Headaches

Headaches - Life :) - Politics - The UK

Struck down

June 26, 2022 by 0 Comments

I’ve had a bit of a crappy time of it the last few days. On Wednesday night I had a piercing sinus headache on my right side – one of those “screwdriver rammed up my nose” ones – and although it eased at around four in the morning, it destroyed my sleep and my energy for the next day. Yesterday was an improvement, but the pain returned last night and I’ve reverted to go-slow mode today. I was grateful for the storm that put paid to this evening’s tennis.

The first half of the week wasn’t too bad. I got good feedback from the two teenage boys about my new skyscraper-building board game. The first one said something like “isn’t it amazing that you’ve actually made this?” which was nice to hear. I was on solid ground with them; after a combined 400-odd lessons, they probably weren’t going to say they hated my stupid game and didn’t want to see me again. (Someone basically did tell me that once, though it wasn’t a game I’d created.) The timing was good because they’d just had their high-pressure exams in Romanian and maths that will determine where they go for their final four years of school, so there was a good chance they’d be receptive to some kind of game.

Lots of politics this week. The US Supreme Court have made abortion illegal in something like half the states. Even if you are anti-abortion, actually banning it is monumentally stupid and evil. Thousands of women will die because of this ruling that has been handed down by half a dozen ultra-extreme religious loons whose concern about a child’s life seems to evaporate once it is born, if their attitude to guns is anything to go by. And where will they stop? Will abortion soon be outlawed nationwide? Homosexuality too? Who was it who said that America shouldn’t fear Islam, but fundamental so-called Christianity instead? They’ve been proven right. This latest ruling will have repercussions that go beyond America’s borders; I could see abortion laws being tightened in religious countries like Romania. The whole political system in the US so utterly messed up. It would be good it could burn to the ground.

In happier news across the pond, the Conservatives lost both the by-elections they were contesting on Thursday, the sixth anniversary of the Brexit referendum. In the next general election, voters absolutely all-capital-letters MUST vote tactically for whatever party is most likely to beat the Tories. Labour, Lib Dem, SNP, Plaid Cymru, it doesn’t matter. If Labour don’t win a majority, that doesn’t matter either. In fact it’s better if nobody wins a majority. The more chance there would then be of the terrible electoral system (albeit not nearly as egregious as the American one) changing.

I called my sister-in-law last night. I knew she and my brother had gone up to St Ives, but was very surprised to see her in the church by the river. She said she was at a “Booze in the Pews” event. After the news from the US yesterday, I was glad to hear that so few people in the UK now use churches for their original purpose that they hold drinking sessions there. My sister-in-law, six months pregnant, wasn’t partaking.

I plan to travel to the UK in a month’s time, but I’ve been unable to book a flight because I still haven’t got a replacement debit card after I nearly got scammed two weeks ago. I’m getting just enough cash payments to tide me over from week to week. What a pain.

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

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

January 20, 2022 by 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 - Headaches - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

A real headache

January 16, 2022 by 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

Coronavirus - Family - Headaches - Poker - Tennis

A GOAT and a donkey

January 8, 2022 by 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coronavirus - Headaches - Poker

Moderna man

November 18, 2021 by 0 Comments

I was up bright and early yesterday for my 8am booster dose. I got it done in some nearby businessy building on the other side of the railway tracks which goes by the rather obscene-sounding name of Incuboxx. The nice lady at the desk asked me if I took any medication. I told her about the pills I take for depression, and then she asked me if I was anxious about getting the injection. Oh no, I said. Everything is în regulă. I got the Moderna jab. I expected it would be the half-sized booster dose, but no, I got the full shot because I’d previously had Astra Zeneca instead of an mRNA vaccine. This surprised me, and googling tells me nothing about different-sized third-dose Moderna shots depending on what you got for your previous two doses, so it’s possible it was a mistake and I got twice as much vaccine as I should have. I felt fine the rest of the day, but last night I had chills combined with a (probably unrelated) headache, and I slept for only three hours or so. I had to drag myself out of bed in time for my 8am lesson.

