Tennis

Life :) - Tennis

Tennis and high taste

July 12, 2016 by 0 Comments

Writing about a tennis match, as I’ve done dozens of times here and on my previous blog, has always been a useful exercise. I think that’s because tennis is such a mental game; when I read back my accounts of old tennis matches I get a pretty good idea of where my head was at at the time.

My head was not in a good place yesterday morning, but at least the sun was shining and I wouldn’t be out there for very long anyway. When we played in the club champs in April under a shorter format he thrashed me 9-1, rattling off eight games in a row. Before yesterday’s match he said he a bit of an upset stomach but even if he’d had a mild case of Zika I wouldn’t have fancied my chances. We practised our serves and a few more of mine went in than they have of late. He called W as I spun my Wilson to determine choice of serve. That surprised me: his name begins with M. It came up M and, encouraged to some extent by my practice serves, I opened proceedings. I immediately double-faulted, but I won my serve to 30, broke him and held again to move ahead 3-0. I defended well and was error-free in those three games. Gosh, I hope I’ll have enough pink Robinsons to see me through. I might be here a while after all. But my opponent picked up the pace, I mistimed a few shots, and it all started to crumble. By the time I next looked like winning a game, the set had almost gone. I fell behind 3-6, 0-2. Eight games in a row. It’s happened again! He then eased off the gas ever so slightly and to my relief I won a game. Two in fact. At 4-2 down the end was surely near, but he began to struggle physically and I sensed I had a semblance of a chance if I dug deep. I then surprised myself with the number of winners I hit on both wings. I served for the set at 5-4 and was broken to love, but I got a second opportunity at 6-5 and played a solid game to close out the set. One set all, and something wasn’t right down the other end. Will he carry on? Ask if I’ll play a super tie-break? He did neither of those things. Instead he shook my hand. It didn’t exactly feel like a win for me but I was happy to find some rhythm, some energy, and to cut down on the double faults. I’m playing again tomorrow night in this winter competition that I’d been hoping would just go away. Meanwhile I was happy to see Andy Murray win his second Wimbledon. For the first time in eleven grand slam finals he caught a break and avoided Federer and Djokovic. Serena on the other hand looks set to become the greatest of all time on the women’s side.

I spent a lot of time with my cousin’s family at the weekend. My aunt and uncle had come up from Timaru, and flew back down this morning with my cousin’s two youngest boys. On Saturday my cousin treated us all to dinner at Logan Brown, a place I’ve walked past literally hundreds of times and never thought I’d go in. Fain daining (that’s how you pronounce it, right?) is a completely foreign concept to me. But the kids helped make the atmosphere relaxing. I had gnocchi and gurnard and an apple tart and it was all amazing with drizzles and garnishes and Portobello mushrooms and the way they somehow cooked the cauliflower. It was so good I could have easily eaten it all again. Come to think of it there might even have been room in my tummy for a third go-around. I suppose being filled up isn’t what you go to Logan Brown for. Yesterday afternoon my aunt and uncle came over to my place for the first time. It was great to have a chat and to drag out the map of Romania and talk about some of the places I might go to with people who genuinely seemed to care. We then had dinner at my cousin’s place. How wonderful it was to spend time with people I feel comfortable with, and to share jokes and ideas and hopes and frustrations. That’s something I don’t experience nearly enough.

I gave a good English lesson tonight. We talked about this morning’s final of Euro 2016 and words for countries and nationalities. When I talked about plurals of words ending in ‘y‘ I’m sure I lost him, but his wife was in the room, she knew what a vowel was, and she clearly understood why we write countries and nationalities but boys, days and trolleys. We discussed flight times and routes to Myanmar and the UK, and we went through some airport-related vocabulary.

My parents will be back from their trip in about two weeks. They’ve had bad colds, the weather hasn’t cooperated, and it’s all taken quite a bit out of them. It’s easy to forget that they’re 66 and 67.

I’m flying up to Auckland on Wednesday evening.

