Family

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Poker

Edging back to normality

May 16, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Slowly but surely, we’re edging back to something resembling BC – before Covid. Today, for the first time in ages, we’re allowed to roam mask-free in open spaces, with the exception of markets, bus stops and the like. I’ll get my second AstraZeneca jab on Wednesday (I’m one of relatively few takers of that in Romania – for most people here it’s Pfizer or nothing) and after that I’ll see about taming the great rodent-like mop on the top of my head.

Today I had my weekly lesson with the young beginner couple. After that I was thinking I’d benefit hugely from daily lessons with beginners. Think of all the Romanian I’d get to speak. I still get confused, as evidenced by the lesson with the eleven-year-old girl on Thursday. She asked me to translate whole sentences, and she could see I was struggling. (She can laugh as me as much as she likes, but if she pronounces “pie” as pee, I’m not really allowed to return the favour. I guess I did laugh when that boy pronounced “yanking” as wanking; I just couldn’t help it.)

I finally got through to my aunt on the phone. She said she’d been suffering from a bout of depression, although she seemed bright when we had our chat. She’s a highly intelligent woman after all. But ever since the nineties, when her husband was still alive, she’s fallen deeper and deeper into a cycle, and has lacked any sort of willpower to try and break it. For me, that was what coming to Romania was all about. I had to do break the cycle, goddammit, or at least try. It’s sad that despite her considerable brainpower, she’s never even sought a way out.

No sign of a buyer yet for my parents’ house in Geraldine, and winter is on its way. Maybe my cousin was right. Who would want to part with bucketloads of cash just to live in Geraldine? Every second time we talk, Mum and Dad go on about Maori issues. I have little to say about the subject, but it seems things have clicked into another gear, and one my parents find uncomfortable, in the time I’ve been away. As an example, look at how Maori, or should I say te reo, now dominates Wellington City Council’s home page. What I would say is that the last thing New Zealand needs is to be a divided country. There’s generally been an impressive lack of division in NZ. That’s mainly why they pretty much kicked Covid into touch. They’d do well to keep it that way.

Poker. I had two goes at that those SCOOP Afterparty thingies this week, and didn’t get very far. I started OK in the PLO8 but I couldn’t flop anything and I made a mess of my bust-out hand. Then in the single draw I was extremely card dead to begin with, and did well to still have 80% of my stack by the first break. I had a bad table draw – regulars, hyper-aggressive players, and even professionals – and I was just gagging for a table move that never came. After the break I made some half-decent hands, and at one point Mason Pye, a young British guy who promotes mixed games on the streaming platform Twitch, moved to our table. He got short and I called his all-in as a slight favourite. If I’d won that hand, maybe I’d have been in business, but I didn’t, I then went card dead again, and the end wasn’t far away. The good news is that I avoided those late nights and I had some time to look through my hand histories and figure out where I might have ballsed up. In my last dozen tournaments I’ve only managed one small cash, but my bankroll can withstand that kind of run and far worse. I’m sitting on $624.

Family - Language teaching - Poker

V-signs

May 10, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had a good chat with my brother earlier today. We talked about his long-running course where he has to teach very scary army stuff and be assessed on his teaching ability, and then we chatted about old family photos. He sent me a picture from the VE Day 50th anniversary celebrations in 1995 (26 years ago yesterday, in fact), with our extended family, including my grandparents who’d been there. We were all giving a victory salute. I think that might have been the first time I got slightly drunk.

Thursday and Friday were a bit of a dead loss because I had heel pain which almost stopped me from walking. My shoes were to blame. I tried icing my heel but in the end I figured I just needed to rest it, and now it seems just about back to normal. I hope I can get back on the tennis court next weekend – the benefits of that are enormous.

Just before Orthodox Easter, a woman rang me asking me if I’d consider teaching at her language school. It sounded like the lesson times at the school would clash with my private lessons, but I thought there’d be no harm in meeting her, so we arranged a meeting. Then she called me to say she was going away for the long weekend, so could we meet on Tuesday, then I never heard back from her. That’s all pretty Romanian. When I arrived here I was offered a job at a language school, only for them to un-offer it to me just before I was due to start. Another very Romanian thing is that the new owners of my apartment said they’ll keep my rent the same until 1st May next year, after which they’ll put it up by 50%. Nothing much, just a slight increase. At least they’ve warned me. So that gives me a deadline to find somewhere else.

