, I wondered. The word in fact means cinnamon.
The only trains from Timișoara to Sighișoara take a circuitous route, and they all leave at an ungodly hour. Unfortunately I’ll miss the annual festival, which is taking place right now, so I might end up going somewhere else. But it’s been on my list for some time.

Six games of Scrabble since I last wrote. Three big wins against lower-rated opponents, two of whom resigned before the end, but the others were all close. In one game I found an early low-scoring bingo but my opponent drew both blanks, bingoed with each of them, and kept scoring heavily enough to snuff out my comeback chances. I lost that game by 27. My next game showed that bingos aren’t everything. Both times I bingoed, my opponent had the tiles and the presence of mind to make big scores immediately afterwards. I clung on to win by 22. I was particularly pleased to find BLOOPED in that game. B and P don’t go well together, and it’s easy to give up with a rack like that. I won my final game by just 11 points after going over time by a few seconds and getting stuck with a W. My score of 323 was my second-lowest in a winning effort since joining ISC.

Update: I’ve since had a nightmare game which I had in the bag with both blanks on my rack, only to lose by seven. But for the ten-point time penalty, and possibly the sinus headache I was grappling with, I would have won. Time management is a massive problem for me. Well, it’s not time management as such, it’s just that I can’t see the best plays fast enough, especially towards the end of the game when the board gets blocked. My opponent played all his words in just six minutes. Straight after that horror show I had a lesson with an Italian guy. He didn’t want to do our customary IELTS writing exercise so I half-jokingly suggested we play Scrabble. He agreed. He went first, played SPENT, and on my turn I found SPINDLES through the P. I then had to explain what a spindle was.

Update 2: It’s getting worse. Three more losses on ISC, by 51, 16 and 8.

Update 3: Now two wins! By 27 and 16. Could easily have lost both of them. In the first game I was 133 points down (that’s a lot!) before I remembered from somewhere in the recesses of my mind that CANG was a word. That allowed me to play GLUMmER and gave me just a glimmer. In the second game I led by 109 but was swamped with consonants and swapped tiles three times, and only because my opponent was overrun by consonants at the end was I able to sneak a win.

Language learning - Language teaching - Other sports - Scrabble

Time for a trip?

July 24, 2018 by 0 Comments

Mum and Dad have been back in New Zealand a week, but when I spoke to Mum on FaceTime she looked pretty much zombified. My Wellington-based cousin and her family had been staying there (a base for their skiing) so my parents weren’t really able to recover from their jet lag.

The last two weeks I’ve only just crept over the 20-hour mark and that’s likely to drop further as people take holidays. I’m tempted to go to Belgrade (again), and from there go on a very spectacular train journey to the seaside town of Bar in Montenegro. It would be an unforgettable experience I’m sure, and one that doesn’t come with a high price tag.

With my reduced workload I make the effort to study Romanian for an hour a day, usually first thing in the morning. It’s helping. There’s a site called Context Reverso, which gives words and phrases in context, with their translations, and I’m finding that invaluable. I’ve also started to learn Serbian, which is a totally different animal from anything I’ve attempted before, and I intend to write about that next time.

The weather here has been iffy of late. I wanted to have a good go at fishing at the weekend, but my attempt was severely curtailed. Fishing and lightning really don’t go well together. If I ever do catch a fish, I’ll be sure to post a photo here.

I watched the absorbing final round of the Open golf yesterday. Absorbing because the course, the wind and the final-day pressure made for a tough combination, even for the world’s top golfers. I was probably in the minority who didn’t want Tiger Woods to win, although I enjoyed seeing him out there. I was rooting for Tommy Fleetwood, ‘cos he’s cool, but when he dropped out of contention I was happy to see the uber-consistent Francesco Molinari claim victory in a ridiculously crowded field. The tournament was played at Carnoustie, famous for Jean van de Velde’s meltdown on the 72nd hole in 1999. The scenes, accompanied by Peter Alliss’s commentary, were quite extraordinary. The Frenchman won, but then he didn’t.

I’ve got back to playing online Scrabble again. Five games since Saturday; three losses. In game one I lost by just four points on a ridiculously blocked board, which I struggle with. I still think I made a tactical blunder towards the end. In the second game I learnt my lesson and sacrificed points to open the board up. This felt like a well-played game for me, and I won by 78. Game three: I got both blanks simultaneously, but plenty of crap to go with them. My solitary bingo wasn’t enough and I lost by 43. Game four: my opponent drew both blanks and very quickly made two bingos (they all play so damn fast, probably because the play much more than me, so a lot of the time they’re on auto-pilot). I made a bingo myself and started to close, but my opponent scored well on his final moves to beat me by 73. Game five: I was lucky to draw both blanks, eventually cruising to a 114-point win thanks to two bingos.

