Poker

Language teaching - Life :) - Poker - Romania

Happy Easter

April 22, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

My birthday – another one – was on Wednesday. It was just a normal day for me; I didn’t even see anybody face-to-face except when I looked at yet another apartment. (That decision isn’t getting any easier. I’m glad it’s now the long Orthodox Easter weekend, so agents are unlikely to hassle me for a few days.)

Yesterday I had my last lesson with a 16-year-old girl. Her mother had contacted me the day before to say that it would be the last one. We’d had some good and productive sessions in the last few months, so seeing the clock tick down on our final meeting was rather sad.

The weekend before last, I went to Lake Surduc with Mark (the teacher) and his dog (or really his girlfriend’s dog). It’s funny how I see him quite often but haven’t seen his girlfriend since around Christmas. She probably doesn’t like me. I can imagine their conversations. “I suppose you’ll be seeing your mate this weekend, then.” “I might do.” “God, he’s so boring!” “He isn’t really. And you don’t exactly like trudging through mud, do you?” Maybe she’s just very conscientious and spends her Sundays making lesson plans for the following week like my mother used to do. Anyway, Surduc is about an hour’s drive away. I’d been there once before, when my friends from St Ives came over in 2017, but we didn’t stop apart from to ask locals if there was any nearby accommodation. This time they’d clearly had a deluge of rain overnight – it was extremely muddy. There was no path around the lake, so you had to clamber through the adjoining wood. There were plenty of ups and downs. We passed shepherds on their small farms, and at one point we were met by six menacing dogs that had come from the farm below. On the shore of the lake we saw dozens of four-pointed (tetrahedral) seed pods that looked like medieval weapons. These came from water chestnut trees. We also saw some rather large shells. I had to cycle to his place in Dumbrăvița and back, and I later played two sets of tennis, so I managed to burn off some calories that day.

Some of those spiky seed pods
A shell and a muddy Doc Marten

Today is Orthodox Good Friday, or as they call it here, Vinerea Mare (“Big Friday”). I’ve just had a lesson with a lady in Bucharest, and I’m about to try and make a Romanian-style marble cake, following a video on Youtube (in Romanian) that has had ten million views. Easter is a much bigger deal here than in most of the English-speaking world, and it seems relatively free of commercialisation. It’s a family occasion, with a lot of traditional food. It’s the only time of year that Romanians normally eat lamb – as well as roasting the meat, they use the innards to make drob, a kind of loaf that also has an egg inside. There’s the usual sarmale and salată de boeuf, then for dessert they have various cakes including pască, which is made with sweet cheese.

After a nice run of final tables (but no wins, dammit) I withdrew $1375 from my PokerStars account. Of course I didn’t quite get all of that because they hit you with a withdrawal fee and an exchange rate margin that adds up to nearly 5% (or at least it did in my case). I’ve now got $719 sitting in my account. Maybe I should have withdrawn the whole lot and ended this unproductive distraction for good, but the SCOOP tournament series is coming up soon, so I thought I’d at least try my hand at that.

This was the scene outside my window last night, following a screech of tyres and metal. I don’t think anyone was badly hurt.

Coronavirus - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

Social struggles

March 28, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today I had lunch with the tennis crew and some of their friends. The wife of one of the guys I play with sings in a choir at the church in Piața 700, and some of them were from there. All in all, there were 14 of us, including Domnul Sfâra, the 87-year-old man who still (somehow) plays tennis from time to time. Most of them hadn’t caught up with each other since the pandemic started. At one point there was a go-round-the-table thing, where everyone was expected to speak in turn, and amid the jokes that mostly zoomed over my head, there was much discussion of everyone’s medical trials and tribulations, Covid-related and not. Romanians are far more open than Brits when it comes to discussing this stuff, though the woman who sat next to me – white as a sheet and no more than seven stone – didn’t say what she’d been through. It wasn’t until it was my turn that I realised the round-the-table thing was actually happening. “So I have to speak now?” Yes. How did you end up in Romania? Always this question, which never gets any easier to answer. When I told people what I did for a living, there was then a short discussion of the English language. And and end are pronounced the same, somebody said. No no no! Just no! Two different vowels. Miles apart. On a daily basis I deal with people who think that send is something you find on a beach, or that a bet hangs upside down, because for some historical reason Romanians and speakers of other central and eastern European languages use their e vowel to represent our short a vowel, when it would serve them better to use their a instead. We stayed from twelve till about three. It was great that everybody got to see each other after such a long time, and they all seemed such nice people, but that sort of thing is never easy for me, even in my own language.

Romania has now suffered 65,000 Covid deaths. Because some of them would have died anyway, it’s hard to gauge the impact of vaccine refusal on that number. However, we know that two-thirds of the deaths occurred after the vaccines became readily available in spring of 2021, and the vast majority of those who died once the vaccines were available hadn’t taken them, so we’re looking at a very large number of preventable deaths, orders of magnitude greater than other tragedies like the Colectiv nightclub fire which killed 65 people on the night and in the weeks afterwards. It’s utterly appalling.