I’ve lost some students of late, so I’ve just put up a couple more online ads. I’ve also bumped my prices up, but not by 50%.

Poker. I’m going through a bit of a barren run. When that happens, I feel I don’t know anything anymore. How did I ever win? Last night I tried a new game called Big O, which is Omaha hi-lo with five cards instead of four. I first watched a stream from a live Big O game played in San Antonio last November, a few days after the election. Covid was raging in Texas then. Nine men, including the dealer, were huddled around a table, fingering chips and dollar bills that had been god knows where. OK, they were masked, but I wouldn’t have been within a mile of that table. I felt particularly sorry for the dealer who was just doing his job. I then found out that one of the players, a middle-aged bloke, has since died. I don’t know if it was Covid-related. My first go at Big O didn’t go too well – it played nothing like on the stream (people just wanted to gamble) and I was mostly card dead. In a rare bright spot, I had a decent run (and a small cash) in a standard four-card Omaha hi-lo game this morning. I plan to have a crack at a couple of big-field events in the next week, as part of the so-called SCOOP Afterparty. My bankroll is currently $635.

Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - Music - Poker

Years that end in one

April 19, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ll be 41 the day after tomorrow. Yikes. Ten years ago today I started that job in Wellington; I only just lived to tell the tale. Ten years before that, I was doing my year abroad in Lyon and Mum came to stay with me for three days. I seem to remember us getting through plenty of pizza and wine. I’d just had a skiing accident (I haven’t attempted skiing since) and I was hobbling around the city. Ten years before that, on my 11th birthday, I was again with Mum, this time a bit closer to home in Bedford. I was taking part in a tennis tournament, and it rained and hailed and even snowed, highly unusual for the time of year. The tennis still went ahead, and I remember I won two of my four matches, just missing out on qualifying for the next stage. When I came back (rather damp) I was greeted by my best friend who was a year older than me; he was getting me all excited about starting at my new school in September. I can’t easily go back a fourth ten years, but I’ve just been looking at picture of our garden from the day after we moved into our family home which was (at the time) totally unsuitable for kids. The grass is knee-high and my parents have been incinerating something in the middle of it. There is washing on the line, and Mum is carrying my baby brother in her arms. Mum has dated the photo exactly to 14/10/81; my brother was eleven weeks old.

Romania’s Covid numbers are still high, but they’re coming down fast; hopefully the effect of the vaccines is starting to kick in. It’s very real here though. A woman cancelled a lesson on Thursday because she’d picked up the virus. Another of my students got Covid several weeks ago but is still compromised – he’s always run down and can’t smell anything. Yesterday some of the tennis players were in shock when they learned of someone’s death from the disease. At some level (minor for me; utterly devastating for many others) this is affecting us all. It’s maddening because so much was preventable. I have day-by-day figures since the pandemic started, but for Romania as a whole and for Timiș, my local area (hence the graphs). The daily new cases in Timiș (population around 700,000) for each of the 30 days of last June were 00200 01000 01100 00111 00020 01003. We had about as much virus as New Zealand at that point and could have ring-fenced Timiș or something a bit wider. Everyone could have had a great summer in the park or at the pool or at the pub or any other P-word, but no, they had to go to Greece or Turkey or the Black Bloody Sea (couldn’t think of anywhere worse in the height of summer, not that I’ve ever been there). How many deaths worldwide have been caused by stupid unnecessary travel? Well, officially there have been three million deaths, so I’d say at least three million.

On the subject of cutting back on travel, I read quite a moving piece in the paper about a Welsh sheep farmer in his early seventies who has remained single all his life and has never been out of the valley. He even eats the same dinner every day. But he wants for nothing. I thought it was lovely, and runs counter to everything that we’re told, to want more, bigger, better, to have big ambitious goals, to even strive for happiness. Yes, we must achieve happiness. You can’t just be content anymore. Do people still even use the adjective content, other than in negative contexts like “I’ll have to be content with that”? I remember at a young age asking my grandmother (Dad’s mum) what the purpose of life was. She said to be content.

I’ve just been listening to Out of Time, the REM album, which came out in 1991 (of course, it ends in one). A great album, and one of the Youtube commenters said that Low, Near Wild Heaven and Endgame are an unbeatably beautiful back-to-back triplet of songs. I have to agree.