Life :) - My big plan - Tennis

I have to do this

June 6, 2016 by 0 Comments

On Friday I went to the theatre at Bats, a Wellington institution that, to my shame, I hadn’t been to before. I never normally have anyone to go to the theatre with, and unlike the cinema, I wouldn’t go by myself. I saw Love and Information with the bloke from the tennis club and his brother who had come over from Singapore. The play was weird. It flitted between dozens of seemingly unrelated scenes with no discernible plot. I think the play was about the sheer quantity of information, some of it deadly serious, some of it less so, that gets thrown at us almost constantly in the digital age we live in. We can’t possibly take it all in. Each piece of information, each tweet, each Facebook message (I guess, I don’t do Facebook) has an implied “you’re supposed to care about this” tacked on to the end. But we can’t care about it all. The trick in the digital age is deciding, out of every ten pieces of information chucked at you, which seven or eight to ignore. The star of the show for me was an old guy who in some scenes had dementia, and at one point hilariously described online sex as “virtual and great”. In one scene somebody rattled off umpteen words for “table” in various languages and I was disappointed not to hear the Romanian word masă.

Yesterday I went on a walk around Island Bay with a Meetup group. It was a beautiful afternoon and we had great views including of the South Island. Wow, what a difference. A few weeks ago a walk like that would have been a serious struggle. Even walking up the stairs was an effort. It’s great to have my physical energy back. I noticed the difference again today on the tennis court. My play was still very scratchy and I still had problems on serve, but at least I could move to the ball. One of the women who ran the English teaching course in February was there.

Someone recently put me in contact with a Romanian woman, and I got to speak with her yesterday. She seemed very nice but wasn’t really able to help me, mainly because she’s been out of Romania for such a long time. I think she thought I was nuts. She certainly managed to sow a few seeds of doubt in my mind. Should I even be doing this? She said it would be daunting for me because I don’t know anyone over there. But I think of the alternative – team meetings, strategic goals, service level agreements, performance reviews, desk moves, restructures, playing the pretending-to-care game where the avoidance of bad outcomes is the best possible outcome – and daunting doesn’t begin to cover it. And if I only ever went to places where I knew people I’d hardly go anywhere. (The possibility of long-term isolation is something that concerns me, I’ll admit that.)

Last Thursday we had our latest body corp meeting about seismic strengthening. We didn’t make all that much headway. There are so many decisions to make – what percentage of new building standard to strengthen to, when to have the work done, whether to employ a project manager or facilitator, and how to apportion the costs. The fact that these decisions depend on each other to an extent makes it especially hard. On the matter of dividing up the costs, I was amazed at the number of people who wished this to be done equally between the apartments. “We’re about fairness and equity here.” So am I, but an equal allocation is surely unfair, inequitable, and plain wrong. Some of the upper-level apartments have almost twice the unit entitlement of my apartment and the others on the lower floors, which means they’re almost twice the size and are worth nearly twice as much. Nobody would seriously suggest that someone who owned two apartments should pay the same as someone who owned one, would they? Would you like to pay the same income tax as your boss? This reminds me of the Poll Tax in the UK in 1990. It led to riots and the downfall of Margaret Thatcher.

I haven’t seen any of the French Open because I haven’t found a stream that works. Muguruza’s win over Serena last night didn’t surprise me that much. People forget that Serena is in her mid-thirties, and Muguruza has looked the goods for a while. I predicted the Spaniard to win the title in an email to a friend when they were playing the third round, but unfortunately I forgot to place my $20,000 bet. There’s a lot riding on the men’s final. Djokovic is surely the favourite to complete his career grand slam but I certainly wouldn’t write Murray off.

Life :) - Tennis

I still don’t get it

May 27, 2016 by 0 Comments

My parents just FaceTimed me from Desenzano del Garda in Northern Italy, where they’re staying for my cousin’s wedding which takes place in a few hours. Last night there was a big pre-wedding do which Dad said I would have absolutely hated. He’s absolutely right. You travel half-way around the globe to stay in such a beautiful place, only to be stuck with all those people! What a waste! I’m so sociable, aren’t I? I made a list a few years ago of five things I really just don’t get, of which weddings was one.

Simona Halep’s third-round match at the French Open starts in 15 minutes, and I hope I can watch that with Romanian commentary. I’ll then see Andy Murray’s match with Ivo Karlovic if I hold out that long. Tomorrow (forecast to be a wet and horrible day) I’ve got a property manager coming over to assess my apartment.

The prospect of doing something I want to do feels, well, amazing.

