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Life :) - Poker - Tennis

Tourists

October 3, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

As we hit October and the leaves turn, I miss the view I had from my city-centre window even more. This morning I spoke to Mum and Dad. Only 18 days till I see them in the UK. They’ve now booked their flights to and from Romania; they’ll be here from 5th to 10th November. I wish they could have come for longer. We discussed the war in Ukraine, the stampede at a football match in Indonesia that killed 125 people, and how the UK seems to have slammed into reverse.

It’s been an interesting day. Yesterday I bumped into Mark (the guy who teaches at British School) as he was getting winter tyres put on his car. We agreed to catch up today. He heard about a guided tour of the Fabric area of Timișoara, where I happen to live now, taking place this afternoon. We had to sign up; I gave the tour people my phone number and said there’d be two people coming. Mark trekked over to my neck of the woods, and some other teachers from British School also made the trip. Not for the tour, but just for drinks. All nice people, from what I could tell. One of them, a smoker, had run a marathon – 42-point-something kilometres – in under four hours that morning. Mind-boggling for me. Mark then decided he’d rather stay at the bar than bother with the tour that was scheduled to take 2½ hours in a language he knew about a dozen words of. Then my phone rang. It was the tour guide. Why aren’t you here? Sorry mate, we’ve kind of got to do this. So the two of us joined the group. The guide could speak English, but conducted the tour in Romanian, so I interpreted for Mark, probably pretty badly because I got lost at times myself. We learnt about the large Jewish contingent that lived in the area, and how nationalities weren’t really a thing 200-odd years ago in Timișoara – your religion basically was your nationality. The guide stopped at buildings along the way – the CEO of the wool factory lived in this one, an internationally renowned violinist lived in that one – sometimes pointing out architectural details that I had missed. Then Mark had had enough so we paid the guide and left.

By that point it was just about time for me to go to tennis anyway. There was a new guy this evening – a teenager who had just taken up the game. Although his forehand was good considering his lack of experience, he was struggling to get any sort of serve into play. We increased his number of serves allowed per point from two to infinity, and still he struggled. Hardly surprising, really. You either need a coach or to practise yourself with a bucketload of balls. A game situation with everyone watching, even if it’s a casual game, is the worst of all.

Hopefully this week I can finalise my new-look teaching room, or close to it. I may even put some pictures of it on here.

I played in four poker tournaments last night. I cashed in three despite making bad starts to all of them, in one case losing 97% of my initial stack (!), but couldn’t convert my big comebacks into big finishes and only made a modest profit. My bankroll is $1015.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Poker - Tennis - The UK - Travel: Romania

An active day

September 26, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s been an active day for me: 19 km on my bike, a spot of hiking, and some tennis. At 9am I met my teacher friend on the outer edge of Dumbrăvița, then I went with him and his dog to Nădrag, just over an hour’s drive away. There we walked along a track to the top of a ridge, then descended quite steeply until we followed a stream back to the car. That all got my heart rate up, and as always, my Doc Martens did the business. This evening’s tennis was doubles. I partnered a woman I first met at yesterday’s session. She’s a decent player. Three years older than me, she lost her 68-year-old father to Covid in 2021. She said he had nothing wrong with him before he was struck down by the disease. I wanted to ask her if he’d been vaccinated, but thought better of it. There are trees overhanging two corners of the court we play on. Normally they don’t cause a problem, but occasionally a high ball will bring them into play. Tonight I had to practically thread a backhand through the branches, golf style.

Yesterday I had two English lessons and one maths. In the maths lesson I went off on a slight tangent (not literally; trig is still to come) when I explained that three 8-inch pizzas for the same price as a 16-inch pizza is a bad deal. In one of my English lessons we finished off one of those skyscraper games, though this time a longer version involving international buildings instead of only American ones. I had a huge lead from our first session, but ended up winning only 36-33 and could easily have lost. That comebacks are possible is a good sign for the game. It still needs the odd tweak here and there, and a little something extra which I haven’t figured out yet.

I spoke to my brother again last night. There’s only so much you can say about nappies. Both he and his wife were tired. There are a lot of things I hadn’t thought about. When does the colour of a baby’s eyes become fixed? Today I wondered whether my nephew will be left-handed; both his parents are, as is his paternal grandfather. (I’m right-handed, but play tennis left-handed. Just like Rafael Nadal.)

