Tennis

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Is it worth the risk?

March 21, 2022 by 0 Comments

I’ve just come back from my second-most expensive grocery shop in Romania. The only time I spent more was in the headless-chicken initial days of the pandemic. Everything has shot up in price. This reminds me of 2008 in New Zealand, when a block of cheese hit $16 and they were practically giving gas-guzzling Ford Falcons away: petrol had smashed through $2 a litre, which seemed crazy at the time. This morning I met up with Mark, the teacher. We had a coffee; he also had waffles. We had a good chat, mostly about teaching, but he didn’t have much time because he was going to a barbecue soon after.

Yesterday I had my maths lesson with Matei in Dumbrăvița, then two online English lessons when I got back, including one with a new guy who lives near Cluj. Most of my lessons are still online, but face-to-face is coming back gradually. After that I was on the tennis court for the first time this year. We’d planned to start back a couple of weeks ago, but we had a chilly first half of March. The tennis crew is depleted. Yesterday I partnered a teenage girl who is a national-level rower; we played against her father and the older guy I sometimes play singles with. We lost the first set 6-3, and in the second we’d fended off half a dozen match points to be at deuce for the umpteenth time in the tenth game, when time ran out on us. I wasn’t too bad. My serve needs some work; my only ace, which hit the sideline at 2-5 in the second set, came out of the blue.

A silver lining to those awful kidney stones is that I’ve dropped a few pounds. On Friday I had my first haircut since last June; the barber’s comb turned my long thick hair into unappetising grey spaghetti before it fell to the ground. I didn’t really want that much taken off, but hairdressing vocabulary is something I struggle with even in English. I do prefer the slimmer, less caveman-like me, though. (I still have the beard.) On Tuesday I’ll go back to the doctor, and maybe I’ll find out if my stones are still there. I don’t think I’ve passed them, but the pain has gone. Now I “only” have my intermittent sinus pain to deal with, plus the cold that never goes away. (If I’m outside on a chilly day, I have to blow my nose all the bloody time. When I played tennis yesterday I had to wipe my nose after every second point. That’s just life for me.)

That’s more than enough about me. My dad passed out on Thursday night, just after I wrote my last post. He somehow fell into the bath at about two in the morning, and blacked out. He was lucky not to injure himself. He came round, then eventually clambered out of the bath. The next day was a write-off as he had such terrible leg pain, but yesterday he assured me he was coming right. As for Mum, a rogue contact lens had got stuck up her eye, and when she extricated that she was fine. I wish I wasn’t so far away from them. I expect they’ll want to come to Europe at or around Christmas – there will be a new addition by then – but I’d like to make a trip to New Zealand too.

I want to move on with my life, which means finding a new apartment and running a proper teaching business from it, but last week’s near miss has made me even more skittish than I was before. The appalling war in Ukraine has made the local economy very uncertain, then when you add in that I don’t really know what I’m doing, and I’ve had my fingers well and truly burnt before…

I forgot to mention a horrific accident – or pair of accidents – that occurred earlier this month near the Black Sea in eastern Romania. It was a quiet evening, and I got alerts on my phone in Romanian, one of which made me do a double take. Is that really what it says? A MiG fighter jet went down in a remote area, in terrible weather, killing the pilot. Then a Puma helicopter flew out in search of the plane, and it too crashed. All seven on board the helicopter died.

Buying property - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

Some sad news, and my latest flat search

February 13, 2022 by 0 Comments

My neighbour called me yesterday to deliver the sad news that Domnul Ionescu, the 70-year-old tennis regular, had died just that morning. He’d died of lung cancer. It all happened remarkably quickly; in November I was playing tennis with him, often on the same side of the net. He was a heavy smoker. He could get through one set of tennis without a fag, but not two. He had a typical smoker’s cough, sometimes yacking out the contents into his hand. He was also pleasant to talk to, even if his favourite topic of conversation was how Romania had gone to the dogs. He was particularly scathing about Romanians’ attitudes to the pandemic; he’d been fully vaccinated. He loved following sport: tennis, football and handball. He worked for the railways, as some of the other tennis players do (or did), and as far as I can tell he reached quite a high position.

