Life :)

Family - Life :) - Poker

More house stuff

February 21, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Thursday night, straight after finishing work (I was really happy with my pair of evening lessons), I called Mum and Dad to ask whether they’d got the house. They didn’t know yet. Mum was being characteristically pessimistic. My “conversation” with Dad descended into a debate about the housing market in which I was probably more than a little dickish. The very subject is a sore point for me, and I’ve been over that several times on this blog already. Then within minutes of getting off the phone, Dad emailed me to say that they’d got it. So they’re going to be busy for the next little while. Dad has mixed feelings I think (they’ve been in their current place 16 years), but if it makes their lives less stressful then I’m all for it.

As for me, I’ll be a homeowner for only the next two days. It’ll feel good to pocket that money, much more of it that I was resigned to getting. Then I can maybe get the ball rolling here. The immigration stuff has stalled for now; I need my landlady to draw up an updated contract to prove that I actually live here legally.

Naomi Osaka won her fourth grand slam title today. Gone are the days of Steffi or Chrissie, or even Serena, hoovering up grand slams. Four is a lot. And this time, she had to fend off two match points against Garbiñe Muguruza in the fourth round. I only watched bits of today’s final, after I’d been knocked out of whichever poker tournament it was. After the match the commentators pointed out that Osaka has yet to taste defeat in a grand slam final and she must be fearless every time she steps on the biggest stage, but how will she fare in front of her own crowd at the Olympics in Tokyo? Seriously guys, fuck the Olympics. We can all live happily without them until 2024.

Four poker tournaments today and I blanked the lot. Either I started well and then hit the wall, or I slammed into the wall right at the beginning. Not to worry; that happens. My bankroll is $280.

Family - Life :) - Poker

Money talk

February 16, 2021 plutomanby 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.

Family - Life :) - Photos - Poker

Simplifying life

February 8, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

We’ve had a mild – spring-like – start to February. I think back to a Saturday in late October, the city enveloped in thick fog, ambulances wailing incessantly, and the very real possibility of Donald Trump’s re-election looming darkly. In spite of two deadly hospital fires in Romania since then, things do seem much less awful now. People are being vaccinated. In the UK, more than eleven million people have now had their first jab, including my aunt and sister-in-law.

I hadn’t used FaceTime video for a while until last Tuesday. Mum, what’s happened to you? She looked shattered and had four cold sores on her lips. (She’s long been prone to them. Stress seems to bring them out.) The 40-degree day had taken it out of her, I think. That, plus all the house-related stuff. They now want to move, maybe as soon as next month. This, and a realisation that they should simplify their lives, has all happened quickly. They’re about to put in a “deadline sale” offer on a place in Geraldine. I’m all for the change. They don’t need the hassle of owning and maintaining multiple properties. I was relieved when they called me from Hampden on Thursday that Mum was back to her usual self.

I FaceTimed my parents again this morning. Dad asked me if I get tired after a big day of lessons. Yes I do! But the tiredness is nothing compared to the feeling I got from working in insurance. This week, during some spare time, I used an Excel macro to try and model a limit poker tournament. In my insurance work I had to use macros and Access and (occasionally) fancier tools to model or analyse this or that, and I kept running into the same problem, that I didn’t care about what I was modelling or analysing, which anyway was only a tiny piece. Where, or indeed if, that piece fitted into the whole picture was mostly unclear to me. If I’d been modelling poker tournaments or tennis tie-breaks or coronavirus cases or elections or flood forecasting (I did that in a job once), things might have been different. (Some people get an almost euphoric high from just using the tool. In fact some practically whack off when they hear those processors whirring away. I’m not one of those people.)

Three poker tournaments yesterday. I cashed in one, finishing fourth of 90 or so, but again (this is a theme) I was hurt by it being a bounty tournament. Though I came back well from being almost dead and buried early on, my short stack meant I couldn’t amass many bounties. I felt I made good decisions throughout all three tournaments, and on all of my bust-out hands I got my money in with the best of it. My bankroll is $163.