It seems the UK has returned to some sort of normal after a fortnight of wall-to-wall royalty. The Queen was amazing woman without doubt, but some of the response was beyond ridiculous. Cancelling hospital appointments because they clashed with the funeral? Utterly ludicrous. Then there was the clampdown on anti-monarchy protests. An expression of a totally legitimate point of view. As I said a couple of posts ago, it’s not only woke that’s gone mad.

I had a crappy poker session on Friday night. Knowing that I had to get up the next morning didn’t help my decision-making; perhaps I shouldn’t have played at all. My bankroll is currently $999; it was $1026 at the start of the month.

Family - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

Tiresome talk

September 19, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I played tennis tonight. We’d booked the court till eight, and it was getting pretty dark by then. Seeing the crows fly overhead made me miss living in that part of town. Where I am now is fine, but being in the centre was quite magical, especially at the beginning.

Yesterday morning I had a Skype conversation with my parents before cycling to Dumbrăvița for my lessons. What started out as a pleasant chat about the little one morphed into anti-woke diatribe by Dad. I find the whole thing, on both sides, extremely tiresome. I’m not woke in the slightest and I find some of the newfangled linguistic innovations jarring to say the least, but it isn’t something I can get worked up about. Sure, it all seems a little odd to me, and I imagine it seems a great deal odder to someone 30 years older than me, but that doesn’t make it wrong. Dad was likening the woke movement to flat-earth or anti-vax, which is a false equivalence because those fly in the face of well-established facts. Being requested to call someone “they” instead of “he” or “she” might annoy you; being opposed to vaccines actively kills people. What I find interesting is the most vehemently anti-woke people are those least affected. It’s like my parents’ regular complaints about all the Maori words on the TV and radio. Perhaps it has gone too far – I don’t live in NZ anymore so I don’t really know – but Mum doesn’t meet a Maori from one year to the next, and the last time I checked she didn’t even know what a koha was.

Something Mum complained of yesterday was the majority having to “kowtow” to minorities. Well Mum, being in the majority does give you significant inbuilt advantages which you’ve probably never even taken the time to consider, and giving some of that back once in a while to those less fortunate seems pretty reasonable to me. These sorts of discussions aren’t easy for me – although I get on well with my parents, we don’t really inhabit the same world. (My brother’s world is closer, so he probably doesn’t have the same issues.) My parents are about to buy a brand new electric car. Dad recently sold a painting for something close to what I’ll spend on my next car if I buy one. We’re orders of magnitude apart. (On the subject of advantages, as an immigrant to Romania from a richer country, I have certain privileges here. It’s important to be aware of them.)

I hope I can get back to baby talk in my next conversation with Mum and Dad. Covid was great for my relationship with them, when I look back. It affected everybody, and we were in agreement on masks, vaccines, the lot.

I took second place in a poker tournament earlier today. I was lucky to get that far, but having reached the heads-up stage it’s a bit of a mystery how I didn’t win. I’m still down a little for September, which has been a torrid month. I got absolutely nowhere in any of the three WCOOP tournaments I played.

Poker - Politics - Tennis - Travel: Romania

The intrigue awaits

September 7, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I haven’t really been following the US Open, but early this morning I saw the end of the quarter-final betwen Nick Kyrgios and Karen Khachanov. Kyrgios dominated the fourth-set tie-break to take the match into a rip-roaring fifth – these two players don’t mess around – but he dropped serve in the opening game of the decider after playing a tweener, and Khachanov was able to cling onto his service games despite a low first-serve percentage. The Russian, who was allowed the compete under a neutral flag, won the final set 6-4 to make the semis of a grand slam for the first time. The match finished at 1am local time. With Nadal and Medvedev out, there will be a new men’s grand slam champion no matter who wins. Kyrgios said he was devastated at losing; the draw had really opened up for him.

I didn’t have a great time at the virtual poker tables last night. I bombed out of the WCOOP single draw after an hour and a quarter. I’d been hovering at or just above my starting stack for a while, but then called a huge bet, which I probably should have folded, with my big but sub-monster hand. I was shown 85432, the fifth-best hand in the game. That all but ended my participation. My saving grace was that I’d qualified via a satellite, so it only cost me a dollar or so. I’ll hopefully try my hand at a couple more of these WCOOP thingies.