I got to look at four places on Wednesday. They were all built in the eighties and in a similar part of town.

The first one was a doozy. (Maybe I should choose that as my starting word for Wordle.) It was a biggish flat on the ground floor, owned by a couple in their sixties. The lady was cooking pancakes at the time. The place had unusual-looking archways and was eccentrically decorated, with no two walls painted the same colour. One of the rooms had snowmen and the like painted on the walls. Under the living room was a hidden storage space. One of the rooms could have been an office, but was rather small. In the bathroom, the sink and bath were shell-shaped, while the sink pedestal was in the shape of a fish. I had a certain admiration for the owners for deciding to decorate the place like this, and they seemed lovely. The woman even gave me two pancakes before I left. But really it was a non-starter. I told the agent I thought it was overpriced, and he agreed with me.

The second place also on the ground floor and had recently had a makeover. A large, typically Romanian elderly lady owned it. It was well furnished and had potential, but unfortunately was just too small. Then on to number three. I met the owner, a man of sixty or so, who might have been a welder. It seemed he could turn his hand to anything involving metal. I do admire people who have such practical skill. Unlike number two, this place was filled with cheap furniture. It had a garage I could have bought for a few thousand extra. Opposite was supposedly a brewery of some sort, which had ceased operations a long time ago. Just like the second place, this was also too small to run classes.

The final apartment was the best of the bunch. It was in a slightly different area, and one I prefer, because it is relatively quiet and has more green space. The flat was a decent size, and one of the rooms could have made a good office. I wasn’t sure about the electrics – the wires hanging from the ceiling in the kitchen looked a bit dodgy. Like the first place, it had a hidden storage space (basement) under the kitchen, with a ladder going down. The owner didn’t stop talking – he was in hard-sell mode – and I wasn’t sure if I could trust him. Again, there was a garage that I could buy for an additional €5,500, on top of the €120,000 asking price of the flat. I wasn’t sure if it got much sunlight. I soon learnt that the apartment had been on the market for a year, and the owners have increased the price by €10,000 in that time. The owner showed me some paperwork with various unaccepted offers, all around the €100,000 mark.

This wasn’t wasted time, because I felt I got my eye in a bit, which I need to do because it’s such a big decision.

Last week was a better one for work as people recovered from Covid, some for the second time.

Poker. I’ve been less active of late, but I got in two tournaments yesterday. In the single draw I snagged the last of the eleven paid places, while in the badugi I had a good run, finishing fourth for a $43 profit. After that successful session my bankroll is up to $1740. If and when my profit reaches $2000 – that’s $300 away – I plan to withdraw most of it, leaving $700 in my account.

Life :) - Maths teaching - New Zealand - Poker - Tennis

Hard to keep in touch…

January 31, 2022 by 0 Comments

What a final that was, all 5 hours and 24 minutes of it. I never imagined Nadal would find himself anywhere near the final, let alone winning from two sets down against Medvedev who is one of the best players on a hard court. I still don’t know how he did it. That game where he dug himself out of a love-40 hole at 2-2 in the third set was the catalyst for his fightback, and you could see Medvedev tire ever so slightly towards the end of that set. There were so many long, draining games in the match, going several deuces. Nadal won less than half the points – in the first set he was completely outplayed, and he got hardly any easy holds until the very last game. Just wow. There it is then, his 21st grand slam in extraordinary circumstances, with Roland-Garros around the corner. The French don’t take kindly to anti-vaxers either.

Last Sunday, on the morning of my trip to the fortresses, I heard from a friend I first met in Wellington back in 2011. She shifted to Auckland not long after that, and then upped sticks and moved to Naseby in Central Otago. I’d sent her some pictures of apartments – I still haven’t made much progress there. It was a huge pleasure to hear from her. To get up and see that message felt great. It’s sad that I’ve fallen out of touch with most of my NZ-based friends, and even some of my extended family, and that hasn’t been for want of trying. I send sporadic emails but don’t get replies, then eventually I give up. People are selfish. They want contacts that will give them results. Tangible benefits. Access to other people who will give them results and tangible benefits. Friendship itself doesn’t cut it. (It doesn’t help that I don’t use social media. Communicating with one person at a time, like in an email, is oh so cumbersome and inefficient.)