Tomorrow morning it’s back to ANAF. Here are some pictures:

A well in Parcul Regina Maria
This well in Piața 700 is out there, man
Well, well, well. This one on Strada Alba Iulia has four taps and is covered in first names
Someone filling up his bidoane (big bottles) outside the church in Iosefin
This place looks haunted
“Don’t stop to read this. Stay healthy.”
This was once where people learnt to bake bread
An old street sign. Strada Iosif Rangheț. The small writing says “militant of the communist front”.
Before and after
Life :) - Romania

I’ve had ANAF of this

February 4, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

The immigration office is supposedly open from 8:30 till 10 (to drop off forms and pick up permits and what have you) and between 2 and 4:30 (for “information”). Yesterday was Wednesday, the only weekday I’m free in the early morning, so I went along there to see what I needed to do. At 8:25 there was already a virus-friendly queue inside, so I stood outside while some of the people in the queue magically disappeared in one direction or another. I then made my way into the immigration room, which has small offices off to the side. A uniformed man in his thirties with two gold stars on each shoulder was being rude and aggressive to another Romanian man who was trying to get a work visa for an employee. Then he said sarcastically to a woman, “Can’t you read that sign?!” God, I’ll have to deal with you in a minute. When it was my turn, I asked what I needed, and he said he didn’t really know but asked me to come back in the afternoon. He was calm. I went back after my lesson in the afternoon, with various paperwork that I thought might be handy. Then he was back into full arsehole mode. “Why are you so angry with me?” he asked me in English. What? I’m just asking you a question. In fact you seem rather angry with me for just being here. “Wait outside!” When he asked me to come in, he was relatively calm again, and spoke in Romanian. My Romanian by this point was pretty hopeless because his attitude had frozen me on the spot. He told me to visit ANAF, a government department which deals with tax and stuff, to get (and pay for) public health insurance, which is mandatory for all non-EU citizens living in Romania. I’ll also need proof of my address here (hard to get – I don’t receive any mail) and other bits and pieces.

This morning it was off to ANAF, a huge building next to Piața 700. I found the right entrance (eventually); there was hand sanitiser and a temperature scanner on the way in. The place was bewildering. Then I had to press a button on a keypad from a choice of at least ten, depending on what service I required. Buggered if I knew. I pressed one at random. Out spat a ticket. Go to desk 9. The ticket also told me there were two people waiting in front of me. Where’s desk 9? I could see 1 to 5, and a whole load of desks without numbers. I walked round the corner, where there were another bank of desks numbered 1 to 5, and more unnumbered ones. Then I saw that the other desks did in fact have numbers, but in an almost invisible font. The lady at desk 9 told me to go to some other desk that really didn’t have a number. Or an occupant. An older woman was waiting in front of me. “I can’t stand here for an hour,” she said. “And get Covid,” I said. While we were waiting, a man was madly filling printers with paper. These places get through forests. The walls were covered in signs in English that said “wireless free”. Just as well, because I’m allergic to wireless. It makes me come out in hives. Then I saw that the three desks nearby had signs with different letters of the alphabet. One of them had something like B, I, N, Q, P, U, W, S. I’m guessing that if your surname began with any of those letters, you went to that desk. Why were they seemingly random and not strictly in order? And that go-to-the-right-desk system can’t work with the letter system, can it? Maybe if you press a certain button it then asks you for the initial letter of your surname. God knows. Then I noticed that only 25 letters were accounted for among the three desks. If your name began with J, you were out of luck.

We’d almost given up when a man of about 55 appeared. He dealt with the woman quickly, then it was my turn. He was extremely friendly and seemed to understand exactly what I needed. My Romanian was no obstacle. He used the “tu” form with me, which in that sort of environment is a bit like appending “mate” to sentences in English. He printed out what I need, though I had to ask what this insurance actually covers me for, and then had to pay for it (nearly £300) at another desk. In 2017 I talked about “flashing orange men” on this blog – things I see that would confuse the hell out of me in any language – and there were plenty of them at ANAF, but at least I got that job done, and I hope it will satisfy the bloke with the stars on his shoulders.

Language teaching - Life :) - Poker

Not interested

February 1, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Friday was a tricky day. I met my student in the Botanic Park so she could pay me for two weeks’ lessons. I’ve mentioned this woman before on this blog several times. We’ve now had 177 lessons in which English has been second and therapy first. She flirted with me and yet again asked me personal questions about my mental health and illegal drug use (of which there is none, sadly). She’s married (he’s a dick, but makes good money) and has a teenage son, whom I also teach. Whatever she wants, I’m not in the least bit interested. She’s become a pain in the arse. When I see her online on Tuesday I’ll make it clear that any more of that rubbish and it’s game over. No more meetings with either her or her son (which would be a shame – he’s turned into quite an accomplished English speaker during our 108 lessons, and all the computer games he plays have helped too).

Also on Friday I got a surprise letter from the immigration office, written in OK-ish English, saying that yes I can apply for residency because I was registered here prior to Brexit kicking in. I just need to come armed with all the necessary documents. Excellent. But there’s nothing to say what the documents are. So very Romanian. An employment contract? A marriage certificate?! I’m sure I’ll sort it out, and crucially they’ve given me until the end of the year to get everything in place.

