Life :)

Coronavirus - Life :) - Poker - Politics

Hard to stay optimistic

January 11, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s hard to stay optimistic at the moment. A month ago I felt that the end just might be in sight. Help was on the way, in the form of vaccines that had been developed at lightning speed. But the virus has morphed into this mutant monster, the vaccines are being rolled out mind-bogglingly slowly, and all that optimism was just a mirage. The UK is nothing short of a disaster zone. Once it was divided into three tiers, then a fourth was added, but the whole country is now officially in Tier Fucked. Leadership is been lamentable since the beginning, when Boris Johnson missed five straight emergency meetings. Daily death tolls – a lagging indicator – are already in four figures. My sister-in-law might not be a podiatrist for much longer. She could soon be a nurse. The south coast got off lightly during the first wave, but now it’s mayhem there, just like everywhere. Here in Romania it’s bad, but nowhere near that bad. However, we’re still dealing with old, non-mutant Covid, as far as I know. If the new variant takes hold (or should I say when?), all hell will break loose. In some ways I’m very lucky. My little job is extremely doable from home, and avoiding people is almost the norm for me.

Then there’s Trump and the riots in Washington where four people were killed. My god, where do you even start with these people? What will happen to Trump now? Could he be removed before the inauguration in ten days’ time? Could he end up in the slammer? Let’s hope so. And Covid is a massive shitshow in the US too, let’s not forget. It already feels a lifetime ago, but Trump’s phone call with Georgia’s secretary of state, horrendous as it was, probably helped the Democrats pick up those two seats in the runoffs, giving them control of the Senate (with Kamala Harris’s casting vote). That’s good news.

I need to stop it with all the disaster (and dystopia) porn on Netflix. Black Mirror, The Social Dilemma, David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet (brilliant though it is), and this morning a documentary about the Challenger accident in 1986. I remember that happening when I was in Mrs Stokes’s class in primary school. I liked Mrs Stokes. She died of cancer only three or four years later.

I finished 11th in a badugi tournament tonight, making eight bucks. There were 110 entries, including those who busted out and rebought. On a few occasions I was just one pot away from having a real shot at the final table and the bigger prizes, but it wasn’t to be. (I could easily have missed out entirely, too.) My bankroll is now $162.

Weather update: it’s snowing!

Life :) - Poker

Face time

January 4, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday I had my first meaningful face-to-face interaction since October. I met up with my long-term student couple at their modern-looking place in Sânandrei, a picturesque village about 10 km from here. The husband picked me up, and had an unbearable (to me) music station on the radio of his BMW. When I got there, the same station was playing on their 60-odd-inch TV. Shoot me, please. Perhaps they sensed something, because they switched it over to some traditional Romanian music, and then wall-to-wall Christmas music on a loop. Then Andreea gave me the happy news that she’s three months pregnant with a girl.

They’re a normal couple, and normal people scare me slightly, or at least trigger me. Wedding photos are always a toughie. Soon there will be baby photos too. I’d eaten before I left, so I didn’t fancy all the food they brought out, although I tried bits and pieces anyway – salată de boeuf, sarmale, and various prăjituri (cakes). Then it was time to drink. Palincă, or țuică, the distilled stuff that’s made from plums. They gave me some to take home. I’ve now got four bottles of homemade highly alcoholic liquid lying around, two of which look like water and the other two like pee. I really appreciated them inviting me over, but it was nice to get home. Maybe I’ve become so unused to socialising now that almost any amount of it is too much.

Răzvan told me he’d deleted his Facebook the moment the new year started. Good on him. It’s poison. I feel like I’m the only person on the planet not to be hooked by Facebook. When I moved here and I briefly toyed with it because I thought it might help me find work, but I soon found it creepy and a chore. The magnet for me worked the other way – I was repelled, or repulsed, I suppose. And it’s not like I didn’t try. Over the years I set up several accounts but couldn’t make myself actually do Facebook. I think for me it’s simple – I’m not normal. I’ve never ever, not since I was a little boy, had the need to interact with a large group of people all at once, and that’s the whole point of Facebook. (I don’t think this blog counts.) I hated sending emails to groups at work. In fact I couldn’t stand work email full stop. And now I have virtually no work email – isn’t that great?