Yesterday I had my maths lesson with Matei. I didn’t see him last Saturday because he’d gone with his family to Milan for the long weekend. As you do. My job as a maths teacher is to explain things that are obvious to me but non-obvious to him, and I partly failed to do that, as a result of my inexperience. I’ll revisit the topic at the start of next week’s session, after giving it a lot more thought.

Some good news, I suppose, about my book. I’ve completed my journey through the thousand or so words and expressions that baffle and bemuse Romanians. I still need to put some more meat on the bones in a few of the sections and add one of two appendices. But then what? How will this huge tome (that’s what it is) ever see the light of day? I could go back to the Romanian teacher at the university. She stopped communicating with me too. What is it with people?

Wordle. It’s taken the world by storm, in a way that no puzzle game has since Sudoku back in 2005. If you haven’t heard of it by now, it’s a daily game created by Josh Wardle (hence its excellent name) where you have to guess a five-letter target word. Enter your guess (which must be a real word) and it’ll highlight in green any letters that are in the right place in the target word, while any letters that are in the word but in a different place are coloured yellow. Letters that don’t appear in the word at all are highlighted in grey. Then you try again, until you (hopefully) home in on the final word. This was my attempt today. I think I got lucky:

I average about four guesses. The concept of the game isn’t new, and it’s interesting (and surprising) what takes off and what doesn’t. As someone who has created a whole ton of word and number puzzles in my time, I’m pleased that this has been a success. Why has it blossomed? Well, it’s simple, it’s pleasing on the eye, the coloured grids are shareable on social media (gotta have that), and best of all, you can only play it once a day. A couple of minutes, then gata, as they say in Romanian. The ultimate anti-Candy Crush. It takes you back to the days of internet cafés when you’d pop in for ten minutes to “check your emails” and then return to glorious disconnection.

Poker. Not my best session today, but it’s been a good January. I’ve made $205 this month, and my bankroll is now $1648.

Buying property - Films - Headaches - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

A real headache

January 16, 2022 by 0 Comments

In a follow-up to the previous Thursday, I had a really really shitty start to this week – headaches and just no energy. On Wednesday, even though my headaches had pretty much gone, I’d taken a hammering from having what felt like a screwdriver jammed up my nostril for two days, and I couldn’t steel myself do anything outside my online lessons. On Monday I did manage to make it over to the apartment for a second look. It ticks a lot of my boxes – it would be great for teaching, I think – but the sun is a big issue. The flat has windows facing both north and south, but unfortunately the south-facing windows look out on tall apartment blocks that cut out the sun. I thought about this earlier today when the sun was streaming through my south-facing window as I washed my lunch dishes. Now I’m about to get the sun through my west-facing living room window. Before moving to Romania I faced ongoing battles with mental health. I now have that under control, and I hate to make a change that puts that in jeopardy.

Talking of weather, we got a fair dump of snow last weekend and early this week, making for picturesque scenes. On Thursday morning we plummeted to a rather brisk minus 12. This was as my parents were down in Central Otago to deliver paintings. Dad sent me a picture taken at a café in beautiful Ophir which I visited seven years ago.

On that awful Thursday – nine days ago – I watched the star-studded Don’t Look Up on Netflix, though I had to take it in chunks because the headaches were making me ultra-sensitive to light and sound. Some reviewers have panned the film, but it’s rather cool to pan something like that, and when all is said and done it’s likely to end up in four-star territory. Don’t Look Up is a pretty good parody of the post-truth times we live in, where everything is up for debate, everything must have two sides, social media is dominant, and the music is unbearably awful.

Even the Djokovic saga has polarised people, when it has no need to. The last ten days have been a bad look for everybody involved: the man himself, and the Australian government in its entirety. A 500-watt light has been shone on Australia’s pretty barbaric (and US-style) immigration practices. If Djokovic had any sense (I used to think he did), he’d have gone home by now of his own accord, but his ego is obviously too big for that.