It’s been a funny weekend. Bright sunshine yesterday, tipping it down today. I had a good lesson with a different teenage boy this morning – we watched more of the series on the Challenger disaster on Netflix, and got to the end of a long (but very good) grammar book.

I played six poker tournaments over the weekend. They were brutal, every one of them, including the only one I cashed in. So much crashing and burning and colliding with other people’s big hands at just the wrong time. In one of the tournaments (triple draw, which is insanely swingy at the best of times), it felt like being slapped over the head repeatedly with a stinking wet fish for two hours. Imagine doing this stuff as a job, where the stakes are much, much higher. (My ex-student who said he played professionally described it as extremely stressful.) My bankroll is exactly the $152 I began the month with. Yes, even for the month, but it feels far worse.

I’ve changed my preferred well for filling up my water bottles. The water from the Central Park well started to have a brown sediment, maybe caused by the snow. The one in the rose garden, which I went to today, seems to be sediment-free.

I’ve got a new student starting tomorrow, my first in a while.

Update: I’ve just been on the phone to ANZ, to set up a new account for the proceeds of the apartment sale to go into. The guy had to read out a disclaimer statement. As he read it I was thinking, here comes the word, any second now… Ombudsman! Yes! There it goes, what a fantastic word. It’s fun to say, isn’t it?

Life :) - Poker - Romania

Another bad day for Romania

January 30, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Tragedy has struck Romania yet again. At around five o’clock this morning, four people burnt to death in the hospital in Bucharest. (Update: a fifth person later died.) This has happened just 2½ months on from the fire in a Covid wing of a hospital in Piatra Neamț, which cost ten lives. On TV this morning the scene looked so bleak, with the burnt-out husk of a Third World-looking hospital wing while snow was falling all around. There will be plenty of words now. They’ll say it’s human error. Maybe someone plugged the wrong thing into the wrong thing. But they’ll do bugger all to ensure that someone plugging the wrong thing into the wrong thing doesn’t mean that people die. All that making sure costs money that has been siphoned off by god knows who. And they don’t seem to bother with smoke alarms here, let alone sprinkler systems. In the UK, there were campaigns to get everybody to fit smoke alarms back in the eighties, but in many ways the eighties haven’t yet arrived in Romania.

My poker experiment hasn’t been going so well of late. My bankroll has dipped from $224 to $166. I’ve been running like crap, that’s all there is to it. That happens. Maaaybe I’ve been calling down too much – at the stakes I’ve been playing, people bluff only rarely. The biggest problem is that I’m not able or willing to play that much. I work most evenings (the best time to play), and I don’t fancy gawking at a screen for hours when I do that in my job anyway. I’ve got a free day tomorrow (unusually), so I might fire up a few tournaments and see what happens.

I’ve had things to sort out to finalise the sale of my apartment in Wellington. On Thursday I had to call the IRD. Hearing Salmonella Dub while I was on hold really took me back. It’s all so Kiwi and cosmic at the same time. It’s been scorching over there. Mum said that Temuka hit an infernal 40 degrees on Tuesday.

Last Sunday the temperatures hit the teens here in Timișoara, and there were loads of people milling about. If it wasn’t for the masks, you wouldn’t have imagined there was a pandemic. Hmm, this is a cool place, isn’t it? I can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather live at the moment. I mean central Wellington is fantastic, but if you have the sort of job where you’re stuck in an out-of-town office, there’s kind of no point in being there. I only just found out that the column in the centre of Piața Unirii commemorates the plague that hit the city in 1738-39, killing one in six residents.

The monument to those who died in the plague over 280 years ago
Coronavirus - Language teaching - Life :)

Know-alls and have-alls

January 27, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Windows 10 is starting to infuriate me. When it wakes up from sleep mode, I find that all my programs have shut down. I can’t work like this. I’ve googled things and tweaked a few settings, but I bet it’ll make no difference.

There’s one problem, if problem is the right word, that I keep running into in my lessons. The Man (and it usually is a man) Who Knows Everything. Who knows what he wants and how to get it. I find these people offputting, and my usual motivation to help them isn’t quite there, partly because I feel unable to help them anyway. They also seem to have everything. They’re already winning. What motivation is there to help one of life’s winners to win by even more? The poker guy, who has disappeared from the scene, was a bit like that. The super-smart 18-year-old who I saw on Saturday is like that. Lessons with him are never easy. This time I went through some expressions like “money for old rope” and “kick the bucket”. The rest of the time he told me about the world of gaming and anime that he inhabits. When I asked him whether he was a risk-taker, he said he played gacha, so obviously yes. Umm, what’s gacha when it’s at home? A kind of Japanese toy vending machine, from what I can tell, that he must play in a virtual form. It didn’t occur to him that I might not know what what the hell he was talking about.