I now have Netflix. Are they spying on me? What can they determine from my preferences? Or my avatar? The first thing I saw was, naturally, The Social Dilemma. In fact that’s why I subscribed to Netflix. My 13-year-old student had watched the documentary, and if I watched it too I could ask him (hopefully) thought-provoking questions about it. It was well worth watching. I found it telling that parents who work in social media don’t let their kids near the stuff. I used Twitter to inform myself during the early days of Covid, and before and during the US election (I received but hardly ever transmitted), but now I don’t use social media at all. I have WhatsApp, but I only use it like a text message; I’m not in any groups (and I would hate to be). I can get by fine without all of this, but I must be in such a small minority as to wonder if I have something badly wrong with me. I’ve now just seen White Christmas, the episode at the end of season two of Black Mirror. About as disturbing as I expected.

PokerStars use every hook imaginable to entice players into their quick-fire games and quickly generate rake for the site, but I’m not biting. My luck at the tournament tables hasn’t so far transferred to the cash tables where I’m running like total arse (over, admittedly, just a few hundred hands which is nothing). My bankroll is $128.

Coronavirus - Life :) - Poker

The good guys

January 2, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

We literally rang in the new year a few minutes after my last post, as the cathedral bells chimed like billy-o. A few people set off fireworks from their gardens but the streets were empty; there was an 11pm curfew. Shortly afterwards, the eleven-year-old boy I teach sent me a lovely text to wish me a happy new year.

I saw this coronavirus logo today. I thought it was clever and effective:

This new Covid variant is more transmissible, so the threshold for herd immunity will be higher. We all need to take the vaccine – it’s that simple – but scarily many people will refuse. I saw some eye-popping figures from a survey in France. Last week the woman in Maramureș said she wouldn’t be taking the vaccine, that it’s bad to wear a mask unless you know you’re infectious (?!?!), and that the virus is harmless unless you’re already very sick beforehand and it doesn’t kill anyone who wouldn’t have died soon anyway. Sorry, but that isn’t true. “My English isn’t very good. I don’t think you understand what I’m saying.” No, you’ve got your points across perfectly well. It’s just that you’re talking utter dangerous bollocks. And she’s training to be a nurse, would you believe. My hope is that when people that the vaccine isn’t causing severe side effects, they’ll eventually fall in line and take it themselves.

The renowned music-and-poker guy I mentioned yesterday goes by the name of Steve Albini. He seems a thoroughly good guy. I wouldn’t mind being him, I think. Another good guy is a friend from Wellington who I thought might have blipped off the radar for good, but it was a real pleasure when he replied to my Christmas email. I hope we can stay in touch.

I visited the mall very briefly yesterday. Part of the reason I don’t like modern malls (Covid or not) is their slickness. I realise I don’t do slick. For instance, just before Christmas I watched a live online broadcast of the “great conjunction” of Jupiter and Saturn, where the two planets merged in the same line of sight. The commentator was Italian, and his English was rudimentary, but he had a passion for astronomy that came across more fully because of his imperfect English. (Some things I prefer to be slick. Public transport. Online banking and payments. In fact all service industries in general. But otherwise I’m happy for things to be more imperfect and authentic.)

I looked at some of my stats from last night’s badugi tournament. I won 23 out of 43 showdowns, a little over half, but I went just 3-from-11 when we got heads-up. The heads-up part lasted all of 31 hands; I could have sworn it was longer. On Wednesday I played my craziest hand ever at the micro badugi cash tables, crazier than any of the tens of thousands of hands I played back in the day. There were two maniacs at the table, betting and raising until the first three streets were capped. With my hand I had no choice but to come along for a very bumpy ride. I could hardly believe it when the nine of diamonds I spiked on the last draw was enough to give me the $24 six-way pot. When you’re running a small bankroll, a hand like that can make an outsized difference.

Coronavirus - Life :) - Poker

Good riddance to 2020

January 1, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Minutes left of 2020 in Romania as I write this. (The time stamp will say 1st January 2021. I’ve never moved my blog off New Zealand time; they’re eleven hours ahead of us.)

New Zealand is one of the few places on earth to have a real New Year’s Eve. It’s (yet another) good advert for NZ to see the Sky Tower fireworks beamed across the planet. Sydney managed to have their famous pyrotechnics from the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, even though they’re not out of the Covid woods. And that might be about it. We’ve got the odd banger going off in Timișoara as a write, but the usual organised stuff has been canned, as far as I know.