I didn’t know much about Moderna, but there’s a lot to like about it. For a third dose, it probably offers you more protection against severe disease than Pfizer, and almost certainly does better than Astra Zeneca or Johnson & Johnson. (All four of these vaccines are available in Romania. In New Zealand, you can get whatever you like as long as it’s Pfizer.) The Moderna company is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I spent a fantastic day six years ago, and it’s a lot smaller than Pfizer; vaccines are literally all Moderna does. Dolly Parton partly funded the Moderna vaccine, and here’s the video of her singing “vaccine” to the tune of Jolene and then getting the jab. Seriously, who doesn’t love Dolly Parton? The name of Moderna’s vaccine is also way cooler than Pfizer’s. The Pfizer jab goes under the brand name Comirnaty, and what sort of name is that for something that can literally save your life? It starts off fine (Com…) but then turns into total mneh. It’s not even obvious how to pronounce Comirnaty – the –aty ending (as opposed to the extremely common –ity) just isn’t a thing in English, outside words where the a is part of a vowel combination, as in meaty or throaty. Moderna’s vaccine, on the other hand, is called Spikevax, a proper badass name. Finally, when so many people have had Pfizer (if they’ve been jabbed at all), getting something different is a talking point.

Of course all of the above, with the exception of the first point (and even that is debatable), is basically a joke. Get whatever goddamn vaccine you can.

Because my jab was nice and early, I was able to call my parents and still be in time to play three tournaments. And guess what, I had another win, this time in the no-limit single draw. Apart from the speed wobbles I suffered in the middle of the tournament, which could easily have led to my elimination, I thought I played good, aggressive poker, and made more moves than I normally do. I didn’t play with fear, and best of all I had fun. I made $52 on the morning; my bankroll is now $1147.

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Trying not to do a lot

July 5, 2021 by 0 Comments

For the last few days I’ve been living in the crawler lane, bogged down by coughing and headaches and lurid green mucky slimy custardy gunge. It’s been particularly bad first thing in the morning. I soldiered on with my online lessons on Friday and Saturday, and intentionally haven’t done an awful lot today.

Lately I’ve played poker on Sunday mornings, but today I did something much better. I had a FaceTime chat with my aunt, whose husband died at the end of May, and my cousin who lives in Wellington but was staying with her mother in Timaru. It was a great pleasure to catch up with them, particularly my aunt. I’m looking forward to the day I can fly over and see them. I fear that will be still some time away.

Before and after our longish chat, I watched three episodes of a documentary series on Netflix (which included a depressing part on deforestation in Romania), then I spent most of the afternoon on a bench in Central Park, reading The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. The weather was pleasant, and it was quiet; I couldn’t hear much apart from the jet of the fountain, the occasional train, and the clatter of tiles and dice from people playing rummy and backgammon. I’m fortunate to have such a lovely park on my doorstep. On one side is the river, on the other the train tracks, and I thought about how I might be on a train two weeks or so from now.

No tennis today, either playing or watching. For the last time, Wimbledon is taking a rest day on the middle Sunday. Next year they’ll play on all 14 days. It’s a sensible move. And I definitely was in no fit state to be running around a court.

I haven’t watched any coverage of Euro 2020, but after a 2-0 win over Germany and last night’s 4-0 thrashing of Ukraine, England are daring to dream.

Family - Headaches - Life :) - Poker

Money talk

February 16, 2021 by 0 Comments

My parents are about to put in an offer on that place in Geraldine. If it’s accepted, they’ll try to sell their current place. (They don’t need to sell it to afford the other one. Must be nice.) If they do get a buyer for their current house, I wonder how many digits they’ll get. To have such affluent parents feels, I don’t know, a bit weird. All that affluence does come with added stress, though. (Years ago I read Oliver James’ depressingly accurate book about that.) Mum, who let’s face it, deals with 80% of the money-related stuff, gets pretty stressed by it all. Dad would be happy if they stayed where they were, but I’m all for the move.