I’d planned to play poker this morning, but once I knew this lunch was happening and I wouldn’t be finished in time, I decided to play last night instead. I was pretty tired this morning after that, and putting our clocks going forward didn’t exactly help. I haven’t played a lot since I had the stones, though last week I did make $76 in a tournament for finishing second and snagging plenty of bounties. My bankroll is $2005.

Yesterday I lamented the end of extended final sets in tennis. It’s not an earth-shattering change; just look at the 2012 men’s Australian Open final. It was a titanic battle – no match has been quite that gladiatorial before or since – and it didn’t even get to 6-6 in the fifth set. (Djokovic beat Nadal 7-5 in the decider.) But it’s a symptom of what’s been happening in sport in general. Everything now has to be neatly packaged and shiny and pristine. Remove the kinks and imperfections and mud, and play it all in soulless air-conditioned stadiums in sodding Qatar. I find myself losing interest.

Here are some pictures of Timișoara in early spring:

The old Banca de Scont (Discount Bank), now done up nicely
The map stone in Piața Unirii, showing where the fortress used to be. This isn’t old; it was laid in 1987.
The Bega boats are back in business
Pink magnolias in bloom
Life :) - Poker

Here’s some better news

February 28, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

As promised, here’s the good news. My sister-in-law is pregnant. She had her ten-week scan last week, and I got a suite of photos showing something clearly moving. Animated. It’s miraculous when you think about it. I knew that she was pregnant a month ago, but I didn’t mention it here. She also got pregnant last summer, but lost the baby after six or seven weeks. That was devastating for her. This time I’ve got my fingers and just about everything else crossed. My sister-in-law will be 37 in April.

Day nine for me. A better day. After another chat with my parents (we’ve been talking a lot lately) I fired up two poker tournaments, and I’ll be damned, I went and won the same one that I won last Sunday. I made a $75 profit from the session to go with last Sunday’s excruciating $69, and my bankroll is now $1904. In the intervening week I never even considered logging on. After that, I felt physically closer to normal than at any point since this all started, so I went for a proper walk.

In my next post I’ll write about the Ukraine invasion, which I’ve had plenty of chance to follow in bewilderment on TV.

Buying property - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

Some sad news, and my latest flat search

February 13, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buying property - Coronavirus - Life :) - Poker

Wobbling slightly

February 8, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Saturday, after realising I’d hardly taken anything in of the flat I’d rushed off to see, it hit me. I’m struggling a bit here, aren’t I? I’ve got a pretty big decision to make, and I can’t motivate myself, while this dump, the one I’m living in now, is a mess and falling apart. How great the initial lockdown was two years ago. No decisions to make. Just do whatever you can to stay safe. Walk in the park once a day and smell the daffodils and tulips, and be thankful that you still can, meaning that you probably haven’t caught the virus yet. (Did people even call it Covid then? I can’t remember.) Traipse up and down the stairs eight times with water bottles on my back. Listen to the birds and the trains in the evening. At times I wish the Sigma Max plus-plus-plus variant could hit us, and we could all go back there. (It’s kind of crazy that Covid is actually pretty bad in Romania right now, far worse than at the start of the pandemic, but it’s predictably bad, so everyone’s sort of OK with it.)

As I was writing the last sentence but one, I googled the name of an insurance product—which had Max and Plus in its name—that was sold by the large company I spent several years working for in NZ. For some reason the name popped into my head. I found out that the company, while large, was taken over by a three-letter-acronym behemoth in 2018, so no longer exists.

What I’m trying to say here is that my propensity for depression hasn’t gone away. I doubt it ever will. I’ve got to move, and until I do, and I’m (hopefully) settled in a new place, I’m probably in for a certain amount of mental turmoil. The good news is that it’s never that long until my next lesson, and connecting with a person for an hour or two (and no longer!) invariably lifts my mood.

New Zealand. There’s talk of opening up, and finally ditching the rather draconian MIQ set-up. I’d love to make a trip over there, but when could I do it? I’m thinking August, of a year to be determined.

I’m still Wordling. Mr Wordle (or Wardle, in fact) has now sold his idea to the New York Times for at least a million bucks, so I don’t know how long it’ll stay free. As well as the Wordle, I’ve been doing the Romanian version, plus a maths-based one called (appropriately) Nerdle.

Poker. I wonder if I’m enjoying that so much. Last week I decided to do a deal, which I basically never do. We got heads-up in five-card draw, and my opponent was happy to split the money 50-50 even though he had more chips than me at the time and (I thought) he was a better player than me. In those circumstances, doing the deal seemed a no-brainer. My bankroll is now $1694.

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

Hard to keep in touch…

January 31, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photos - Poker - Travel: Romania

Some Romanian ruins

January 26, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just been alerted of Romania’s huge virus numbers today. Ambulance numbers are on the rise too. If only the country hadn’t failed its vaccine IQ test quite so spectacularly, we wouldn’t be facing another month of utter carnage.