Life :) - Scrabble

Friends with benefits

June 10, 2018 by 0 Comments

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.

Life :) - Scrabble

The big day is fast approaching

May 21, 2018 by 0 Comments

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.)

Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

Brass monkeys

February 26, 2018 by 0 Comments

Thirty-six hours of teaching last week. That’s almost a whole page of lessons in my notebook, and it’s getting to be a problem. A nice problem, but a problem nonetheless. I need a day off occasionally. Time for myself. Time to sit in the square and have a coffee. Time to be served by that complete lunatic in the funny bar next to the market. Time to not have to think about time all the time. I see people fishing on the Bega and it all looks wonderfully relaxing. I’d like to take up fishing, but right now I know next to nothing about it.

For some unknown reason Ryanair have decided to close their Timișoara base as from 25th March, cancelling both sets of flights I’d booked to and from the UK (in early April and for my brother’s wedding in late May) in the process. My aunt and uncle from New Zealand were also booked on the flight from Stansted to Timișoara on 28th May. We’ve since rebooked all our flights with Wizz Air, going to and from Luton rather than Stansted. What a pain.

“Welcome to Romania. Please turn your clocks back fifty years.” Not if the availability of Bitcoin is anything to go by. The currency of the future is readily available in machines dotted around the city. So is Ether, another cryptocurrency. I had a play with one of the machines which had 2.5 Bitcoins available. How many would you like? Hmmm, 2.5? That’ll be 80-odd thousand lei, please. Ah. I’ve probably missed the boat there.

For a minute there I thought I’d dodged winter pretty much entirely, but we’re now in the grip of an icy blast. It is cold! The next day with a non-negative expected high is Friday.

Three games of Scrabble today. My first was a loss on an extremely tight board that I’d prefer to forget (I had a tiny lead but went into overtime, costing me ten points, and forfeited the game a minute later after failing to find an elusive out play). I then had a close game, clinging on a bit in the end to win by 17. In my last game I managed to play my first nine-letter bingo on ISC: UNrESTING, a double-double through ES for 86 points. I won that game by 56.

Language teaching - Scrabble - Tennis

Workload update

January 22, 2018 by 0 Comments

I decided to actually count how many students I have. It’s 24. That number includes four couples (well three actual couples, plus a brother and sister), and two students (Matei and Timea) whose first names are anagrams of each other. I also have an initial Skype meeting with a potential 25th student tomorrow night. In other words, things are likely to get pretty crazy. I had a difficult session yesterday with a ten-year-old boy who described just about everything as nașpa, which is a slang word meaning “crap”. School was nașpa; learning English at school was total nașpa. I’m sure my lesson was nașpa as well.
My cousin said I should think about bringing somebody else into my “team”, but that would take things to a whole new level, and who would that person be exactly? (My point of difference is that I’m a native speaker. Where would I get another one from?) It’s something I could maybe consider in a couple of years, but right now I think it would be stress on a stick, which is precisely what I wanted to avoid when I came here.

I’ve only caught snatches of the Australian Open – I’ve been too busy to give a whole match my full attention – but much of what I’ve seen has been compelling. I didn’t see any of Simona Halep’s 3¾-hour match with Lauren Davis in the searing heat, but it must have been something. Women’s matches that go deep into an extended final set are a rarity, because of the relative lack of service dominance in the women’s game, so they’re invariably a treat when they do get that far.

I played two games of Scrabble this evening, winning them both. The first I won 462-331. I got rubbish in the early stages and swapped tiles twice, but I found three bingos in the second half of the game to run out a comfortable winner. In the second game (14 minutes, so some time pressure) I benefited from high-scoring tiles at the beginning, so when my opponent played a bingo I still held a slender lead. I was slightly fortunate that he provided a spot for a bingo of my own late in the game, and I won with something to spare, 375 to 299. My rating has reached 1101 (a new high) but if I do climb the rankings it’ll take a while – I don’t get to play all that often.

Language teaching - Scrabble

Monopoly (and a bit of Scrabble)

January 13, 2018 by 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 by 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 by 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.