As I mentioned last time, Britain now has a new prime minister. It’s surely a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire. In Boris Johnson’s leaving speech he compared himself to Roman or Greek gods, one or the other. It was all about him. He’s an egomaniac, pure and simple. He became more and more Trump-like during his time in office. Like Trump he was desperate for the power but had no interest in using it in a positive way, and he seemed totally devoid of empathy. And just like Trump, we might not have seen the last of him. But now, Liz Truss. Seriously. She appears to know bugger all about anything, and has already filled her cabinet with sycophants who know the same amount – a bunch of I’m-all-right-Jack climate-change deniers. A torrid winter is around the corner, and Britain will probably muddle through it and come out the other end in one piece, but it will be despite the country’s politicians, not because of them. I hope this lot get dumped out at the next election.

I’ll be off into the mountains, or sort of, just after lunchtime. Călin, one of the friends of the tennis crew – he works as a taxi driver – will pick me up. The drive will take about three hours. I’ll be staying three nights in a village called Blăjeni, near Brad. All the pictures I see of the area look extremely bucolic and beautiful. I’ve been given a list of food not to bring; yesterday I made a plum crumble and a pizza to take along. There are a load of unknowns around cooking and eating and sleeping and whatnot, but that all adds to the intrigue, I suppose.

Family - Life :) - Poker - Tennis - The UK

What’s in a name?

September 5, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Any day now I’ll be an uncle. They’re keeping everything a surprise. Even on the subject of names, I’ve heard nary a whisper. That strikes me as a little odd, because names matter. They’re part of one’s identity. Take, for instance, Nina Nannar, one of the reporters on the local news when I was at university. She was teased mercilessly at school over her name (what were her parents thinking?) but when she got married she found that her identity was so wrapped up in her name that she kept the Nannar! My brother also has alliterative names, and though they don’t make it to anything like Nina’s level, they give his name a don’t-mess-with-me simplicity. As for my name, I lack double initials, but my first and last names are close alphabetically, so I know my place (so to speak) even when the sorting is done by first name, as seemed to be common in my employee days. My full first name has a high letter count. When I was little I thought it was great (Look! I can write my whole name!), but later all those letters just became a pain. In Romania, middle names garner a bit more attention, so all my ID cards and bank cards and various bits of paper have my (much shorter) middle name on them too. Sometimes I wish that could have been my first name instead. But in truth my name is fine; my parents chose well.

I had a chat to my brother last night. He was pretty peeved by our parents’ lack of enthusiasm at their upcoming trip. “If they’re only going to spend a few days with us, what’s the point? It’s been four years. I don’t think they give a shit, honestly.” I’m more inclined than him to give them the benefit of the doubt. They aren’t young anymore, and Dad has been spooked by Covid. My brother is still bitter about my parents emigrating to New Zealand in the first place, and that’s something I don’t really get. We were grown men (23 and 22) by that stage. My brother had even been to Iraq. They could do what they liked. And Mum’s teaching at that same school was making her stressed and unhappy. Another ten years of that and I’d dread to think.

My teaching room now has yellow walls. There is no Resene in Romania which is just as well. That must be one of the biggest rip-offs in NZ. Their stores have play areas to encourage customers to browse even longer at vastly overpriced tins of paint on shelves where they pretty much spam you with eleven near-identical hues of ochre called Omaha Sands or some other crap. And several hundred dollars later, you’re out the door, ready to paint the dream. Anyway, there were two only yellows available to me, an insipid one and a bright one. I went for the bright one, fearing it would be sort of tennis-ball shade, but it’s about what I was aiming for, so that’s nice. It took a while, though.

Tennis. Only one session this weekend because the courts were soaking on Saturday following a heavy downpour. We started a bit earlier though, so we got two hours in before the light faded. Last weekend was interesting; there was a woman who lives in Sydney with her boyfriend and was back for a short time in her native Romania. I played with her against Domnul Sfâra, who isn’t far off ninety (!), and a teenage girl. My partner hadn’t played much. In a slightly comedic set we got to 4-4, at which point Domnul Sfâra asked if we could play a tie-break. We did, and when we reached 8-8 the old man asked to come off the court. We persuaded him to stay for what might have only been two more points, and we eventually lost the tie-break 11-9. Another funny thing (in a different set): that teenage girl managed to a serve four aces in a single 16-point game.