All this talk of properties and money leaves me ice-cold, honestly. Even my brother has an app pinned to his front screen so he can see how much his place has increased in value since breakfast. It was the most liberating thing in the world to teach here and get rewarded with rectangular pieces of polymer with pictures of Romanian artists and writers on them, and then hand those same sheets of polymer to the old man or lady at the market. This is how money is supposed to work. Yeah I know, life is way more complicated than that, financial security is really important, and having a place of your own is hugely beneficial especially as you get older, but there’s a threshold beyond which having more doesn’t achieve a whole lot (apart from boosting your own status, of course, if that matters to you).

I had a shocker of a day on Saturday. Intense sinus pain, or more likely a migraine, and I was up to my eyeballs in paracetamol. Not much else I could do, and it’s all so debilitating. I was still feeling sluggish yesterday (Sunday). My late-night poker tournament on Friday night probably didn’t help. I came second in a pot-limit badugi tournament for a $47 profit. (Nice, and I ran pretty hot for most of that tournament, but the bounty thing keeps killing me. I’m really bad at knocking out other players.) As for the fixed-limit badugi tourneys, I’m going through a dreadful run – I’ve blanked my last ten. My bankroll is currently $210.

Coronavirus - Family - Headaches - Life :)

Should have stayed in Peterborough

June 15, 2020 by 0 Comments

I gave up painstakingly updating my Covid graph on 21st May, but it hasn’t gone away. Far from it. Today we reported 320 new cases in Romania, the most on one day since 8th May, and 16 more deaths. Active cases are edging back up. In this corner of the country we’ve got near–New Zealand levels, but it’s spreading like wildfire in Bucharest, Suceava and Brașov, and will surely be back here with a vengeance.

Today is Mum’s birthday (and Steffi Graf’s and Donald Trump’s). When I called her, my aunt and uncle (who visited Timișoara two years ago) were over for dinner. It was great to see them on FaceTime. They were shocked to see I now have a ponytail. I’m shocked to have one too.

Yesterday I had a bad day with my sinuses, or migraine (whichever it was), so today it was nice to sit on the riverbank and read my book, and get all the wonderful strawberries and cherries and apricots and tomatoes from the market (while I still can, before the second wave hits).

On Friday I had my lesson with the guy who lives on the outskirts of London with his wife and son whose first birthday it was. They’re looking at buying a house; he said they’d been to see a ghastly place costing £500,000. He showed me an online property evaluator with an intriguing feature called a happiness rating. You tap in a postcode and this needle waggles into position, telling you how happy everyone in the area is. It’s based on crime, deprivation, health, levels of education, and so on. I asked him to tap in the postcode of the flat I rented in central Peterborough in 2003, and the needle hardly budged. So sad. But I was reasonably happy there. My job didn’t pay a lot but I had interesting flatmates, played tennis, went bowling, went to the pub, and ate out from time to time. I often saw my grandmother. I made two trips to France, including beautiful Montpellier. I only had a six-month work contract which they happily extended, and they would have given me a permanent role. But my boss said he was unconvinced that flood mapping and forecasting was the best career path for me, and when my parents decided to shift to NZ, I convinced myself that I’d be better off over there.

Anyway, we read an article containing the word cusp, and I explained that the word is sometimes used in relation to star signs (which some Romanians take as gospel). Like me, he is on the cusp: he was born on 21/9/89. He has a family, a career, pretty soon he’ll have a house, and he has almost an extra decade to play with compared to me. Maybe I should have stayed in Peterborough.