Poker. I had another tournament win on Wednesday, which was nice. I’ve now had four goes at razz – a fourth place (which got my confidence up), a good run but far from the money, and two very early exits. My bankroll now stands at $1523.

Coronavirus - Family - Headaches - Poker - Tennis

A GOAT and a donkey

January 8, 2022 by 0 Comments

Just a quick one from me this morning, as I’m about to head off to Dumbrăvița in the rain for my maths lesson. (Update: the rain has turned to snow.)

Omicron is now spreading like wildfire in Romania; the doubling rate of new cases is four days. The graphs at the top of this blog are already hopelessly out of date – I’ll soon go back to daily updates. In countries like the UK, where people have actually been getting vaccinated, the new variant has been mild, but who knows what it will do in Romania where (incredibly) the majority of the country is still unjabbed. We’ll soon find out.

I spoke to my parents on Thursday night. They gave me updates on all the renovations on their new house. They might have bitten off more than they can chew. I just hope they get professionals in as much as possible – it’s not as if they can’t afford to. Will this be the year we finally see each other? It’s been three years, and I miss them terribly. Thank heavens for FaceTime.

Mum and I talked about the Djokovic saga. She’s a fan of the Serb, so she was much more equivocal than me. (I used to like him too.) To my mind, Djokovic is getting what he deserves here. His attitude to Covid has been lamentable from the start. He organised the Covid Cup superspreader event in summer of 2020 and has been a vocal anti-vaxer. He’s idolised in Serbia and has surely convinced many thousands of Serbs to remain unjabbed like him. Then he tries to waltz into Australia, which has some of the strictest Covid rules on the planet. Bugger him. And I don’t care if he’s won the Australian Open nine times and he’s the GOAT and blablablah (or is it maa maa maa?). He isn’t the only one to blame. The authorities, especially Tennis Australia, have behaved appallingly here too. His appeal hearing takes place on Monday, and it’s possible he’ll still be allowed to play. If so, he’ll be booed to oblivion. I hope he’s deported on the next plane.

On Thursday I had a terrible day. Luckily I only had two lessons – one in the early morning and one in the evening. I’m now almost sure that what I thought was acute sinus pain is actually migraines. I had two or three hours of intense pain in the morning and around lunchtime, and it took the rest of the day to recover. Dad has suffered from migraines (with much greater duration and frequency than me) since he was a teenager, so I suppose it’s not a surprise that I’ve ended up getting them. I tried to watch Don’t Look Up on Netflix and listen to one of the Reith lectures (about AI), but even all of that was a struggle because I was hypersensitive to light and sound. More about that next time.

Poker. Two second places on Wednesday took my bankroll to $1477. I made $46 on the morning. I tried, with no success, to play razz, a lowball stud game. I’ll give that another go, probably at the weekend.

The apartment. I’m still very interested, but also very apprehensive. I’ve booked another viewing for Monday.

New Zealand - Poker - Tennis

Tennis at various levels

November 22, 2021 by 0 Comments

It’s been a beautiful cloudless Sunday in Timișoara. I met the British teacher guy in town, where it was packed. The police were trying to enforce mask wearing. We sat outside at a restaurant in Piața Unirii. I only had a beer – I’d already eaten – while he had a sizeable beef salad.

Yesterday I played tennis with that same guy. This time the games and sets came thick and fast, even though we had some long rallies, and from my perspective we finished up at 2-6 6-2 6-2 2-2. In the first set I really struggled on my serve and didn’t come close to winning any of my service games. When your serve isn’t functioning, the rest of your game can often fall apart too, and that’s sort of what happened. Also my opponent was playing well; when he’s in the zone there isn’t an awful lot I can do, serve or no serve. I just have to try and weather the storm. I did bounce back and he started to make more mistakes. An interesting moment came on my opponent’s serve at 0-4 and 15-30 in the third set. He whammed down an ace out of nowhere, and that gave him a visible confidence boost. I did however take out the set on my fourth opportunity – a real bruiser of a final point to conclude the longest game of the day.