Three poker tournaments at the weekend. I failed to cash in any of them. I played a fixed badugi this evening – that’s a rarity, and I only managed it because tennis was washed out. I had a good, highly aggro player at my table who plays an absolute ton of all kinds of games and must be playing with a nice fat bankroll. I don’t like the way I played my bust-out hand – my opponent correctly broke and outdrew me, when I might have got him to cling on hopelessly to his hand if I’d played it differently. My bankroll is $505, and I’ll be playing two more SCOOP tourneys this week.

Family - Poker

The signs are there

April 13, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I spoke to my parents this morning. Yesterday they went to Timaru for my uncle Graeme’s 80th birthday celebration. He’s the father of my cousin who lives in Wellington. He’s suffered from a lung condition for decades and has also had prostate cancer. In 1999 another of my uncles – one of Mum’s older brothers – came to stay with us in the UK, and my parents asked him how Graeme was. In his typically vivid way of speaking, he replied: “He’s got one foot in the grave and another on a bloody banana skin!” Well he died in 2014 at age 70, from cancer of the oesophagus, while Graeme is still going.

My cousin had travelled down with her three sons to celebrate her dad’s big eight-oh. Dad was intrigued by the youngest boy, aged 12½. You know, I think he might have a problem. Apparently he was obsessed with the cat, and was totally uninterested in any of the people present, except when he gave Dad a big bear hug out of the blue. He didn’t really talk. Dad thought he might be autistic, and he could see shades of me in how he behaved. I know my cousin recently took him out of the expensive school that his elder brothers also went to, and she wouldn’t have done that without good reason. So much time has gone since I saw him face-to-face, so I haven’t seen him grow into a near-teen, but he was always different from his brothers who were high achievers right from the start. My cousin kept a spreadsheet of all the words they knew by the age of two: the eldest one had a sizeable vocabulary, only for the middle boy to surpass that by his second birthday. She didn’t bother with the youngest one, though, because he’d hardly picked up a single word. The one thing that does stand out for me is the time I saw him at football practice. He often sloped off to the side, uninterested in the game, the whole idea of competing in a team seemingly alien to him, just as it was to me at that age.

I really did have problems, but they were largely masked by my capability at school; as a little boy I was unusually capable at reading and maths. Throughout my teenage years and beyond, I sort of got by. Few friends to speak of, but I muddled along in my unobtrusive way. Unlike my brother, I wasn’t much trouble. (Because of him, I flew under the radar a bit.) My parents thought I’d “sort myself out eventually”, and on the surface I did. I got into a quality university, came out with a good degree, got a good job. None of it was particularly easy, but I managed it. I could fake it for just long enough to maybe get through a one-hour interview, but in the job itself I couldn’t fake it. I might be expected to go out for drinks on a Friday night, four hours or more in a packed bar, and I’d just be itching to escape. (Covid must be a godsend for some people.) Or, even harder, I’d need to build up relationships with colleagues over months and years. I survived, in the only way I knew how, by keeping a low profile, but trying to keep that going just about killed me.

My problems might have seemed small, but they have affected me hugely. My ability to earn money and live comfortably, my ability to have fun, my ability to find a partner and have a family, all massively compromised. I came up with my online name “plutoman” when I lived on Pluto Place (what a name), but for me it worked because I was always on the outside, and mostly irrelevant. (At the time, Pluto had just been downgraded from a planet to a lump.) I liked “plutoman” (anagram of “not a lump”, by the way) because the “man” ending has always been slightly amusing to me, and the word then has lots of those nice friendly letters in the middle of the alphabet.

Living in Romania has been a breath of fresh air. I’m no longer living a lie. In this evening’s lesson I could play a video, make faces and wave my arms about, and that was absolutely fine. I really hope my cousin, a super-high achiever herself, recognises her youngest boy’s condition, or at least looks into it (maybe he’ll grow out of it – who knows) and doesn’t try and push him into jobs or university degrees or anything that could make his life unnecessarily stressful.

I played another poker tournament – single draw – this morning. Barely a dozen hands into the tournament, my 3000 starting stack had shrivelled to 200-odd as I called a shove with a pat 98 only to be shown a 96. So that was that. But no, I built my tiny stack up to over 4000, only for that to whittle down, and in the end I was the victim of a suck-out (my pat 97 got outdrawn) and that really was that. There were a couple of spots where (in hindsight) I was too tight. So much of this game is knowing your opponents.

Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - New Zealand - Other sports - Poker

No Shangri-La for me, but at least I can stay

April 7, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

My apartment here in Timișoara has been sold. The agent told me on Monday. Luckily I can stay here, and I certainly want to for the time being. Then that evening I got a surprise knock on the door from the elderly couple on the sixth floor. They’d heard this place was for sale and were interested in buying it. I had to tell them that it had been sold hours earlier.

On Sunday I played tennis again with the smoker in his late sixties who coughs and spits his way through the game. We talked vaccines, as we all do right now, and I expected him to be one of Romania’s many anti-vaxers. He just fits the profile. But no, he’d been pfully Pfizered and was quite vocal about all the “idiots” who refuse the jab. I shouldn’t have been so quick to pigeonhole him. When he started smoking, probably half a century ago, practically all men in Romania smoked. And it’s really hard to give up!

I had a good chat with my cousin in Wellington on Monday. It’s funny dropping in on Virus-Free World. It sounds like some mythical land, a Shangri-La. They’re about to introduce a trans-Tasman bubble with Australia. Fingers crossed that doesn’t all blow up in their faces.

Last weekend the Boat Race took place. I didn’t watch it; I didn’t even know it was on. It was one of those things I watched as a little kid, hoping Cambridge would win, because I was born there and lived just down the road, and because I thought their duck-egg bluey-green colour was way cooler than Oxford’s boring dark blue. But Oxford always bloody won. Last Saturday’s race was interesting because Covid restrictions it took place on the Ouse at Ely, just around the corner from where I grew up, instead of on the Thames, so Cambridge had home advantage of sorts. And they won both the men’s and women’s races.

In my last post about everything becoming too big, I totally neglected to mention the Ever Given, the gargantuan quarter-mile-long cruise ship that was wedged in the Suez Canal for six days, blocking about 12% of all global freight. We’re bursting at the seams here.

I played a single draw poker tournament this morning, or at least attempted to. My connection to their server kept cutting out. It was hopeless. I only saw about dozen hands in the times I sporadically reconnected. After blinding way down and busting out, I contacted support asking what I could do to mitigate the problem (I had no internet issues other than with their server), and if they could refund my small buy-in. They got back to me pretty quickly and, to my surprise, refunded my buy-in as a “goodwill gesture”, though with a big dose of “this is your fault”. This didn’t happen to the others at your table, so you can’t blame us. It reminded me of the time I got a wisdom tooth taken out and was in agony during and after the extraction. The anaesthetic didn’t properly work, and I was up all night bleeding and in excruciating pain. When I went back to the dentist, whom one of my work colleagues accurately dubbed “the Indian Butcher”, he strongly suggested that it was my fault because my experience “doesn’t usually happen”. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to get a refund, but I don’t know how to prevent being disconnected again.

Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - Poker

Getting away from big

April 5, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s a sunny early April morning, though a little chilly for the time of year. It’s twelve days since I had the vaccine, so I’m over half-way from probably being protected from severe disease. I read that many in the UK (where vaccine take-up has been impressive) felt a sense of euphoria when they got the jab; it was the most exciting thing they’d done all year. I felt something similar: when I got out of the vaccination centre the sun was shining, spring was in the air, and a world of possibilities was maybe opening up again.

A week later, I had a similar experience. Last Wednesday morning, when I was completely free following a jam-packed work schedule the day before, I went to the immigration office armed with paperwork: the Article 50 form, an updated rental contract, confirmation of public health insurance, bank statements, and some other bits and pieces that I’ve forgotten. The guy who had previously been a bit of a twat was very nice and gave me the green light. He even complemented me on my Romanian. He said I’d need to wait five weeks for the wheels of bureaucracy in Bucharest to turn, after which I’ll receive a residency card of some sort. (I initially thought he said “three to five days”, not “thirty-five days”: my Romanian could still do with some improvement.) So that’s fantastic. But what to do I do next? Buy a place to live, what and where and when? My UK-based student said I should I buy a flat in a new apartment block, but those sterile hospitally new blocks (and the areas they’re located, and the kinds of people who live there) depress me, and the last thing I need is to live somewhere depressing, even if it’s a “good investment”.