I’ve just finished second in a badugi tournament, for a profit of $45, after 4½ hours. (Badugi is a kind of poker, my favourite kind of poker, in case you’re wondering.) I survived a pretty dire moment in the second hour, but from then on I steadily chipped up. I pulled off some pat bluffs (not drawing any cards when you don’t have a real hand), which are the coolest, most adrenalin-pumping part of the game. Then when we were down to three I picked off pat bluffs (also known as snows) from both the other two players. When we got heads-up I had an enormous chip lead, but my opponent drew out on me twice when he was all-in, and mounted a comeback. He hit hands, I didn’t, and after quite a long back-and-forth I had to settle for second. So it could have been better, but my bankroll is up to $152.

I recently communicated on a poker forum with a guy from Chicago who’s knowledgeable about all kinds of weird variants, enjoys the game immensely, and is obviously a good player. But I had no idea (until I did a spot of googling) that he was famous. He’s 59, and a long-time production engineer for some of the all-time great indie bands, including Nirvana back in the day. The sound on In Utero, that’s him. He charges very little for his services, hence why he’s always been in such demand. And he’s been in a few successful bands himself (one of which was called Rapeman – I can think of better band names). He’s very outspoken about commercialisation of music, and I don’t blame him. Somehow he’s also an amazing poker player. In 2018 he took down the seven-card stud event at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. And he writes so eloquently. He’s a man of many talents.

Six minutes of the old year to go.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Photos - Poker

A few pics (and a spot of poker)

December 30, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s currently a ridiculous 12 degrees on the penultimate day of a crazy year, and the fourth anniversary of the day I moved into this flat. I remember that day well. All I had was a suitcase, a backpack, and a view. It was like a dream. I could have ended up anywhere but I’m slap-bang in the middle of this beautiful city. That’s mad. And then the next day the square was absolutely heaving. New Year is (under normal circumstances) a big deal here.

I’ve had a big last quarter of 2020 on the work front. A third of my hours this year have come since 1st October. To put that another way, my daily volume over the last three months has been 50% higher, on average, than in the first nine months. Yesterday I had five sessions (8½ hours) and felt I could have done better. I’d run out of things to do; I was winging it. Since I moved exclusively online, where there are fewer tools at my disposal, winging it has been a more prominent feature. One of my sessions was with the ex-professional poker player; he pointed me towards a database you can use to scout out fish in PokerStars hold ’em games.

Yes, poker. On Monday night I made $24 from a badugi tournament. I came fifth out of more than 100 players, surviving for 3¾ hours. It’s funny getting back into that again. The adrenalin rush of hitting a big hand or calling a big bluff. People made more moves than I remember a decade ago, or maybe they did then too and I just didn’t notice. I’m a better watcher of the game than back in the old days. My demise, or almost, came when I was dealt the 41st best hand in the game (which is better than it sounds), but my opponent made the 39th. That left me almost chipless, and two hands later I was out. After a couple of other cashes (and some non-cashes, of course), my bankroll is $97, which gives me just enough of a buffer to play the cash games. My goal isn’t really to make money (though that would be nice), but to enjoy the game and play a whole lot less robotically than I feel I used to.

When I called my parents last night, Dad had gone to Temuka to get his blood checked, so I was able to have a good chat with Mum. As long as we avoid all talk of Dad’s health, we get on extremely well. It will be a long time before I hug her again.

Here are some pictures of Timișoara (where else?):

Central Park, 20/11/20
This is Serbian. “Who is the fastest in the city?”
Some old maps of Timișoara Fortress
Gearing up for the “Romania without masks” protest.
Christmas dinner
Books - Coronavirus - Family - Life :) - The UK

A strange festive season

December 26, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Wednesday night, I met one of my students. She paid me for my lessons, then showered me with gifts. It was dark, but there was clearly a book (in Romanian, inevitably), some sarmale, and a cozonac. Damn. You’ve wrecked my Christmas Eve cooking plans. (I’m serious. I’m not great at planning, and when I do make a plan, it throws me for a loop when someone makes me suddenly abandon it.) I can still make some salată de boeuf, I suppose. But when I got home, I opened the glass container to find some salată de boeuf. She must have read my mind. Or this blog. I’ll have a go at all that Romanian cuisine some other time.