A world away from Parcul Rozelor where we played yesterday, there have been two good developments in professional tennis. First, Chinese player Peng Shuai. Her disappearance, after she accused the ex-vice-premier of sexually assaulting her, has been deeply troubling. In a breath of fresh air, players (current and former) and the tennis organisations have spoken out against China. The ATP and WTA have threatened to pull their (highly lucrative) tournaments out of China. The second item of good tennis news came when the Australian Open organisers said in no uncertain terms that it’s no jab, no play, no matter what your ranking is or how many titles you own. Things might get interesting then for Djoković who holds nine Australian Open titles – he’s unvaxed as yet, as far as I know.

When I spoke to my brother yesterday he had a cold. That’s such a rarity for him (unlike me), but there are so many bugs going round in the UK at the moment.

I had four of the most uninspiring poker tournaments I could imagine last night. Got absolutely nowhere in any of them. I shouldn’t complain too much after my two recent wins. My bankroll is $1132. Tennis will soon pack up for the winter and I’ll have less work over Christmas, so I’ll probably get to increase my volume a bit.

Yesterday I read an article about Wellington’s many chairlifts that carry people up hillsides to their (often very expensive) homes. The lifts themselves cost a bomb to install and maintain. They’re a visible part of the landscape around Oriental Bay. Just seeing an article about Wellington did make me slightly homesick (or something-sick; nowhere counts as home for me).

Buying property - Coronavirus - Family - New Zealand - Other sports - Tennis

The benefits (perhaps) of big sport

November 20, 2021 by 0 Comments

I’ve got tennis this afternoon, straight after my lesson with the young couple. It’ll probably be singles again with that super-fit guy. We chatted after last weekend’s game, and he attributed his fitness in part to growing up (and going to school) under communism in the Nadia Comăneci era. Sport was a top priority then, as it simply wasn’t when I grew up in the UK, and isn’t now in 21st-century Romania. Sure, we all did gymnastics and swimming and team sports, but unless you were one of the best at football or cricket, we were pretty much going through the motions. I know I was. We certainly didn’t have scouts visiting schools to eye up the best young talent, as they did in Romania. I was, however, exposed to a higher-priority regime when I spent those six months in New Zealand as a nine-year-old. There were inter-school tennis competitions, inter-school athletics competitions, and cross-country runs. I participated in all of that and hated the lot, even tennis, a sport that I otherwise liked.

I saw two more flats yesterday, both in the same block in the Fabric area, which is to the east of where I live now. The block was designated U4, as in “U4 me”, but I don’t think those places were quite for me. In Romanian, U4 is pronounced “ooh patru“. They weren’t bad apartments at all, but do I know what I’m taking on here? I left feeling more confused than anything.

After my Moderna booster, I felt fine for the rest of the day, but at night I got the shivers and slept no more than three or four hours. The next day I felt a bit tired and groggy, but soon I was back to normal. Some short-term grogginess seemed a small price to pay for the level of protection that the extra jab should give me, especially seeing that I’m in Romania where getting a severe case of Covid is a riskier proposition than it would be in New Zealand, for instance.

Mum and Dad missed out on seeing their one-in-800-year near-total eclipse of a blood-red moon. It clouded over at just the wrong time. I had a chat to them this morning. All is well there, although they have taken on a pretty big project with their new house. I also spoke to my brother, who was on his own – my sister-in-law was attending a conference in Liverpool.

Films - Language teaching - Life :) - Music - New Zealand - Poker - Tennis

Trying to keep up

November 15, 2021 by 0 Comments

I had seven lessons scheduled for Thursday. That would have been a record, but by the Romanian law of low averages it was pretty unlikely that they’d all actually happen. In the end, only four did. The guy who probably didn’t have Covid cancelled, then the new woman cancelled because she’d had a fight with her boyfriend, then I got a message from the twelve-year-old girl’s mum to say that she was ill. In the final case I had no complaints.

