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Family - Life :) - Poker

The green light, and a familiar scare

May 27, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday I got my immigration card, so I’m now free to stay in Romania until 2026 under the provisions of Article 50. It’s a relief to get that out of the way. Now that I probably won’t be turfed out of the country, my next stop is to put down some roots here using the proceeds of the apartment I had in Wellington. But I don’t know where to start. A house or a flat? A new build or something more established? (The new blocks, and new areas, depress me.) Where I am now is perfect in many ways, but a huge rent hike is on the horizon, and I could do with being able to teach in a different place to where I eat. Plus I’d really like to have my own set of wheels.

My uncle Graeme, who turned 80 last month, had a major scare at the end of last week. He collapsed and vomited, and was quickly rushed off to hospital. There he had his aortic valve replaced, just like my father did at age 55. Graeme won’t be coming out of hospital for a while. This all reminds me of how Dad almost died following his operation. It really was touch and go. He had his valve replaced in the UK, while I was in Auckland. (Mum also stayed in New Zealand – we all make baffling decisions at some points in our lives, and this was her turn.) I spoke to him after the operation and everything seemed to have gone off without a hitch. But as he was on the verge of leaving hospital he couldn’t get out of bed. He had fluid in his lungs. My grandmother overheard one of the staff say that the fluid had probably coagulated and he was a lost cause. I remember when Mum called me, telling me to say a prayer for Dad because he might not make it. That was 16 years ago, around the time of the terrorist attack in London. I was studying for actuarial exams while also trying to devise a word-based version of Sudoku, the new craze.

When I spoke to my brother at the weekend it dawned on us. Mum and Dad might never come back to this part of the world again. I’d put the chance of that at 30%. We spent some time discussing the when and how of making a trip over to see them. As it stands, my sister-in-law isn’t allowed to set foot in the country.

Summer is almost upon us, and for the next four months I’ll be making regular trips to the outdoor markets. The strawberries have just started, as have the cherries, although they’re still rather pricy. The tomatoes are on their way. Soon we’ll have the watermelons and the stone fruit. All the lovely fruit and vegetables we get here are hard to beat.

Not much joy at the poker tables since I last wrote. I need to run better, basically. My bankroll is $690. Why am I doing this? Not for the money, clearly. I’m doing it for the mental workout. Can I at least get some way to mastering this game?

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.

Books - Life :) - Poker - Romania - Writing a book

Hristos a înviat

May 3, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

The vagaries of the Julian calendar, the spring equinox and phases of the moon mean that today is Orthodox Easter Sunday. Sometimes it falls on the same day as what they call Catholic Easter (and what I would call “normal Easter”), sometimes it’s a week later, and sometimes (like this year) it’s a whole month later. Easter is big in Romania; I’d call it a tie between Easter and Christmas for which is most important here. Last night the tennis-playing couple (who live next door but one) gave me some salată de boeuf which, despite its partially French name, contains chicken rather than beef. They also gave me an egg painted the traditional reddish-brown using red cabbage, and invited me to “knock” it with another of their painted eggs. The “knocker” said Hristos a înviat (“Christ has risen”), then the knockee became the knocker and said Adevărat (“really”). Although I was unaware that it was a game, apparently I won because my egg remained almost unscathed through all the knocking.

At quarter past midnight I was woken up by the Easter vigil service at the cathedral. A huge throng of people with candles spilled out in front of the cathedral as a sermon played over the loudspeaker, much of which I actually understood. I wonder how many of those “vigilantes” picked up Covid. There have been services and processions and bells ringing out all this long weekend. I missed my first two Romanian Easters because I went to the UK. Then last year the restrictions meant that everything was far more muted. That leaves 2019, and I think I must have slept through the vigil service that year because I don’t remember seeing it. My blog posts from two years ago aren’t helping me. Just like last year, the Easter market has gone by the board, but they’ve Easterised the end of the square where I live, as in a normal virus-free year.