On Saturday Mark, the English guy, asked me if I wanted to join him on a trip to Arad the next morning, where we’d look at some churches and stuff. Sure, sounds good. I cycled to his place, where I expected his girlfriend to come too. She stayed at home, but he brought their dog along. It was an icy morning, and the flat expanse – bleak but beautiful – stretched out to the horizon. I’d imagined we’d explore the city and maybe grab a coffee somewhere, but Mark had other ideas. He wanted to visit two ruined fortresses. Great. But then I realised I’d need to climb icy hills and I didn’t exactly have the right footwear. Neither did he. Going up wasn’t easy, but coming down was even dicier, and we had no choice in a couple of spots but to slide down on our arses. For the dog it was dead easy. The first fortress, at Șoimoș by the Mureș river, was built in the 13th century, and seemed to be on the way to disappearing entirely. That’s how Romania treats its history. It was probably possible to get to the top – someone had stuck a flag up there – but we didn’t dare try. From there we drove to another ruin at Șiria. This was a longer but easier (less icy) climb than the first. On the hill near the fortress was a cross and a Hollywood-style sign that lit up at night.

It was a quiet, still day, as Sundays in Romania so often are. The terrain in this part of the country is pancake flat for miles on end, but then hills soar out of nowhere. There was plenty of bird life, as usual, and we met a herd of goats on the way. It was great to get all that exercise, even if I wasn’t prepared for it, including the bike rides to Dumbrăvița and back.

Monday, which was a public holiday, was a far less energetic day. I could feel my exertions of the day before. I played six poker tournaments, grabbing a satisfying win and two smaller cashes. I’ve had a good run since mid-November, with numerous first and second places. I made $62 on the day; my bankroll is now $1625.

Here are some pictures from Sunday:

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

My flat search, my brother’s job search, and 19/1/12

January 20, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s a nippy Thursday morning here. I took this picture just before my lesson which started at eight. You can see the hoar frost on the trees and the near-full moon. The days are noticeably pulling out: a fortnight ago it was almost pitch black at that time.

I haven’t had much luck getting new students at the start of 2022, but yesterday I got a call from the mother of a 17-year-old girl, and I agreed to give her daughter tuition for her C1 Cambridge exam. Teaching for advanced-level exams is not my forte – they’re basically a game in which I lack experience, rather than a simple test of English – so I might not be much help.

No maths lesson with Matei this weekend – his family are going away. It’s been interesting being back in his room again. The huge world map on his wall always fascinates me because it makes Europe seem so small. He told me that his grandmother, whom I often had conversations with, is now suffering from Alzheimer’s. She must be almost eighty. That’s sad.

I saw the doctor on Tuesday to get my pills. I mentioned my headaches and gummed-up nose, but after seeing 35 Covid patients in a single day, his focus was on the virus which wasn’t my issue. (I took a rapid Covid test last week, just in case. I was negative.) He gave me the requisite temperature and oxygen saturation checks, and even checked my blood pressure and gave me a once-over with a stethoscope, and everything was fine. He then prescribed me a drug called Quarelin for my headaches. If I can’t rid of this head pain, and the frequency and duration reach the levels that Dad had to deal with when he was my age, life might not be worth living. I’m serious. Dad had a wife and family. I don’t.

I’ve finally dismissed that flat which initially seemed so promising. The lack of sun isn’t something I can risk. I look back at all those places in Auckland and Wellington, and the correlation between natural light and my mood – if not necesarily a causation – is definitely there. I’m interested in three more places and I’ll make some phone calls later today.

My parents told me that they heard a loud bang last Friday. What the hell was that? It was the Tongan volcanic eruption. They could hear it from 1500 miles away? Holy shit. The scenes following the eruption are of total devastation.

My brother wants to leave the army. He’s had enough of his courses that take him away from home five days a week and hardly inspire him anyway. He recently applied for a job which he didn’t get (unfairly, he thinks). He’s invariably grumpy and uncommunicative at the moment, so I really hope he can find something to cheer him up.

Poker tournaments. Since Christmas I’ve had one win and five second places. What a shame it isn’t the other way round. At the weekend I was heads-up in a $4.40 pot-limit badugi. My opponent covered me, just. I got dealt the 204th best hand in the game. That doesn’t sound very good, and it’s not, but heads-up against an aggressive opponent it shoots up in value. It was just a bit too good to fold. We got all our chips in, he turned over the 203rd best hand (!), and I had to be content with another runner-up spot. My bankroll is now $1562.

It’s now ten years since my grandmother died, four months prior to her 90th birthday. How time flies. I often wish she could have seen me in Romania. I sometimes dream about sitting in the square with her, having a coffee or a glass of wine, watching the world go by.

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

A real headache

January 16, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

Coronavirus - Family - Poker - Tennis

A GOAT and a donkey

January 8, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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