Saturday morning was cold, with thick fog. I went to the market in Mehala, which isn’t a million miles from that house I’d looked at the previous day, but didn’t buy anything. When I came back I had my lesson with the young couple, which went fine. I then watched an episode of Black Mirror. Hang the DJ, season four, episode four. I nearly didn’t watch it because I knew it was all about relationships, something I find ever so slightly triggering, but it was great episode and I’m glad I watched it.

After Black Mirror it was time for some poker. A fixed-limit badugi tournament with a $5.50 buy-in and 96 entries. I haven’t run well in that tournament in general, and on multiple occasions I had one foot out of the exit door. But I kept surviving, and when we got down to six players, all my Christmases came at once. I amassed a big stack which I never relinquished, and although we had a protracted short-handed battle, I was able to run out the winner for a profit of $90 in a little under four hours. What a surprise that was. It was my first win in 90 tournaments – that sounds bad, but in the intervening period I had four second places and two thirds. Yesterday, normal service resumed – three tournaments in which I got precisely nowhere. My bankroll is now $1096.

I’ve been listening to End of the Line by the Traveling Wilburys. (When I was younger, I imagined it was Wilberries, a kind of fruit. It’s only one letter away from those wimberries that I picked over the summer.) It’s a great song, and one that reminds me of the simple Twizel house we lived in on Princes Street in Temuka in the winter of ’89, before moving to a place on Richard Pearse Drive. We had no TV, and made do with the radio that was tuned to either 93 Gold or Radio Caroline. We always got the results from races eight, nine and ten. The scratchings and quinellas and trifectas. Racing seemed a big part of Kiwi life back then. I’m pretty sure one of the bedrooms had a waterbed, which were all the rage in the late eighties over there. There was always the pungent smell of chimney smoke, which we never had in the UK.

I played tennis again yesterday. Once again it was singles with the guy of nearly sixty who is like the Duracell bunny. How does he never get tired? I won the first two games, then he won the next three. I edged back in front, and on his serve at 4-5 down, he led 30-0 but I levelled the game at 30-all. The next point was an exhausting long rally, which I won to bring up set point, but I hit long on both the next two points and he dominated the rest of the set. I think that long point ultimately cost me. I was soon in a deep hole at 5-7, 1-4, having lost seven games out of eight. I was struggling physically while he was as fresh as a daisy. I also couldn’t win the important points. He had a killer shot to my backhand corner that I found hard to combat, and he saved plenty of game points with it. Despite the fatigue and sweat, I clung on, and reached 4-4. At 30-all in the next game, I had him pinned to both sidelines before eventually winning the point ten shots after I thought I’d won it. But he played the next three points as if nothing had happened, winning them all. Quite extraordinary. He led 30-0 in game ten to move within two points from victory, but I won the next four points to break him. At 5-5 I held serve from 15-40, but then he held to love to force a tie-break. I won the shoot-out 7-4 and we finished all square, but I was left wondering how somebody of that age could be so fit. I saw that sometimes with the trip leaders on the day tramps I did around Wellington. Is it all in the genes?

Here are some pictures of abandoned Timișoara. There are ex-swimming pools dotted around the city. If you look closely you can see the name of Morărit CILT, an old flour mill.

A sunny afternoon along by the Bega
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Rooted to the spot

November 7, 2021 by 0 Comments

I’ve just booked my booster dose of the vaccine, which I’ll get in ten days’ time, precisely 182 days after I had my second dose. (You have to wait at least 180.) I clearly remember the sunny March morning when I got my first jab. It was Astra Zeneca, concocted by the good, not-profit-making guys from Oxford. I came out of there brimming with optimism. A shaft of light at the end of the tunnel. We’ll get over this, and soon. At that stage there was Alpha but not the super-transmissible Delta, and little did I know that my position – taking the sodding jab – was a minority one in the country I happened to be living in. By May, when I got my second dose, the picture was far darker. Last week I had three lessons with a girl who had just turned twelve and become eligible for the vaccine. On Monday she proudly displayed her arm to me over Skype. Any side effects? No, just a slightly sore arm, like the vast majority of people. That was great to see.

