Coronavirus

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Poker

All jabbed up

May 21, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I got my second shot of Astra Zeneca on Wednesday morning. There were far fewer people there than the first time around. I think a lot of people became skittish about Astra Zeneca in March and April, and now Romanians who have taken Pfizer outnumber the AZ takers by eight to one. Because it was so quiet, I was done and dusted in no time. I entered the building at eight, the needle was in my arm at 8:10 – a young man administered my jab this time – and then at 8:25 my name was called and I could go. It’s always a bit funny having my distinctly English name called among all the Ciobanus and Popescus. They also called me by my middle name rather than my first name; that happens quite often and I don’t mind it – I like my middle name.

I was vaccinated in the youth centre, which is right next to the stadium where Poli Timișoara (the local football team) play, and just across the road from the main hospital. It’s also right next to the outdoor market which is full of local produce and is open on Wednesdays and Saturdays, so that was convenient. In the same area is a sports centre with several clay tennis courts, and next to that is an abandoned piece of land which was supposed to be a university building but never happened. I know this because there’s an old peeling sign there, dated February 2000 (I was in my second year of university then). They got as far as putting in the steel rods, but then they presumably ran out of money. Now it’s a wild area, full of trees and birds and the intermittent ribbit of frogs.

After my first jab I didn’t feel any side effects apart from a bit of a sore arm. This time was different. On Wednesday night I shivered in bed so I put on an extra duvet and of course I was soon sweating. I didn’t sleep well. Yesterday evening I had a slight temperature again and suddenly felt very tired. Thankfully I had a good sleep last night and now everything is back to normal. My symptoms were all pretty standard and a good indication that the vaccine was doing its job.

Four more poker tournaments since I last wrote, with little success. On Tuesday I made good starts to all three but could only scrape a min cash in the PLO8. Last night I managed to bust out of the fixed badugi after just 30 hands without winning any of them. That’s a new record. My laptop crashed in the middle, so I didn’t want to rebuy just in case it happened again. My bankroll is $699.

I was able to play last night because my 19-year-old student has decided to give up his lessons with me. Honestly I’m OK with that – he was never the easiest to teach – but I have lost a few people lately and it might be hard to get replacements with summer on the horizon.

The newly renovated Lloyd building in the square
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.

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.

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

Bikeless, and the joys of tennis

April 12, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had a bit of a surprise on Wednesday, just after I wrote my last blog post. My bike was no more. It had been nicked. It was locked to the banister leading to the basement – not in my flat where the fumes from the glue on one of the tyres made me sick – but no matter, my cheap bike was gone. After that I walked many, many miles, to Decathlon (50 minutes’ walk from here), the police station (45 minutes; almost certainly a waste of time, but I got to practise my Romanian there) and the market at Mehala (45 minutes). Add all those times together, then double that. I didn’t find a suitable bike at either Decathlon or the market, which is where I picked up both that bike and my previous one. So I’m bikeless, which is a pain. I’m also pretty tired; I played a fair few sets of tennis over the weekend.

We’ve had a lovely weekend of spring weather, but after another fine day forecast for tomorrow, it’s predicted to turn to custard (as they say in Shangri-La) in a big way. I played tennis on both days, and today was really quite wonderful. In a flashback to pre-smartphone world, people on the sidelines were watching other people play, commenting, applauding. Bravo, Viorica. It was like being back at Belmont, circa oh-five. Somebody was following a handball game on his phone, but that’s OK. I played my first set for several months with Petrică. Last year he wanted to hit any and every ball; he was a pain to play with, honestly. Since then he’s had Covid, and he definitely isn’t the same man. In today’s set I took more than my share of shots. I served the first game, which we won after seven deuces. We then proceeded to lose the set 6-1, without ever getting to deuce again. I didn’t exactly set the world alight with my play either; I hit so many forehands out over the baseline. As it happened, that marathon first game wasn’t the longest I was involved in. In a mixed set, my partner served a game that went ten deuces, plus or minus one. The highlight of the early evening might have been Domnul Sfâra, who is probably 86 now. He just watched; it was great to see him again.

On Thursday morning I got some encouragement from my 13-year-old student. To illustrate a key difference between English and Romanian, I gave him an example of a Romanian sentence, adding “I hope I’ve got that right”. He said that of course it’s right, and I definitely shouldn’t be worrying about my Romanian. That was nice coming from him; I expect someone of that age to be more honest than somebody older.

Poker. I’ve been struggling to play much, but I got in four tournaments today. The first was Omaha hi-lo. I had a reasonable run but was out in 52nd, with the top 35 paying. Next was single draw (well, they overlapped). I was fortunate to chip up as I called my opponent’s shove with a nut draw and hit my monster to beat his strong hand. Then, very briefly, I had a big stack. I lost almost half of it when my 50th-best hand clashed with my opponent’s 49th, then soon after I made a terrible fold. Against the same aggressive opponent and with a bounty in play it was just awful. I thought I was dead and buried (and deservedly so) after that, but I got a reprieve when someone seemed to misread their hand. I made the final table where I was out in sixth. Pot-limit badugi next (again they overlapped), a less dramatic tournament but a similar result as I finished seventh. A bit disappointing not to hit one of the top prizes, but those little wins come in handy. After tennis I tried a tiny-buy-in satellite to tonight’s Omaha hi-lo SCOOP. I doubled up on only the second hand as I flopped quad kings, but it was all downhill from there. Having a maniac on my left most of the time didn’t help. My bankroll is $484.