On Christmas Eve, not a lot happened. I had a lesson with the woman in Brașov. She’d forgotten that we’d scheduled a meeting for Christmas Eve, and when I called her at 8am she was still in bed. We eventually had the lesson at ten. No grammar or anything taxing. Just chat about Christmas and Covid-related stuff. She said she was glad Romania is always behind other European countries, because it means the vaccine will be safer when it gets here. Then I got the business about allergic reactions. Then the stuff about the MMR vaccine causing autism, which is utterly, dangerously, false. In the evening I heard that the Brexit deal had gone through. With days until the deadline, there were only two real options. This was the second worst option. I was sad to learn that Britain will no longer be part of the Erasmus programme, which I took advantage of in 2000-01. None of the students left out in the cold were old enough to vote in the referendum. (Die-hard Brexiteers will applaud this, of course. Erasmus is for the elite, or some such shit. It even sounds Latin, doesn’t it? Mr Erasmus was in fact a philosopher and monk from Rotterdam. Since the programme began in the late eighties, over three million students have taken the opportunity to study abroad in Rotterdam. Or anywhere.)

Not that much happened on Christmas Day either, really. It was a wet day. (One of my ex-students sent me a video clip of her Christmas morning in Austria. It was snowing there.) Mum and Dad called me from Hampden – they’d had their Christmas dinner in Moeraki. I ate some of all that Romanian food I’d been given (I felt far more grateful than I did on Wednesday night), drank some Romanian drink (the red wine was called Sânge de Taur, “Bull’s Blood”), and read my book. I’ve almost finished Kate Atkinson’s extremely clever Life After Life, which didn’t do much for me at the start (this is too clever) but quickly grew on me. Once I’ve finished that, I’ll start on my present, Inocenții by Ioana Pârvulescu. That will keep me going. My brother called me; he and his wife had done a normal Christmas dinner for the two of them, with all the turkey and pigs in blankets. He’d have been quite happy not to bother, I think, but she takes Christmas pretty seriously. My brother told me that St Ives had been flooded. Not the south side where we lived that often got flooded before the embankment was built in 2006, but north of the river where most people live. It’s been a very crappy Christmas for them. I dread to think what Christmas will do to the Covid situation in the UK. I don’t think 25th December dominates anywhere in world like it does there. Then I spoke to my aunt, who immediately asked me if I was bored. She’s obsessed with boredom. No, and so what if I am. There are far worse things in life than being bored. Thanks to Brexit, from the middle of next year my pre-pay phone plan will no longer include calls to the UK.

Dad’s cousin, whom I called my uncle when I was growing up, died on Tuesday (the 22nd). I don’t know if there will even be a funeral, let alone where or when or how. He’s one of a number of male family members to have died of cancer a few months either side of their 70th birthday. Dad, now six months past his 70th, has been through the wars but keeps hanging in there.

I was going to meet my student couple later today at their rather nice-looking house Sânandrei, but she’s just texted me to say she’s ill. It would have been my first real time spent with other humans for ages, and last night I was contemplating what to wear. My blue shoes? Hopefully we can still catch up.

Language teaching - Life :)

Hope I can spin and stay

December 17, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I went to the immigration office this morning after my lesson, but I didn’t get very far. There were five people in a queue, inches apart from each other. They wore masks, and the entrance door was open so ventilation was good, but I might have been there for hours. Time is so often the real killer. So I turned round and went home. I wanted to ask what exactly I need to do to ensure I can stay in Romania after the end of the Brexit transition period, but as I was basically expecting a don’t know, I decided it wasn’t worth it. I’ve had no luck emailing them or phoning them.

The Covid numbers are coming down here, but aggravatingly slowly, and they could easily shoot back up again after Christmas. If everyone was like me, staying out of everyone else’s way as much as practically possible, we’d now have a handful of cases every day, not a handful of thousands. It’s frustrating. But the fact that most people aren’t at all like me, for better or worse, is something I came to terms with ages ago.

They’re making the UK (or should I say England) Covid rules up as they go on, and I’m glad I’m here and not there. My student in Barcelona told me that things are stricter in Spain; you can’t move freely between say Barcelona and Madrid. But you can still happily get on a plane! Her boyfriend’s family are from Peru, and he’s flying there for Christmas. First to Amsterdam, then 12½ hours to Lima. You need a mask and a plastic visor and a negative Covid test and this and that, but just ugh.

During last night’s lesson there was a march to the cathedral steps for the anniversary of the Revolution that kicked off in Timișoara on 16th December 1989. “Libertate!” “Mai bine mort decât comunist!” I gave my student (who’s 38 and at least remembers the fall of communism even if he was too young to understand the whats and whys) a bit of a running commentary. Talking to Romanians about communism never ceases to be fascinating. Then we went through his translation of a difficult article from Romanian into English, before doing some work on prepositions, which are a minefield in both languages. For instance, I just got an alert in Romanian to say that Emmanuel Macron had tested positive for coronavirus. But the Romanian said “cu coronavirus” which usually corresponds to with in English.