On Friday I had a lesson with the 31-year-old guy who lives on the outskirts of London. He and his wife moved there from Bucharest almost three years ago, and they have an 18-month-old son whose little brother or sister is on the way. They’d just put an offer in for a house. The first one they looked at. Nearly £600,000. As you do when you’ve come from Romania. Heaven knows where their money has come from. I’m thinking he might not need me either.

This all reminds me of the maths tuition I did in Auckland in 2010. It was an eye-opener to see the insides of the houses where these teenagers lived. I’m supposed to get excited about pushing your privileged Oliver or Olivia from Excellence to Excellence Plus, am I? They weren’t all like that, of course, and the exceptions were where most of my motivation lay. Here, so far, the Men Who Know and Have Everything are the exceptions, and long may that remain so.

On Sunday I had a session with the 13-year-old boy who lives in Dumbrăvița, which is joined on to Timișoara, and is currently in lockdown for the second time since the autumn. Here in Timișoara we’ve been lockdown-free since May. The prevalence of Covid in Dumbrăvița has been consistently higher than here, and I think I know why. By Romanian standards, Dumbrăvița is rich. I’ve heard that it’s Romania’s second-richest suburb. It’s all BMWs and Audis, with the occasional Porsche and even a Maserati thrown in. When you go to Dumbrăvița it’s mostly dead. They’re all jet-setting and doing business deals just like this boy’s dad does in Hong Kong. They’re highly economically active. Most of Romania isn’t like that at all, and that’s why (I reckon) Covid hasn’t quite been the disaster in Romania (yet) that it’s been in western Europe.

The Covid situation in the UK is still dreadful. More than 1600 deaths have been reported today; the overall death toll is now in six figures. My brother, whose optimism has evaporated, said we might all be facing lockdowns for the rest of our lives. His wife had her first dose of the Pfizer vaccine last week. In Romania we now have five cases of the UK variant. If that takes over – and why won’t it? – we really will be in deep doo-doo here.

It was a huge relief to see Joe Biden’s inauguration go off without a hitch, after what happened two weeks earlier. President Biden. Sounds great. The near-octogenarian has his work cut out but I’m sure he’ll give it a damn good go. I’ve now been in Romania for three US presidents and six Romanian prime ministers.

Coronavirus - Life :) - Photos - Poker

Keeping the heat in

January 20, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s cold. Last night I put the central heating on for the first time this winter. Amazing, really. These great hulking blocks of concrete that were put up during communism are almost unbearably ugly on the outside, but they sure keep the heat in. We also have communal pipes that travel down all eight storeys – there must be a giant boiler somewhere, and one day every year in late October or early November you can hear the water gurgle. My student in Maramureș has taken a break – I hope it’s only a break – and that meant I could visit the supermarket yesterday as it opened at eight. The temperature at that time was minus six. It’s a great time to go because it’s almost empty. The lady at the checkout even had time to compliment me on my choice of spuds (“they’re so good for mashing, but you have to eat the mashed potatoes as soon as you make them”). It’s hard to know what to say (in Romanian!) in reply to something unexpected like that.

Yesterday was a funny day. I managed to get in three poker tournaments. The first was no-limit single draw (just like good old five-card draw, but the worst hand wins). I’d forgotten what a good tournament game that is. With only two rounds of betting, it’s very fast-paced. I finished in fifth place out of 93 runners after 3¼ hours, but only made $10 in profit. That’s because it was a bounty tournament, which means you get rewarded for knocking people out, and your reward is bigger if your victims have previously knocked people out themselves. None of my four scalps had eliminated anybody, so I only received small bounties. In these tournaments there’s a premium on building up a nice big stack, which I almost never had (relative to the field). My badugi tournament was over in a flash, and then I had a go at a turbo no-limit hold ’em tournament with a massive field. The buy-in for that was $22, but for some reason I got it as a freebie. I chipped up fairly well, but made an atrocious play (I think) with pocket jacks and I was soon out the door. My bankroll is now sitting at $220.