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

My first shot

March 25, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had my first Astra Zeneca jab this morning at eight (well it was half-eight when it actually went into my deltoid), and right now I’m feeling fine. I was a tad nervous, not because of the needle or any potential side effects from the vaccine, but because of all the admin and forms and other associated faff which tends to stress me out. After leaving home I realised I’d forgotten to fill in the declaration form (we’re still in lockdown, so you need that every time you go out the door) so I had to rush back for that. When I got there just before eight, a queue of 20 or so people had formed outside. Then we all piled in. Though their system worked well, they did a really bad job of ensuring that we didn’t ironically contract the virus moments before being vaccinated. Just ugh. I had to declare on a form that I was taking antidepressants, then as soon as I produced my passport they started speaking to me in English. I got things like “you move there”. Please speak Romanian, I said. The woman who gave me the jab seemed lovely. She said she’d worked in America. Then I sat around for 10 or 15 minutes before getting my certificate. Congratulations, you’re vaccinated. It’ll take three weeks before I get protection, then I go back for my second dose on 19th May.

Our lockdown has just been extended for a second time. It was due to end last Sunday, and on Saturday the local council voted not to extend it (or rather, they didn’t get enough of a majority to prolong it). But Bucharest stepped in and sanity prevailed: we got a three-day extension. Today they’ve confirmed that a further seven days will be added. I use the word lockdown, but it’s nothing like the lovely tranquillity of one year ago. We sometimes get a blissful lull in traffic, but most of the time there’s a steady flow. It is extremely quiet in the late evening though. In the meantime there have been anti-lockdown protests right in front of my window. Lots of noise and flag-waving, and on one occasion someone burned a mask, but the turnout has never got above 150. I do find the flag business weird. Show patriotism by letting your fellow citizens die.

No lack of work at the moment. Five lessons on Monday and six yesterday. I’m grateful for an easier day today (just two lessons). It’s been a beautiful spring day. I took this snap from the rose garden this afternoon. If you look closely you can even see the moon.

Coronavirus - Language learning - Language teaching - Poker

Face-to-face? Are you kidding? And Romanian Commentary 13

March 22, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Someone’s just called me asking for a lesson on behalf of her husband. I managed to find a space in my diary on Thursday evening, and I was all set to pencil it in, but then she asked for my address. Er, Skype? Zoom? No, your actual physical address. We want face-to-face here. Fa-fa-face-to-face? No! No no no no no. Not until at least mid-April, three weeks after my first jab. I’m guessing these people might not be all that into jabs and stuff.

I’m starting to beef up my work volume again. Last week I got 30½ hours, and this week should easily surpass that (but you never know; sometimes it just rains cancellations). Some of my lessons are dead easy and don’t remotely feel like work, but others are a test of mettle. I recently started with a married couple who have a nine-letter, seven-vowel surname, and they want to learn from scratch. Hello, how are you, my name is, would you like a vowel? I have to speak a lot of Romanian in these lessons, and although I get by, I still make mistakes and get tongue-tied. For instance, last weekend I couldn’t say “he likes to run” correctly in Romanian. Sounds a simple sentence, doesn’t it? The verb to run is a alerga in Romanian (well, there’s also a fugi, but that’s more like “to run away”). Here’s how you conjugate a alerga in the present:

eu alerg – I run
tu alergi – you run
el/ea aleargă – he/she/it runs (notice the extra a before the r)
noi alergăm – we run
voi alergați – you run (more than one person)
ei/ele aleargă – they run

That’s great, but with sentences such as “he likes to run” we need to use the subjunctive, and for the third person (he/she/it or they) this is different from the normal form of the verb. The form I needed was alerge, not aleargă. The full correct sentence is Îi place să alerge. (The first word of that sentence, if you’re wondering, is an i with a hat followed by an i without a hat.)

By contrast, the very common verb a merge means to go, and it’s conjugated like this in the present:

eu merg – I go
tu mergi – you go
el/ea merge – he/she/it goes
noi mergem – we go
voi mergeți – you go (more than one person)
ei/ele merg – they go

If I wanted to say “he likes to go”, I’d once again need the subjunctive, and this time it would be Îi place să meargă. So the subjunctive ending of “to go” is just like the normal ending of “to run”, and vice-versa. I understand this, but I still get tripped up from time to time.

Another problem I have is stress. Not that kind of stress, but the way words are accented. Just like in English, it isn’t always obvious which part of a word gets the emphasis. I managed to confuse a kid this morning when I said “martor” (meaning “witness”) with the stress at the end, when it should be at the beginning. Unless it’s a word I use a lot, I often find myself guessing.

Poker. My biggest problem is how little I’m able to play. I haven’t run very hot since I last posted. In one tournament my laptop crashed five times – hopefully I’ve solved that problem. My bankroll is $470.

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.