I finally bit the bullet and deposited $40 on PokerStars. What’s it like these days, I wondered, ten years after I played regularly. I had to open a new account under their Romanian licence. The name “plutoman” was already taken, and adding numbers to the end looked kind of meh, but luckily they allow special characters, so taking a leaf out of Marc Bolan’s book I stuck an umlaut on the o: “plutöman”. (Not to mention Motörhead, Mötley Crüe, and a whöle bünch of others.)

Things have changed for sure. They’ve tried to Roulettify things a bit, to attract new players. The new big thing is the Spin & Go, a quick-as-a-flash three-person hold ’em tournament with a random prize for the winner. Most of the time the winner will only get back double the buy-in, but occasionally it’ll be bigger, and very very occasionally it’ll be in the thousands, even for a buy-in of a dollar or less. When you make your first deposit, they drip-feed you some free low-value Spin & Go tickets over a period of a few days. When you fire up one of these things, wheels spin like on a fruit machine (or the pokies, to go all Aussie or Kiwi) to tell you what the prize will be, then you start playing. It’s best to play maniacally. Anything half-decent and go all in. I spun the wheel four times yesterday. Once I got lucky and the prize (for a 50-cent stake) was $5. Despite playing atrociously on one hand when we were heads-up, I lucked out and claimed the five bucks. In another game I shoved with A-10 on the very first hand, both the other players went all in too, and I won, but the prize was only a $1 ticket. The other two times I bombed out. I can see how the little wins you get, and the sheer speed that everything happens, would make this format like crack for some people, but I’ll stay away once I run out of tickets.

No more health news from Dad. He’s had his 18-month check-up but hasn’t had the result yet. I hope he can get the blood in his urine (which is painless, and probably caused by his prostate) checked out ASAP.

It’s a lovely winter’s day here.

Family - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

The latest worry

December 14, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I spoke to my parents on FaceTime this morning and I was just about to hang up when their landline phone rang. Mum took the call. This sounds medical. What’s going on? Apparently Dad had blood in his urine when they were down in Queenstown, and the phone call was about an appointment to get that checked out. This week he also has his scheduled 18-month post-cancer-operation check-up. Mum told me not to worry. What the hell? Of course I’m going to worry. And if they’d got that call a minute later I would never have known.

Yesterday my aunt called me. We chatted for half an hour – that’s probably some kind of record. She started off, as usual, saying she was bored and depressed. The depressed part I sympathise with; you have some say over the bored bit though. She said her antidepressant wasn’t doing the trick, so I gave her the name of mine, though it might not be suitable for her (if she could get a doctor to prescribe it anyway). We had a friendly chat, about hairstyles among other things. She was all there and half-way back but her world has become oh so small. I’m sure things would be very different if my uncle was still alive.

This afternoon I played tennis for the last time until the spring. Tennis has been of real benefit to me. Plenty of exercise and a fair bit of Romanian too. Today I finally figured out what a da din mână means. (Mână is Romanian for hand.) The phrase means to just rally, without playing a game. The first time I heard it was when one of the women wanted to go for a pee behind the bushes, and the rest of us rallied while she was busy. Does it mean to pee, I wondered. There are lots of Romanian expressions involving mână. One of the most common is sărut mâna, literally “kiss hand”, which is used when you say goodbye to a (usually older) woman. The t is silent.

Since the US election I’ve been following the news less. Most of the time it just isn’t worth it. Three incompetent prime ministers (in their own ways) have helped push Britain to the brink of a nonsensical tear-down-everything exit from the EU while the pandemic rages on. (Hopefully I’ll be safe here.) And Donald Trump is fast-tracking executions before he leaves office, while 3000 Americans are dying every day from Covid. He really is a piece of shit, isn’t he?

I remember the 2003 rugby World Cup final very well. I watched it at my grandmother’s place; it was a few days before getting on the plane to New Zealand where I would start my new life. How sweet it was to see England lift the cup. Against Australia. In Australia. In the 100th minute. (When I arrived in NZ, they were still dissecting the All Blacks’ semi-final exit.) But I was reading that Steve Thompson, who was in the cup-winning side, can’t remember winning it. He even forgets his wife’s name sometimes. Gee whiz. He’s barely older than me. He’s one of several ex-elite rugby players to suffer from dementia.