Coronavirus - Headaches - Language teaching - Life :)

May Day blues

May 3, 2020 by 0 Comments

Yesterday was a crappy Friday. My sinus pain or migraine (I’m not sure which) started the night before, and I didn’t sleep a lot. I took plenty of paracetamol which helped, but I still felt washed out and sapped of energy. Four trips up and down the stairs were all I could manage. I had two lessons, and I had to apologise for yawning in my session with my UK-based student which started at 9pm. In the middle of the lesson we had a storm here. Today I’ve still felt lethargic and have done little other than read and talk to my parents (where they taunted me on FaceTime with lumps of Whittaker’s chocolate). I did my full eight laps of the stairs but was slower than usual. It’s bucketing down right now. We were in need of a good deluge.

It’s our penultimate weekend under full lockdown. I hope by the end of this month I’ll be able to read a book on a park bench while eating a punnet of strawberries. I have no desire to eat out or go shopping. I was surprised to see Piața 700 – an open air market I’ve mentioned several times on this blog – in full swing when I passed by on Tuesday. I kept well away from the produce and people. Another market, Piața Iosefin, has shut down after one of the stallholders tested positive.

Mum keeps me updated on cases and deaths from Covid-19 in New Zealand. Those who die in NZ are invariably old, often from care homes. In Romania that is not the case. The list is updated two or three times a day, and it’s full of not-that-old people. So far, 57% of deaths have been under-70s, including 27% under 60 and 10% under 50. Why? My first guess was that, even though I see old people all the time, Romania has a smaller proportion of elderly than a prosperous country like New Zealand. But no, Romania’s proportion of over-70s is in fast slightly larger than NZ’s (1 in 8 against 1 in 9, roughly). That’s not because Romanians live longer than Kiwis – they don’t! – but because so many young people have left the country, and women have just about stopped having babies, so the elderly make up a sizeable chunk of the population. In other words I’m puzzled by all the premature deaths here.

Here’s the first ten questions from Tuesday’s game of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? with the twelve-year-old. I made these up pretty much on the fly. After the Boris Johnson question, I was tempted to ask how many kids Boris had, and make all the possible answers correct.

Family - Headaches

Pain, pain, go away

October 30, 2019 by 0 Comments

This morning I called my aunt for her 72nd birthday. She seems remarkably good these days when I talk to her, but she still has episodes of severe depression and her world has become very small. That’s sad. I wish there was some way she could escape that cycle.

Sunday was a shocker of a day for me. I’d struggled all night with medium-level sinus pain, which became more severe during my lesson in the morning. I was begging for the clock to tick round to twelve and to be alone. When my student left, the pain became unbearable. Screwdriver rammed right up my nose. Pure torture. It was a sunny day and I staggered over to the curtains to block out the light as best I could. I tried pacing around; it was too painful to either sit or stand. Then I stumbled to the sink where I was sick. It took two hours for the pain to subside. I felt shattered and feeble for the rest of the afternoon, and it took until my 8pm Skype lesson to properly enter the world of the living again. My student gave me the name of a Bucharest-based specialist he thought I should get in touch with. But then, after reading a few websites, it dawned on me: maybe these aren’t sinus headaches after all. Maybe they’re migraines. I have all the symptoms, plus the family history.

Fortunately these bouts of excruciating pain don’t occur too often for me. That isn’t the case for my father, who has suffered from crippling migraines since he was a teenager, and has had headaches on a daily basis since about the time he got out of hospital. I spoke to him last night. He said that if they continue like this, his life will effectively be over. A permanent cloud, shrouding everything. The time zone change meant I could speak to Dad while Mum was at golf, without having to stay up past midnight. I get on very well with Mum these days, but occasionally it’s nice to speak to him when she isn’t there.

I also had a quick chat to my brother, who surprised and delighted me when he said he and his wife plan to come to Timișoara next April. It would be a pleasure to have them here.

It’s looks like the UK will be having an election in December. We might see a three-figure Tory majority. What a bloody fantastic Christmas present that would be. Not.