Language learning - Life :) - My big plan - Tennis

Humming

May 21, 2016 by 0 Comments

The last few days I’ve been humming. During the day everything has been beautiful, amazing, wonderful, and at night I’ve hardly slept. On Thursday, after my fifth night in a row of sleeping for a couple of hours max, I decided to take a sick day, only my second in over two years there. It was the perfect day for it, the sun was shining and my flatmate had moved out the day before. I walked around my local area for two hours or so, wide-eyed, taking photos of beautiful trees and houses that were now so much more colourful than I remembered. Other than that I gave the bathroom a good clean (it needed it – my flatmate was a rather aggressive user of the toilet) and studied some Romanian.

I’ve now got my Google set to Romanian: the “I’m feeling lucky” button is now “Mă simt norocos” and if I search for Sibiu I get aproximativ 32.100.000 (de) rezultate in just 0,57 secunde. The same goes for Google Maps, Google News and Google You Name It, everything is in Romanian including all the suggested search terms and my supposedly tailored results. As anti-Google as I can be at times (they are so pervasive), that’s pretty cool. There’s also a social network, Google Plus, which I’ve joined. It’s much smaller than Facebook or Twitter, with “only” a few million active members. I find the network part of Google Plus as confusing as hell (and of course all the terminology and help pages are in Romanian for me), but what I like about it is that it’s great for viewing and sharing photos, and I’ve spent hours staring at colourful photos of Sibiu and elsewhere. I might even post some photos of Wellington at some stage, and I’ll post the link here if that happens. I’ve even got an animated Romanian flag as my mascot or avatar or whatever you’re supposed to call it. I had to find one that wasn’t so fast as to drive everyone batty and to re-order the frames so that the first one looked nice (sometimes you only get to see a still photo and it defaults to the first frame). Yeah, working with animated images, or GIFs, is fun.

romania_done

 

I think what’s made me hum is the realisation that I’ve got so much freedom. I can be who I want and for years I didn’t even know it. Isn’t that something? Billions of people around the world don’t have that. In my own country we do pretty well in the freedom stakes, but so many of us are constrained by the situations we end up in. Take my boss. He plans to move house soon, but can’t move more than a mile or two because his three kids would have to move to a different school otherwise. He works extremely hard and his mind works extremely quickly but to me, as I watch him shove TV food down his throat while he rushes from one bullshit meeting to the next, none of it seems worth it. I used “TV food” there because of something I saw on a train in America. The guy in front of me in the food car dropped an armful of processed crap on the counter, and the bloke behind the desk tried to stop him from buying it: “You don’t want to be spending eighteen dollars on all that TV food.”

It would be criminal for me to waste this freedom I have. I haven’t got a two-mile radius dammit, I’ve got a great big map. My train itinerary which will cover some of that map is likely to be:

  1. London to Paris via the Eurostar, 2½ hours;
  2. Paris to Munich, humming along at 200mph on a double-decker train (Seat61.com tells me to get a top-deck seat for the best views), 5¾ hours;
  3. Munich to Budapest overnight, 9¾ hours, and I’ll have a few hours to look around Budapest when I arrive;
  4. Either Budapest to Timișoara, 5 hours, arriving in the evening of day two, or Budapest to Sibiu, 10 hours (why so much longer I have no idea), arriving in the early morning of day three.

Without Seat61.com I don’t know where I’d be.

A week ago yesterday I had my performance review, the last one that will matter in my current job (and I’d prefer not to ever have another job where they’ll matter). I got through it OK, and that felt pretty good. The same evening I went to a regional tennis awards presentation. Someone at the club nominated me for an award for those nine consecutive singles wins I had, but there wasn’t much chance I’d ever win it. Most of the prizes went to the elite players who already win heaps of awards anyway. The best moment of the evening was when a bloke of about eighty, who had done so much work organising competitions over decades, was recognised with the volunteer of the year award; it brought a tear to his eye.

Talking of freedom, having this apartment to myself again, and the freedom that gives me, feels incredible.

Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

Tanking

May 9, 2016 by 0 Comments

The last few days I’ve had a cold and almost no energy, but I’ve still shown up to work because that sure beats the alternative.