The latest lockdown ended on Wednesday night, and that meant I could play tennis again. At the weekend I played twice. (One of the sessions I only managed because someone cancelled a lesson at the last minute.) My social life has been nonexistent seemingly forever, so it was good to get back out there, meeting people, exercising, speaking Romanian. It’s a lovely setting with (right now) white magnolias in bloom. Some of the other players follow all kinds of other sports, and one of them was giving live score updates from his phone. “It’s 25-17,” he said. Hmm, sounds like rugby. “Now it’s 25-18.” So it can’t be rugby. Turns out it was handball.

Last Monday a student and I talked about the pandemic and how it has thrown some of the problems of modern society into sharp relief. One of them is the tendency for everything to get bigger while at the same time less meaningful. Destination weddings that last five days, World Cups in bloody Qatar, kids’ sixth birthday parties where their whole class is invited, ever-expanding malls where you can blow big money on big crap. That morning I’d been to a supermarket so big that I couldn’t find a damn thing. Where are the sodding light bulbs in this place? My student even mentioned that apples have increased in size, and yes, the ones you buy in supermarkets are twice the size of those that grew on our trees when I was a kid, and have about 10% of the taste. One nice thing about my life and work in Romania has been escaping big; no more millions or billions or talk of market share.

Don’t get me wrong, big isn’t always bad. Big gives you economies of scale and more options. That’s why I play poker on PokerStars. They’re the biggest, so they offer games that their competitors don’t. Unfortunately I can’t play very often, so at 4:40 on Sunday morning I decided to do something dumb. I lay awake in bed. Hey, isn’t there a poker tournament starting about now? So I got up and played it. Two hours later, having built up a healthy stack at one stage, I was out in 17th place with the top 11 getting paid. Ugh. I slept for another two hours and got up at nine just in time for two more fruitless tournaments. I felt washed out for the rest of the day. I must stop doing that. I’m going through a bit of a barren patch; my bankroll is $456. This month there’s SCOOP, a big tournament series that normally takes place in May, but this year they’ve moved it forward a month to catch more people staying at home before the Covid situation improves. My only previous SCOOP tournament was eleven years ago and it went quite well, so on that basis I definitely want to give this year’s SCOOP a whirl.

I’m about to give my cousin in Wellington a call. Her eldest son has just started university in Canterbury (amazing how time flies) and he’s already found himself a girlfriend. Must be nice. For me, there’s no doubt about it, that first year was tough.

Coronavirus - Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Poker

Our only way out

March 29, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had no side effects at all from my much-maligned (totally unfairly) Covid jab. A slightly sore arm for a day, and that was it. I know others haven’t been quite so lucky, but c’mon people, get the damn vaccine. It’s our only chance of getting out of this.

My conversations with Mum and Dad revolve around when, where and how we can meet again. It’s already been ages, to the point where I’m struggling to piece together the timeline of what has happened since. I do know the dates, but my whole concept of time has been warped. Dad’s cancer, my trip to Bosnia, a few months which passed for normal, then Covid, the new normal. A little over two calendar years, but what’s that in lockdown years?

Today I felt quite angry. We could have eradicated this virus by now, but modern society – greed, entitlement, selfishness – hasn’t allowed us to. All over the world, apart from New Zealand, Vietnam, South Korea and one or two others, the wrong kinds of politicians have made the wrong kinds of decisions, and they still are.

Last week was my biggest for work in a while, with 36 hours of lessons, plus all the putting together of worksheets and what have you. When I’m locked down, I’m happy to take all the work I can get. Yesterday I had that 90-minute session with the young couple who are learning English from scratch, and it’s quite tiring having to speak a weird mixture of Romanian and English. One of the very nice kids I teach said he’ll be off to Egypt in a few weeks with his parents. Seriously, right now you can shove your pyramids up your arse. The bloke in the UK gave me a one-hour Youtube video of Romanian stand-up comedy to watch. That’s got to be one of the hardest things to understand in a foreign language. Shushushu zhuzhuzhu dududu. Ha ha ha ha ha! Um, I don’t get it, Toma.