I’m going away the day after tomorrow. It’ll be somewhere near Brad. I’ve had to cancel and rearrange lessons, which is always a pain, but seeing some new scenery and getting to speak Romanian for three days straight will make up for that.

Poker. I played some tournaments on Friday and Saturday and got absolutely nowhere. Tomorrow I’ll have a go at the $11 WCOOP single draw. The structure could be better, but I’ll try my best in what probably won’t be a star-studded field.

In the UK, I’ve just heard that Liz Truss will be the new prime minister. Man the lifeboats.

Language teaching - Life :) - Poker

See you later, summer

September 1, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today is the last day of a very hot summer and the 25th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death, which Mum and I heard about over the PA on a Malaysia Airlines flight just before we landed in Kuala Lumpur. We were on the way home to England after spending four weeks in New Zealand. For the next week at least – Diana Week – it was as if nothing else mattered; millions must have descended on London on the day of the funeral. I also remember the black humour. What’s the difference between a Skoda and a Mercedes? Diana wouldn’t be seen dead in a Skoda.

I’ve now started the process of zhoozhing up (“zhoozh” is one of those not-really-spellable words) my teaching room. I put the primer on today, and tomorrow I’ll lather on the first coat of yellow, with the second following on Friday. It might end up being a dayglo disaster, for all I know. At least the huge mirror, that takes up almost an entire wall, will break up the block of colour somewhat, and then there will be bookshelves and eventually all kinds of maps and posters covering the walls. My current paucity of face-to-face lessons enables me to do this. I have picked up some new students, but others have dropped off. Tomorrow I do have four lessons scheduled, but three of them are online with the other in Dumbrăvița.

I had a good poker session at the weekend, cashing in all three tournaments I played, giving me a $43 profit. Easily my biggest score came in single draw where I was lucky enough to win a couple of flips against a player who went all in constantly, knocking him out in third place, and I then came through a long heads-up session to win the tournament. The WCOOP (World Championship of Online Poker) is coming up, and I hope to play at least three events in that. When that is done and dusted, maybe I’ll knock the whole thing on the head like I did ten years ago.

One of the 15-year-old boys I teach has just got back from his family trip to Zanzibar. It’s part of Tanzania, which is extremely poor. His mother has sent me some of the more incredible holiday photos I’ve ever seen, with such beauty and poverty at the same time. She managed to somehow get inside a dirt-floored classroom, which accommodates nearly 100 pupils at a time; she sent me a picture of the blackboard from this class filled with all the types of the English conditional.

I was glad that the Artemis 1 launch got postponed because I’d lost track of time and would have missed it. It’s now scheduled for 9:17 pm (my time) on Saturday.

I don’t do Wordle very much now, but this was my stripy attempt at yesterday’s:

Family - Films - Poker - Travel: Europe

About to push off

July 25, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Tomorrow is my last day before I go away. It looks like being a complicated, tiring day. Six lessons, interspersed by stuff that I would like to have done on Friday or yesterday when the city simmered in 40-plus-degree heat. I’ve ordered some made-in-Romania baby shoes (gender-neutral-ish, I hope) as a present for my brother and sister-in-law who will pick me up from Stansted, but who knows if they’ll be delivered tomorrow and whether I’ll be home at the time they deliver them. If not, I’ll have to find some other present and save the shoes for when I go over again in October, assuming I can do that.

Yesterday I had a long Zoom chat with my cousin in Wellington. She paints a very different picture of New Zealand from the one I get from my parents. None of the anti-Maori diatribes. Her eldest son is now in his second year at Canterbury. Number two can’t be far behind.

Poker. After going 42 tournaments without a top-three finish, this weekend I got the whole set of medal positions in just five attempts, for a profit of $102. I had two long, absorbing heads-up sessions, both in no-limit single draw. My third-place finish was in five-card draw, which is just like single draw except you’re trying to make good hands instead of bad ones. At one point this morning I was playing four different tournaments, each of them with different rules and at very different stages, all at the same time.