Yesterday I met up with the English couple in Dumbrăvița. I took my old bike – the one that had been nicked – and it was painfully slow going. The area they live in is only half-built and the roads are still unsealed (I use the Kiwi word there), so it was all muddy after the heavy rain we’d had. After being practically attacked by their large one-year-old mongrel dog with gangly legs, we chatted for a bit, and the guy played me some of Gnossienne on his fancy touch-sensitive keyboard with full-sized keys. He followed that up with a few bars of Genesis’s utterly mad über-prog-rock tune Firth of Fifth. On paper, it looked like a chaotic mess of key and time signature changes. He said he’d passed all eight piano grades as an adult. Then we went to a restaurant called La Ioji (the first letter of Ioji is an i, not an l) where we sat outside and talked. I had ciorbă, a thick soup, and a beer.

From there I went home (a struggle) and almost immediately went to tennis. It was singles against that same guy, and it didn’t go well for me at all, for the simple reason that my footwear was totally inadequate for the slippery surface, so I could hardly move without slipping and sliding all over the place. We’d booked the court for two hours. To begin with we just rallied, and I was content to do this for as long as possible. Then, the inevitable. “Let’s play a game.” But you know I can’t move, right? I eked out the first set 6-4 on my fifth set point, and extended my winning run to five games as I went 2-0 up in the second. From 3-1 though, I lost seven games on the spin, including a long game which gave him the second set. I was paralysed out there. When you’re almost rooted to the spot, the rest of your game suffers too. When time ran out, I was one game from defeat, at 6-4 3-6 2-5.

Then it was online poker time. I played five low buy-in tournaments with very little joy, although the mix of different games made life interesting. My bankroll is currently $1008. Two more tourneys in store for later today.

Buying property - Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

Making the news for all the wrong reasons

October 25, 2021 by 0 Comments

Romania’s Covid woes – excavators being brought to cemeteries to cope with the sheer weight of mortality – have made the news in New Zealand, which is saying something because Romania hardly ever makes the news anywhere. Covid is now killing one Romanian every three and a half minutes. Romanians are now getting vaccinated in much larger numbers, because of the increasingly severe restrictions that they face if they don’t. Far too late for this wave, but it will help in 2022. My parents are worried about me. They fear that all lines of communication could be cut in the event that I get whisked off to some Covid ward. Or corridor. Or car park.

I played tennis this afternoon. First I played singles with the guy of 60-ish, whom I’ve had close battles with until now, but this time I was up 6-0 5-0 when we were joined by a third player; we then played what they call American doubles. The singles match was bizarre because the score was more down to him than me. I really didn’t play that well in the first set. My forehand wasn’t doing what it was supposed to, though in the second set that started to click. I sometimes wonder about etiquette in such situations. Is it poor form not to let someone win at least one game? (To my mind, absolutely not, but I know others see things differently.) After the first set he was marvelling at the colours of the leaves on the big maple tree that overhangs the court, so I’m guessing he had no problem with me.

House hunting has taken a back seat. It involves meeting unknown people which isn’t particularly safe right now. That agent has stopped contacting me. Today I had a look at a place in Mehala, but only from the outside.

Living on the edge of a time zone has its oddities. We’re still on summer time until next Sunday morning, so right now it’s dark in the mornings until eight. There has been serious talk of EU countries ending their twice-yearly clock changes, though that has stalled, probably because of the Covid crisis. If Romania were to observe permanent summer time, it wouldn’t get light until 9:15 am in December in Timișoara. I like the long summer evenings here, so clock switching gives us the best of both worlds. I imagine it’s a minority position, but I’d choose to keep the time shifts.

Last night I had a marathon poker session, and a deep run in Omaha hi-lo, but only made a tiny profit from the four tournaments I played. My bankroll is in four figures for the first time, at $1001.

The two pictures above are from Parcul Regina Maria.

The last three pictures are from Mehala. The sign on the power pole is telling dog owners to clean up after their “quadrupeds”, or four-legged friends.