Poker. I haven’t had much joy since I last reported. On Thursday I paid the price for my terrible passivity in a pot-limit badugi tournament. I was really kicking myself for failing to shovel chips into the pot. Today I had a similar spot and played much more aggressively. I got knocked out, but did the right thing I’m sure. My biggest problem continues to be how little I can play. My bankroll is $464.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Poker

A shot in the arm

March 19, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

To my surprise I’ve managed to book myself a Covid jab. That’s exciting, honestly. I’ll be getting it bright and early next Wednesday morning – I never expected it would be so soon – and yes, it’ll be the Astra Zeneca vaccine. My second jab will be eight weeks later. I’m not counting any chickens until I actually get the needle in my arm, because there’s still a chance Romania will suspend the AZ vaccine like about half of Europe has done so far, crazily if you ask me. One of my students didn’t react well to his first AZ jab, and in the meantime he’s picked up Covid, which he says is far less severe than his reaction to the vaccine. We then did some exercises from a book produced by Oxford University Press. These are the same guys who concocted your awful vaccine; I hope you don’t mind. Everyone has become a vaccine expert – a vaxpert? – seemingly overnight. In Romania the numbers continue to climb.

Mum and Dad are now official owners of property number five. It would be nice if they could offload their big place, and until then they won’t be able to relax. I look back at my grandparents and think how much simpler their lives were, and I dunno, are all these extra complications really worth it? When I spoke to them yesterday, there was a lot of excitement about the America’s Cup, which had completely passed me by. It’s not a sporting event that’s ever captivated me, with the one exception of the time we went to New Zealand in the summer of 1986-87 and the Kiwi boat KZ7 was racing against an American crew to the sounds of Rod Stewart’s I Am Sailing. Both KZ7 and Rod Stewart were national obsessions then.

My aunt called me on Sunday. We chatted for half an hour; we rarely make it that far. She talked about my brother’s ex-fiancée and what a bullet he dodged there. Then she admitted that she had a drink problem. That’s a start, but like her other problems, she’s never seriously tried to solve it.

I’ve had some great feedback from my lessons in the past week or so, and that does make me feel good. In two recent lessons I’ve had that lovely feeling of seeing someone “get it”: the difference between for and since, or when to use the present continuous instead of the present simple. Last night someone said he’d learnt as much in that one session as he would expect in five. One of my advanced-level students enjoys the variety of listening, speaking, reading and grammar activities we cover.

Poker. On Monday evening I made a quick $25 from a cash game (nice), then decided I’d play a bounty tournament which started at 9:42. Normally it kicks off at 10:42, but the clocks had gone forward in the US. I was lesson-free the next morning, so I thought I’d give it a go. Big mistake. I was finally eliminated at 2:08 in the morning, finishing third for a $28 profit. As almost always, I did a bad job of collecting bounties. It’s not like I didn’t try. With four left, I got it all in as a 57% favourite with the short stack who had a hefty $20 bounty. My hand didn’t hold up, someone else soon got his bounty instead of me, and I was out almost immediately afterwards. The next day I was a complete wreck and had a terrible headache. I just can’t do late nights anymore; I’m getting old. My bankroll is now $489.

The crappy weather continues. This morning’s sleet turned to rain which hasn’t let up all day.

Coronavirus - Family - Other sports - Poker

The nightmare of normal

March 15, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today Mum and Dad will have got the keys to their latest property. They’re quite stressed at the moment with trying to sell their current place as they head into autumn. Mum seems to spend half her waking hours dusting or vacuuming, in case somebody shows up out of the blue. They feel about as locked down as I am.

At the weekend I watched John Campbell’s fantastic video on the impacts of Covid on mental health: the depression and anxiety caused by all that worry and isolation. But what he didn’t mention were the anti-effects. If I had an office job and had been able to work from home for a year in relative peace, how would I cope with all those people again? With extreme difficulty, I’m sure. This was the case for me in 2011. I quit my insurance job at the end of 2009. For the next 15 months I travelled, read, played online poker, and did temporary work which I enjoyed because I never had to involve myself in all the crap. Then (and I still can’t believe it happened) I got sucked back into the corporate world. In my first few weeks there I was like a fish out of water. Possum in the headlights doesn’t begin to cover it.