I’ve also watched The Big Short this weekend. I saw Margin Call at the Penthouse in Wellington all those years ago, and it’s hard to say which I like more. The bailout, the “too big to fail” aspect (there’s a film with that title too), and the fact that hardly any of those bastards went to jail and basically nothing changed as a result of the Global Financial Crisis, was a great tragedy.

Time to pack now. I leave Timișoara on Tuesday lunchtime.

Language teaching - Life :) - Poker - Tennis - Travel: Europe

Shame one of them has to win

July 11, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s about time I wrote again, but what’s actually happened? I’ve booked some accommodation in Bergamo, so that’s something to look forward to. Vespas and Bambinas, or should I say Vespe e Bambine. I need to brush up my Italian. I still haven’t planned my stay in the UK. Where and when will I see my brother? And what about my friend in Birmingham?

I’ve got two new students. One of them is at a low level – not a problem, but as far as I can tell, he’s never learned how to learn. He reminds me of the Burmese refugee I taught in Wellington before coming over here. That guy left school at twelve to work on fishing boats; my current student probably stayed in the education system a bit longer, but he doesn’t have a handle on what to learn in what order. Sometimes he comes out with stuff like “Him tomorrow say me,” and he’ll keep repeating the same garbled phrase over and over, seemingly thinking that if he says it enough times it’ll magically become correct. Then he’ll ask me how to say something complex that requires a range of tenses. He’s a roofer and wants to work in Scandinavia. I’m pleased that he has the motivation and enthusiasm to have lessons with me, and I hope I can get him to learn more systematically. The other new student is a very pleasant woman in her mid-thirties who lives in Bucharest. She’s about to start a new job which requires a lot more English.

There’s a lot of talk and WhatsApping in this apartment block about gas installation and central heating. We should soon get a gas pipe fitted that will heat the whole block from top to bottom, like I had in the other place. I rarely needed central heating there. Somebody from the gas company came in and took some measurements, and he’s come back with a quote for NZ$5000 (£2500) to put gas central heating in my flat. My worry is that when we get to winter, the price of gas will be so high that I won’t dare use it.

When I moved in, I only got one set of keys. At least one more set is out there, somewhere, but I’ve never seen them. (The vendor has been massively unhelpful here.) On Friday, the old lady who lives on the first floor took me to the key shop on Piața Traian, a very Romanian outfit which you got to via a courtyard. The key lady had two dogs, including a female Rottweiler – I think – who was happily sleeping on the floor. She cut both my front door keys and made a replacement intercom swipe thingy, but when I got home one of the front door keys didn’t fit and the swipe thing didn’t work either. Two trips later and I got the other front door key to fit but still no luck with the intercom doohickey, so next week I’ll go somewhere else and see if I can get that sorted.

The men’s final at Wimbledon is almost upon us. I’m playing singles tennis later, so if the match goes beyond three sets I won’t see the end of it. What a line-up. An anti-vax super-spreader against an egomaniac. A bully. There were kids like Kyrgios when I was at school. Both finalists are extraordinary talents, however, and you can’t take your eyes off Kyrgios when he plays. You never know what’s coming next. Djokovic is the clear favourite, but it wouldn’t be massive shock if Kyrgios was to win. He’ll be insufferable if he does. There was quite a turnaround in yesterday’s women’s final where Rybakina grabbed the match by the scruff of the neck in set two; her hold from 0-40 in 3-2 in the third was the key to her victory over Ons Jabeur, who I hoped would win. Yesterday’s men’s doubles final was a belter of a match. A slow burner you might say, not because of the tennis but because the players were largely unknown and the crowd didn’t fully get into it until the later stages. I was hoping the super tie-break could be avoided, but no such luck. The Australian pairing, who had saved five match points in their semi-final, won the shoot-out 10-2 – a procession in the end, after an encounter that had been on a knife-edge throughout.

Poker. I haven’t mentioned that for ages because it’s way down my priority list. I had one win at the end of May, and since then I’ve had a torrid time, playing 35 tournaments without making the top three once. It should be easier to snag a podium position now that the fields are smaller because the Russians are gone – they were rightly kicked out shortly after the war started – but things just haven’t happened for me. I just need to be patient.