At the weekend my cousin showed her disdain for the way corners are being cut (as she saw it) with the vaccine roll-out in the UK. She thinks that delaying the second dose, so twice as many people can get their first dose, compromises the whole thing. Well, news flash, more than a thousand people are dying from Covid there every day. It’s an emergency. Sometimes you really do need to compromise. (Update: 1610 more Covid deaths have been recorded today. It’s Tuesday, which always gives the highest numbers, but still.) I sent her a link to one of John Campbell’s latest videos but I doubt she’ll watch it. I’ve just taken a delivery of six months’ worth of capsules containing zinc and magnesium.

We’ve got Dolly Parton on Musicorama right now.

This is what it looked like outside my window an hour ago:

Life :) - Photos - Poker

Winter scenes

January 18, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I spoke to my cousin in Wellington this morning. They’d been down in the South Island and dropped in on my parents. I had a total brain fart when I asked them if they’d been skiing. In January. In New Zealand. Normally that’s why they’d be passing through Geraldine. Their eldest boy is about to fly the nest – next month he’ll be off to Canterbury to study engineering. My parents remarked that he’d developed a distinctly non-Kiwi – almost British – accent, and yes, he picked that up within weeks of starting his expensive school. It was amazing, and a little unsettling, to hear such a sudden change just because he’d started a new school.

Maybe I asked about skiing because I had snow on the brain. We got chunky flakes of the stuff most days last week, only for it to melt away. Now we’ve got a blanket. Walking through fresh snow – crrrunch – is one of life’s pleasures, and one I missed out on in all those years in Auckland and Wellington.

I made $57 in a badugi tournament yesterday, finishing third. It’s the seventh time I’ve cashed in eleven attempts, including three appearances in the top five. (I doubt that sort of strike rate is sustainable.) There were one or two things I might have done differently in hindsight, but I thought I had a pretty good tournament overall. I’m making a lot more player notes than I used to – the same players show up time after time, so knowing what you’re up against is so valuable. After my wander into the endlessly fascinating Iosefin area of Timișoara this afternoon, I gave back a few dollars at the cash tables (a very profitable game on average, but I couldn’t hit a damn thing). My bankroll is currently $214.

Two days left of Trump, we hope.

Here are a few pictures from Iosefin, pre- and mid-snow:

This shop used to sell seeds. There is a seed shop (still doing business) next door.
The kids’ theatre
These two pigeons have found a warm spot. Here is one of many notices warning of falling bits and pieces.
Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - Music

The big chill

January 14, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

The snow I mentioned last time pretty much melted away, but now the white stuff is coming down properly.

Dad sent me a great video about Fen skating. The Fens – the pancake-flat part of East Anglia which I lived on the edge of – regularly floods and sometimes freezes. Before the half-arsed winters we get now, the meadows might be frozen for weeks, and people would skate on them, especially Bury Fen, near Earith where my aunt lives. I had a go once or twice, but was just about talent-free. The Fen skating tradition dates back at least a couple of centuries, and racing was serious business that drew bumper crowds. The men in the video are getting on a bit now; they reminisced about the famous winter of 1962-63 and three successive harsh winters in the 1980s – people came in their thousands then to participate or watch. They said that another deep freeze could revitalise the tradition, but I’m not so sure. Even the eighties are a world away now. Back in Romania, temperatures are forecast to dip into the double-figure negatives, so the Bega might freeze as it did during my first winter here. There was even ice fishing.

I watched the replay of Dad’s cousin’s funeral. The video only lasted half an hour, and a good part of that was music before and after the service. I couldn’t see very much. He was a potter, and much of the focus was on the relative fame he achieved in that sphere. He was a PR man, he gave lessons, he talked pots, he was all over social media, he met the great and the good of the potting world on his travels, and he blew his own trumpet loud and often. The complete opposite of my father, in other words, who can’t stand any of that stuff (you can see where I get it from) and has always preferred to let his paintings speak. He was described in the service as being curmudgeonly, cantankerous, and always right. Surly is the word I would use. I think he was actually quite friendly though if you got to know him (I never really did).

Coronavirus deaths in the UK have reached 100,000. Yesterday 1562 deaths were recorded. (On a per capita basis, this is equivalent to almost 8000 in the US.) People are often dying alone. Bodies are piling up in mortuaries. This level of excess death hasn’t been seen since the Second World War. It’s a tragic toll.

Last night’s Musicorama was dedicated to Joan Baez, who has just turned 80. What a voice, and what an incredible life she has led inside and outside of music. In the winter of 2015, just before I started this blog, I found myself playing Diamonds and Rust over and over. On Monday’s show that a variety of artists including Sting. Why do I like his All This Time so much, I wondered. Ahh, because it sounds so much like Paul Simon.