Yesterday I heard that Murray Walker, the Formula 1 commentator, had died at the age of 97. This came as a surprise to me, because I thought he was already dead. Somebody quipped that Walker spoke like a man whose trousers were on fire, and that was why he was so memorable, even for someone like me who was mostly uninterested in motor racing. He voice was cars zooming around a track on a Sunday afternoon. These household-name sports commentators of my childhood and early adulthood are rapidly becoming history. Peter Alliss – it’s hard to imagine the 72nd hole of the Open championship without him – died in December aged 89. Then there’s Richie Benaud, voice of the Ashes, and Sid Waddell, voice of darts. Going further back, there’s Bill McLaren (rugby – again, what a voice), Peter O’Sullevan (horse racing, another sport I didn’t care about but was hard to avoid), Ted Lowe (snooker), Brian Johnston (cricket again), and Dan Maskell (tennis, “Oh, I say”). All gone. Dodgers baseball fans had Vin Scully, who commentated on their games, with extraordinary wit, for sixty-seven seasons until 2016. At 93, he is still with us. But these voices, beamed into our living rooms and onto our car radios seemingly since time immemorial, won’t be replaced. They’re gone for ever, as (for me) has sport itself, largely. I think back to England’s 1998 cricket tour of the Caribbean and how exotic and far away those islands seemed as I listened to ball-by-ball commentary on long-wave radio. As money has flooded top-level sport, that remoteness, that wonder, it’s all gone.

Four more poker tournaments at the weekend. Saturday evening’s fixed badugi went nowhere, then by Sunday the US had moved to summer time, meaning all the day’s tournaments kicked off an hour earlier. (They’ll be back to normal in two weeks, when we too put our clocks forward.) The early starts reduced the fields by about 20%. I had a good run in the single draw, picking up some monster hands to amass a big stack, but I couldn’t make much headway at the final table. I had a big stack to my left who kept bombing after the draw and I never made a hand I felt I could call (or check-raise) with. Being out of position in single draw is tough. I was out in fourth for a $21 profit. At the same time I made a deep run in the pot-limit badugi – being in contention in two tournaments simultaneously is fun when it happens – but though I finished sixth I only made $7 because I once again did a terrible job of picking up bounties. I had a particularly unlucky bust-out hand, but that happens. Then I ran badly once more in last night’s fixed badugi, winning four of the 78 hands I played. My bankroll is $436.

We generally get very nice weather in Timișoara – that could be another reason why it’s become my happy place – but right now it’s grey and wet and miserable.

Finally, I’ve just found out about this new website – radio.garden – which lets you tune in to any radio station in the world just by clicking on a map. You can spend hours on it.

Family - Life :)

Growing old quickly

March 7, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Not a whole lot to report. I’ve had tech issues with my laptop which I mentioned last time. Both the power port and the charger itself were playing up, and for a while I was using books to jam the charger into place, knowing it could still come loose at any second in the middle of a lesson, which would have meant disaster. I took delivery of a new charger yesterday, so I can breathe again.

The subject of tech came up last night with a student. He got me to sign up to Revolut, a payment app which is all the rage here. He could tell that I didn’t understand how it worked, and neither did I particularly care, and he said “you’re so old-fashioned”. Well I guess I am. I’m also nearly ten years older than him. My phone is vital to me, but outside calling and texting it doesn’t get much use, especially in Covid world where I’m inside the vast majority of the time. Imagine writing this blog post on my phone with its tiny touch screen. Ugh. I’m constantly making worksheets for my students or looking at data or replaying poker hands, stuff that’s either horrible or impossible on my phone. I still use paper dictionaries (they’re more informative than online ones and, for me, just as fast) and I keep records of all my lessons in an A4 notebook. Whatever. This guy then asked me to confirm my year of birth for ID purposes. I said 1952 but I’m not sure he got the joke. He then pestered me about the money from my apartment sale. You can’t just leave it in a bank, yada yada yada. I’ve had it for ten days. Leave me alone. He doesn’t just think I’m old-fashioned; he thinks I’m a gigantic failure in life, in all matters unrelated to the English language.

Last weekend I had a fright when I saw Mum on FaceTime. You look like your mother. The stress of moving money around the world while attempting to sell their huge house seemed to have aged her ten years. Right now they have five properties. Just imagine. Dad isn’t immune from stress either, and he’s untrusting of online payments and the internet in general. As for cell phones, he doesn’t even have one. Going into autumn they might struggle to shift their high-end property; I hope that doesn’t pile on the stress.

I recently watched a three-part documentary on Netflix called Don’t F**k with Cats (the asterisks are in the name). Gruesome and deeply disturbing.

Dad sent me some pictures of drawings and scribbles I did when I was five. I think I was a little messed up even then.

In an hour I’ll step onto the tennis court for the first time in three months. I’m in serious need of the exercise.