I still watch John Campbell’s informative Youtube videos on coronavirus, but I’m less dedicated than I was. After I watched one of his videos last week, Youtube suggested that I watch a different one from a American medical doctor and religious nutcase, called “Why I’m not taking the vaccine”. It had three times as many views and likes as Campbell gets (and he gets a fair few), and it attracted a long stream of comments saying that the deep state are trying to force us to take the vaccine and I’m not having any of it. I’m defiant! Six hundred thumbs up. Many commenters referenced the Bible. No Covid vaccine! Matthew 7:25 says so! I really doubt that the Gospel of Matthew said anything about vaccination or herd immunity. (I picked that verse at random; it happens to be about floods and storms, not a pandemic, but I’m sure you could find a connection there if you really wanted to.) Covid has been an eye-opener. I knew we had fake news and echo chambers, but here we have millions of people, some in positions of authority and influence, willing to dispense with the truth even when it comes to matters of life and death. I’ve even seen this in my own brother. A supporter of Brexit and the Tories, he’s happy to divorce himself from the reality that the British government have done a breathtakingly shitty job that has cost many thousands of lives unnecessarily, just because it’s his team. It’s become just like football.

I’m two-thirds of the way through Inocenții, a Romanian book that one of my students bought me for Christmas. It took me a while to get going, mainly because the language is hard. But I’ve made some headway finally. It’s all about a woman’s childhood in Brașov in the sixties, the early Communist period. The book is full of humour, though it certainly has its dark moments too. I’ve been jotting down words I don’t know, including some that I’ve come across before but forgotten, so I can look them up later. I think it’s the sixth Romanian book I’ve read.

Poker. Lately I’ve been playing tournaments exclusively. I’m at a bit of a standstill, with a run of tournaments in which I’ve either just missed out on or just made the money. I’ve been persevering with Omaha hi-lo, with little joy. Unlike the other games I regularly play, I can’t hand-read in Omaha hi-lo. That’s partly because the tournament buy-ins are tiny and people play any old junk, even hands that are real disasters like the 9993 that someone raised pre-flop with this morning. My bankroll is $661, although I expect that to drop a few dollars when I play the fixed badugi this evening. Pessimistic I know, but that tournament with its eight-minute levels plays like a turbo, especially in the early stages, and most of the time you’ll fail to make the money no matter what you do.
Update: As expected, that tournament was a waste of time. The game is played with three draws, but if I’d had ten I still wouldn’t have hit anything. Bankroll now $655. (I don’t exactly risk much of my bankroll in these tournaments.)

I’ve gone back to the dictionary part of the book I was writing, after losing heart when that Romanian teacher decided she had better things to do than help me. I’m now on the letter R, and I hope I can make some more progress this week.

The cathedral at 12:15 last night
Just after 4pm today
Life :) - Poker - Tennis

Springtime pics

April 26, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today is Anzac Day and my sister-in-law’s birthday.

I’d just gone out to withdraw 1990 lei from the cash machine, or bancomat as they call it here, and guess what. I saw my bike. It was chained to a nearby lamp-post, with a slightly more sturdy combination lock than the one I had. Then I bumped into Bogdan. He thinks that someone in our block, “the bloke with the beard on the sixth floor”, took it. He said he’d chat to the guy. I asked him not to involve the police. I never thought I’d see it again, and it’s so weird that someone from my block decided to pinch it. It didn’t get much use over the lockdown period, so perhaps he figured it was abandoned.

I didn’t think I’d ever get into poker again. It is engrossing, it does exercise my brain, but there’s so much I can’t do when I play poker. I can’t enjoy the sunshine. I can’t read a book. I can’t answer a FaceTime call when I’m playing a tournament. Heck, last week it was even stopping me from sleeping. Tournaments are the worst for having your hands tied. It was all fine over the winter months and the lockdown, but with the improving weather (and maybe even potential bike rides!) I don’t know how much of this I want to do. I got in three tournaments today. I won small prizes in two (single draw and badugi) while Omaha hi-lo once again eluded me. My bankroll is $652.

Lots of tennis this weekend. Yesterday we played three-and-a-bit sets of doubles. Today there were just three of us so we played two-against-one in rotation; singles in that format gives you a real workout. I really had to scramble. It was great stuff, and the weather was just perfect for it.