The temperature has dropped from the high 30s to something bearable. I might write again tomorrow and talk about the crazy business with Boris.

Life :) - Poker

What’s in a Wordle?

May 30, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

After a month or more of drought-like conditions, it’s been a wet weekend, so no tennis. Yesterday I was very glad of that – I felt shattered. My maths lesson is now a 17.5 km round trip. I was happy to not do a whole lot in the late afternoon and evening. Poker tournaments have been thin on the ground this month, but I managed to fire up three and win one, making $48 on the session.

Last week we had a storm that was spectacular, and for some residents of Timiș, pretty damaging. Thankfully it didn’t make it to the level of the short, sharp soup-swirler of September 2017 – a hellish quarter-hour that killed eight people in and around the city.

It’s been a good day for Wordle. This was today’s English version:

I hardly played this optimally. An initial-N word isn’t great, then I doubled a consonant on my second guess. My third guess (remembering that Wordle uses American spellings) wasn’t bad, but then the solution was about as American as it gets. My final guess was a toss-up between the solution and KAZOO, though I would have guessed TABOO if I’d seen it. BAYOU reminded me of the time I visited Louisiana in 2015. We boarded our boat, about to embark on a tour of the bayou, when the outboard motor simply fell off. Our skipper must have been in his eighties at least, and he tried to jury-rig the motor to the boat somehow. At this point our young guide made the correct (but sad) decision to call the whole thing off. Instead we did a tour of the Louisiana state house in Baton Rouge – the tallest and perhaps most expensive state house in the country, in one of its poorest states. We did manage to go on an alligator swamp tour, which was well worth doing, and I even picked up a small alligator. Today’s winning word also appears in a number of songs – Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Born on the Bayou, Hank Williams’ Jambalaya (On the Bayou) and also in That Was Your Mother, the penultimate song of Paul Simon’s Graceland album, where he sings about “King of the Bayou”.

Here’s today’s Romanian Wordle:

FRIGE was a total guess. How didn’t I know it? It’s an everyday word, and it means to roast, to fry, to bake, or to grill. The past tense of frige is fript, which is where the common word friptură (“steak”) comes from. I think the problem for me here was frig, an ultra-common word meaning “cold”. (Think “frigid” or “refrigerate”.) The first person singular and third person plural forms of frige are both frig. So you’ve got one frig meaning cold and another frig that means to make something very hot. That’s frigging fantastic, and if I hadn’t done today’s Wordle I still wouldn’t know that.

Buying property - Poker - Tennis

Half here, half there

May 26, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

This is my first blog post from my new flat. I don’t feel I’m fully here yet, because a lot of my stuff is still back at the old place. Finding some movers has proven harder than buying the damn flat in the first place. Either they quote some exorbitant price, probably because they think ka-ching as soon as I open my mouth, or they refuse entirely, or they say they’ll get back with a quote but never do. Maybe, with a bit of luck, the move will happen on Friday. Then I can set myself up here properly.

It’s been a tiring last ten days with all the beetling backwards and forwards (as Dad would say) between this place and the old one, and my face-to-face lessons that now take longer to get to than before. There has been a whole battalion of flashing orange men to contend with along the way. The new flat is far more kitted out than the old one, with swanky appliances that want to have a relationship with me. Leave me alone, will you? This place is several degrees cooler than the old one, and I almost froze during my first night here.

The only time I was able to relax was on Saturday night when I had some drinks with the tennis crew. That was after my singles match with Florin which I won 7-5 6-0 after being 4-1 down. I was so sluggish at the start of the match. I’ve been invited to someone’s holiday home in Brad (or somewhere in that vicinity) in early September. I’m looking forward to the total Romanian immersion if nothing else.

I could only find the time to play one poker tournament in the SCOOP series and that was tonight’s $11 badugi. It wasn’t a damp squib so much as a sodden one. I got knocked out on only my 30th hand without winning a single one. A shame because it was eight-handed and had decent-length 12-minute levels, but I kept missing and my opponents didn’t and that was that. Nothing I could have done.

I only had one eye on the Australian election. It was a great illustration of how preferential voting works, and yippee, they got rid of the bastards. Then today there has been absolutely horrific news out of Texas. Nineteen children and two teachers killed. Right now I’m reading more “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” bullshit. It’s too messed up for words.