I played tennis on Saturday morning against the guy I narrowly beat in round one of the club champs. This was part of a round robin singles competition that I wish I hadn’t committed myself to. I lost in three sets, 7-5 3-6 6-2. I led 4-2 and 40-15 in the first set but chucked in six double faults (count ’em!) in that god-awful game, quite a feat when you think about it. I still got within two points of what was a dreadful opening set from both of us. We both improved in the second, and when I won that set I expected to carry some momentum into the third, but not a bit of it. I had nothing left in the tank. My opponent sensed this and hit drop shots to good effect as I tried to defend from behind the baseline. He served well in the second and third sets and his win was well deserved. I was glad to get off the court after a match that took 95 minutes, give or take.

Fatigue has been a huge problem for me ever since my flatmate moved in, and I hope I can get an energy boost when he moves out in eleven days (count ’em!). He has been exhausting. He’s not a bad person by any means, but he needs to learn when to leave people alone. My previous flatmate (in 2014) could certainly be a pain in the butt too, but I felt I was helping him get some stability back into his turbulent life and that made me feel good. He’d made some bad decisions and had got involved with the wrong people, but giving people another chance is part of what makes a good human being. I don’t feel anything similar towards my current tenant.

I gave my English lesson tonight. We worked on the forms of the verb to be (I am, he is, etc.) and the contracted forms (I’m, he’s, etc.). I decided to leave it there rather than go on to the negative forms and I’m glad I did. I’d have only confused him. I got him to talk about his new painting job and we made basic sentences about his colleagues: I’m from Myanmar; He’s from New Zealand; They’re from Vietnam. Getting him to pronounce it’s was a battle; I don’t think the ts combination, which is common at the end of English words, exists in his native tongue (and I wouldn’t know where to start with a word like exists). He said he wanted to practise reading so I’ll get him a simple story book for next week’s lesson.

A Tame Impala song came on the radio tonight. I only recently saw the name written down for the first time. A-ha! A non-wild antelope. All this time I thought it was two people’s names, Tame and Parlour. Jack Tame is the US reporter on One News, and there was a footballer by the name of Ray Parlour, so it seemed plausible to me. Tame Impala are similar to MGMT, and I like them just as much. I should probably see them live some time, and make sure I listen to the whole show.

Life :) - Tennis

Let this be over

April 28, 2016 by 0 Comments

My flatmate keeps acting as if he’s here for the long haul, so on Tuesday I asked him about his exit date which he previously said would be late May. He then talked pompously about his connections in Liberia or whatever African country it happens to be, and when I interrupted him to ask how any of that was relevant, he got angry. He did mention a date eventually: 1st June, which is a Wednesday. I don’t believe him. I think he’ll try and stick around for what will be a really long Queen’s Birthday weekend, and beyond. In the meantime, as I remind him of the date, the tension between us will only ramp up.

He’s always there, and I can always feel that he’s there. That’s why I don’t look forward to weekends, even normal-length ones. I prefer being at work where I don’t get hassled as much. The highlights of the week for me have been sitting on a bench at lunchtime, overlooking the sea, while trying to follow baseball on my phone. A year ago I never imagined I’d be doing that. We’ve had beautiful autumn weather all week.

I’m still going to marimba lessons. These are very enjoyable, if not quite as much as fun as during the first term when the resonators were always attached. Last night I found out the name of the seed-filled gourd that is used as an instrument in marimba music. It’s a hosho, which is a Zimbabwean word that sounds Japanese. Until last night I thought our teacher was saying “listen to the whole show” which I took to mean “pay attention to everybody’s parts, not just your own”, but all this time she’s been saying “listen to the hosho“.

They’ve started up a round robin singles competition at the tennis club. On Monday I got thrashed 6-0 6-2 in 45 minutes by probably the best player in the competition. It was just what I expected; I’m a shadow of the player I was six months ago, and he took me apart, accelerating through the ball on both sides and hitting inches from the junction of baseline and sideline with alarming regularity. I also averaged about two double faults per game. OK, the sun didn’t help me at one end, but in October I might have served two double faults in an average match. I got on the board early in the second set, much to my relief, but once that set started running away from me I thought, please, just let this be over. That’s just what I’m thinking about my flatting situation.

Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

Just another year

April 20, 2016 by 0 Comments

Today is my 36th birthday. I brought some cake and biscuits to work, but other than that it’s just another day, although it is a reminder that yet another year has flown by and I need to do something with my life.

Some numbers geekery: 36 is both a square and a triangular number. You can arrange 36 snooker balls in a square with six on each side, or in a triangle (which is more what one does with snooker balls) with eight on each side.

36 square triangular

What’s more, the current year is a triangular number too. If you happen to have 2016 snooker balls lying around, you could arrange them in a nice pretty triangle with 63 balls on each side.triangular-number-2016

I gave my third English lesson on Monday. It went well, far better than last week’s one where I think I overwhelmed and confused my poor student. This time we talked about the world of work and didn’t stray much from that (apart from the bit where he tried to tell me that, unlike in Myanmar, there isn’t much farming in New Zealand). Half-way through the session I thought to myself, this is great. I’m helping someone, he’s appreciative of my help, and we’re both clearly enjoying this.

I made myself the underdog in my first-round singles match in the club champs, but it was a toss-up really. My opponent is undoubtedly more technically proficient than me, but his approach to the game is more casual than mine even if he plays more than I do. I won four games in a row to go 5-2 in front in the first-to-nine match, and felt I might win comfortably, but in the following game I seemed to forget how to serve. Three double faults cost me dear as I was broken in the first of five consecutive deuce games; I lost four of them and we were all square at 6-6 (the game I won was thanks in part to a stone-dead net-cord that left my opponent seething). Six-all became seven-all and it was down to the wire, but I then played my best two games of the match, winning them both to love, for a 9-7 win. I played well to reach the second round but once I got there nothing went right. I was flat-footed, my first-serve percentage was low, my unforced error rate ballooned, I lost control of my forehand, and before long I’d lost the match, 9-1. It wasn’t a match I expected to win, but I didn’t think I’d go down in a heap like that. Oh well. That’s how it goes sometimes, but the reality is that I’m not playing nearly as well, or enjoying the game nearly as much, as at the start of the season.

The doubles, both the men’s and the mixed, went as well or as badly as I thought it might. My most enjoyable match was a men’s match that we lost 9-4. My partner has only been playing tennis for a matter of months and played remarkably well, considering. He has a Filipino partner. His small daughter, Luz, was sitting courtside. He pronounced the name “luzz” to rhyme with “buzz”, and looked at me blankly when I said that it means light in Spanish. I can see that both the “lose” and “loose” pronunciations could be problematic in English, but I still prefer either to “luzz” which doesn’t do justice to such a beautiful name. Talking of parents pronouncing their kids’ names in unusual ways, I recently met a woman who had a two-year-old daughter called Arya. “Everyone keeps saying it wrong. It’s not ‘aria’, it’s ‘aah-ya’, as in ‘aah-ya going to the party?'” Well I’m sorry, if you give your daughter an unusual name that people haven’t seen before, they’re going to say it how they see it, and in this case that’s “aria”. Poor Arya.

Tomorrow I’ll be seeing Hunt for the Wilderpeople, which I’m expecting to be at least ten times better than Batman and bloody Superman.

Life :) - Tennis

Club champs preview

April 15, 2016 by 0 Comments

We’ve got the tennis club champs this weekend. Tomorrow is the singles, and in the first round I’ve been drawn against the gay bloke I endured Batman vs Superman with. We’ve never played each other but he knows my game well. My fairly unorthodox game, combined with being left-handed, gives me an advantage in interclub (against people who don’t know me) that I won’t have tomorrow. I haven’t been hitting the ball well of late, and I’d say I’m the underdog in spite of my run of interclub wins. Last year I made the semi-finals of the singles. In round one my opponent didn’t show up until it was almost too late but made a good go of eating into my huge lead. I got there in the end. My next opponent was seeded third and in a different league to me but in the midst of a very protracted ninth game after I’d clawed his lead back to two, he said he was getting the aura from a migraine and pulled out. In the semis I was outclassed and lost 9-1. The format, just like this year, was the first to nine games, with a best-of-three-set final.

Several of my colleagues had interviews today for the new roles that have been created by the restructure. They were understandably stressed even though they would almost certainly keep their jobs whatever happened. I’m glad I didn’t have to go through that – my care factor would have been through the floor.