Spring and the loosening of restrictions have brought seemingly the whole city out to the parks. The many flowerbeds, mostly full of tulips in a multitude of colours, are a big attraction. Here are some pictures:

Gearing up for an anti-lockdown protest. From late March.
This rusty motorbike still has its old Ceaușescu-era number plate
Central Park
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.

Life :) - Poker

Police and poker

April 15, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday the woman in the UK cancelled her 2pm lesson – she misses Romania and is going through a tough time mentally in general. With that extra break in my schedule, I played a $1.10 buy-in satellite into last night’s $22 SCOOP triple draw tournament. Out of 94 entrants, the top four made it through. In the early stages I profited from being at a table of people who were either sitting out or hadn’t the foggiest idea of the rules. If I made any sort of hand I could just keep betting and raising. These players were quickly eliminated, and from then on I needed to win the big pots when it mattered, which I did. At one point I made the nuts against the second nuts. On the final table I found myself in the unusual position of having the biggest stack by far and being able to coast into the main tournament which started at 9:15 pm. As soon as the satellite was over, the police called me, asking me to come in early the next morning to make an official statement about my bike. Damn, this tournament could go on all night and I could be buggered by then. Should I even bother?

In all probability my two-hour battle to win a SCOOP ticket would be for naught; just over 15% got paid. Unlike in the satellite, most of the 1319 players in the main tournament actually knew the rules (though how they played varied enormously), and some of them were high rollers and/or had intimidating badges to say that they’d won SCOOP events in the past. They’d probably played hundreds of the things. By the first break I had a bit more than the 25,000 chips I started with, by the second break I was up to two and a half times my starting stack, and by the third break I had over five times. In other words I was doing pretty well. But when we resumed at midnight it all came crashing down in the space of a few hands. My number four was beaten by number two and that left me crippled, but I partially bounced back. Then, with 72,000 chips in my stack, I got involved in a huge three-way pot with an excellent draw and immediately made the second nuts, but on the last draw somebody clearly made a big hand. If my hand had beaten his, my stack would have been 158,000 and I’d have had an eye on the top prizes. Had he shown the same hand as mine, I’d have had 91,000. But no, he showed the stone-cold nuts and I was left with 24,000. So much can hinge on just one hand, and after that unavoidable disaster I was almost dead meat and unlikely to get a payout at all. I hung in there somehow. The top 215 paid, and as the money bubble approached I went into near-shutdown mode. (Normally I don’t care much about min-cashing, because it’s such a small payout compared to your buy-in, but because I’d satellited in, the min cash was many times my original buy-in, so I was unusually bothered.) There was a player at my table with even fewer chips than me, and he stalled to try and flop over the line and get a min cash. Finally the bubble burst, and I was soon out in 202nd place for a $36 prize. Not quite what I managed in my only other SCOOP all those years ago (second place for a few grand), but at least I got something. My bankroll is now $516. I intend to play two more SCOOP events (directly; no satellites) next week.

The rollercoaster ride (maybe it was more like Oblivion at Alton Towers) finished just before one o’clock, but I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about my parents (when will I see them again?) and my cousin’s youngest son. I had to be up at seven so I could make that damn (almost certainly pointless) police statement. The city of Timișoara, as I’ve just found out, is split into five police sections, and it seems to be something akin to gerrymandering that places the station (a 45-minute walk from here) in the same section as where I live. Gosh, the statement. I had to start by writing Declarație and underlining it. Then I was interrogated about where and when and what kind of lock and are there cameras and so on and so forth. The policeman dictated the statement for me to write, and I had to pen a page and a half of Romanian. Reședință. Is that with an e or an i in the middle? He asked me to state my reședință, my residence, my home, but where exactly is home? As far as I’m concerned, Timișoara is home now, or the closest thing to it. The cops clearly had no shortage of time on their hands, and that’s got to be a good sign. This city, touch wood, is pretty safe. So I got some useful Romanian writing practice. I was knackered after that, and had a doze at lunchtime.

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.

Family - Life :)

Growing old quickly

March 7, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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