Tennis

We did it

March 24, 2016 by 0 Comments

Some good news: our team did win the interclub competition for our grade.

In Wellington they split the season into two competitions – pre-Christmas, where we finished mid-table, and post-Christmas, where we finished first out of seven teams by the slimmest of margins.

We tied on points with the team who beat us in the penultimate round of matches. The first tie-breaker wasn’t head-to-head (which would have been curtains for us, obviously) but overall wins and losses. Our rivals, like us, had five wins and one loss. The next criterion was set differential: we finished on +16 to their +11.

The teams in third and fourth place were nipping at our heels too. There were no stand-out teams, and our winning total of 32 points (out of a possible 48) is probably some kind of historic low. But somebody had to win, and how often in life have I been part of a winning team? Hardly ever. I certainly played my part in the win: all those straight-set singles wins were a big help, and although some of my doubles losses were disappointing, the closeness of those defeats was crucial in eking out overall wins, as well as for our set differential when it came to that.

In a round robin competition like this, how should you separate teams tied on points? In football, should you use goal difference or head-to-head as the first tie-breaker? I’m firmly in the goal difference camp. Why use only one (or two) matches to break the tie when you can use them all (which could be as many as 38 or 46 matches)? Why shouldn’t every goal in every game be worth something? And when three (or more) teams tie, head-to-head can get messy. The same principle applies in a tennis competition. It’s just as well whoever made the rules of Wellington interclub saw things the same way.

Tennis

Interclub tennis – Week 9 (undefeated!)

March 19, 2016 by 0 Comments

Our team went into the last round of matches with a chance of winning the post-Christmas competition. I don’t yet know whether this morning’s performance was good enough – it depends on the outcome of a match between two other contenders for the title.

We played the same team as last week but in a different order. My doubles partner was elevated to number one, so I played in the top doubles match against big servers and big hitters. One of them was a young Serbian who played in a Novak Djokovic shirt. I could tell he’d had many hours of coaching. In the first few games the rallies just went on and on and on… Actually no, it almost entirely rally-free tennis. Remarkably there were no breaks of serve at all in the first set. I don’t ever remember playing such a set before. We missed some break point chances but then had to save three set points at 4-5, love-40 on my serve (I’d won both my previous service games to love). We did save them and got to 6-6 and a tie-break, but that was our undoing; we quickly fell 5-0 behind before losing it 7-3. After that “macho” service-break-free first set, there were six breaks in the second which we lost 6-3 after having a point for a 4-1 lead. I had a bad time at the net in the second set, even by my standards. That was disappointing, even if we got closer than I expected we would given out opponents’ sheer firepower. We somehow avoided sudden death in the first set, despite getting to deuce a few times, but played three decisive points in the second set, winning one of them.

I played my singles in the heat of Wellington’s never-ending summer. My opponent, who turns 62 next week, works as a photographer. I felt confident that my younger legs would see me through in a match I needed to win to give our team a chance of winning the morning’s contest, let alone the competition as a whole. My opponent aced me on the very first point and I had to climb over the fence to retrieve the ball. Apart from that I started comfortably enough, but even though I won the first set 6-1 I’d lost my dominance by the end of it. I dug deep to open up a 3-1, 40-love lead in the second set, but on one of my game points I called a ball in that was out over the baseline according to my team-mate; to be honest I thought it was out too, but I didn’t know it was out. I dropped my serve, and played two absolutely shocking games to go 4-3 behind when I should have just about been off the court. I’d lost all confidence in my shots, everything I tried came back with interest, and worst of all I was stringing double faults together. I needed to win in straight sets for our team to win. It was all unravelling. But my opponent couldn’t quite keep up his level, I regained some consistency, and I won the last three games to give the team the overall win. We won three matches out of six, with every match being decided in two sets, but we won by an eleven-game margin.

And guess what? I finished the season with an unbeaten singles record. Nine wins out of nine, 18 sets out of 18. I didn’t expect that for one minute at the start of the season. I had my hairy moments along the way, not least the match a couple of weeks ago where I faced four set points in the first set, but I did it! My doubles record was nowhere near as good (four losses including the last three matches) but maybe that just shows that I don’t need other people. Flatmates, workmates, team-mates, who needs ’em?!