We’re racing towards Christmas. It’ll be my third in five years spent alone, and I’m fine with that. No stress. I’ll attempt to make some Romanian food. Sarmale. A ciorbă. Maybe even a cozonac if I get really ambitious. I’ve got some vișinată, which is lovely, and even some țuică if desperation sets in. (Google these things if you like.)

I had 33½ hours of lessons last week.

Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Romania

Why didn’t he tell me?

December 9, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

The busker outside has just been playing La Fereastra Ta (“At Your Window”), an early-eighties hit by Cluj band Semnal M. I remember hearing it when I listened to Romanian radio online in the months before coming here, and trying to make sense of the lyrics. In my letterbox I’ve just had a note telling me I have to pick up a small package from the post office. I was hoping it would be the books Mum ordered for me, but I think that because it’s “small” it’ll be the CD I ordered off Ebay: Mwng from Welsh band Super Furry Animals. The whole album is in Welsh. I’ll pick it up tomorrow. (I also bought one or two items of clothing on Ebay, but they seem to have vanished into thin air.) Talking of music, the Kinks song Apeman came on the radio a few days ago. A great song which expresses how I feel about 21st-century life, even though it came out fifty years ago. Leave modern life behind and massively simplify everything. In some ways, that’s what I’ve done. A funny thing though – they bleeped out the first word of “fogging up my eyes”. It does sound suspiciously like “fucking”, but in reality it isn’t, and at any rate I’ve heard expletive-laden songs in English on the radio here which have been left uncensored.

Romania’s parliamentary elections have produced a split decision. The PSD (clear winners last time) are the biggest party again, but with a far smaller vote share this time, and it looks like they’ll be locked out of a coalition. The forward-thinking USR-plus (who were in third place, and may form part of government along with PNL who finished second) came top in Timișoara. There’s also a new party on the scene called AUR (which means “gold”); they’re anti-lockdown, anti-mask, and anti even thinking Covid is real. AUR got 9%, nearly twice the threshold for entering parliament, in a shock result. My student last night said they only did so well because of their shiny name. Turnout was abysmal, even considering the pandemic: only about a third showed up. And we’re currently rudderless. Ludovic Orban, the latest prime minister in a long line of them since I washed up in Romania, has quit. We still have a president, though.

After my two tricky lessons last night, finishing at 10:15, it was a great pleasure to talk to the woman who lives near Barcelona this morning. The woman I saw last night at seven is always so vacant. The lights are on but nobody’s home. What am I doing wrong? Help me! When I gave up on grammar exercises and asked her about her Christmas plans, she mercifully turned her dimmer switch up a notch or two. Then it was the poker guy with a big-stack ego. He’s so bloody good and knowledgeable about everything and loves saying so. I had 90 nauseating minutes of that. (Apart from those two students, everybody else I have is great, so I can’t complain.) The woman in Spain told me she didn’t like weddings. Join the club, I said. (Except my brother’s.) I bet loads of people don’t like weddings but don’t dare admit it.

I’ve been scouring statistics about verb tenses. (That’s the present perfect continuous.) There are twelve tenses in English, and I’ve been teaching them, concentrating on what I think are the most important ones. In speaking, more than half our verbs are in the simple present. (Not the present continuous, which some Romanians use continuously. That’s far less common.) About 20% of what we say is in the past simple. When we write a story, we’re generally writing about the past, so the percentages tend to flip. In my last blog post, which included an account of a tennis match, roughly 60% of what I wrote was in the past simple. All the stats I saw online confirmed what I thought. Five tenses are important enough to warrant serious study, including the problematic present perfect. Another three are useful once you’re at a pretty decent level. As for the remaining four (like the past perfect continuous – “I had been waiting at the station all day”), you can get by perfectly fine without them.

I spoke to my brother last night. They were in the middle of laying their parquet flooring. Eleven hundred strips of wood, each requiring two screws. It looked like painstaking work. My sister-in-law should get a shot of Pfizer any minute. I recently had a strange dream about my brother, although he wasn’t actually there. No, he’d gone to the moon (!) and Mum was naturally worried about him. Why didn’t he tell me?!

Life :) - New Zealand - Tennis

Real estate, but it feels fake

December 7, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I flew off the handle yesterday when Dad suggested I max myself out by buying a place in the UK. Spend that much?! I don’t want to go back there again. Real estate is a sore point for me, and it doesn’t help that my parents have four properties and might be buying a fifth. I’m perfectly fine with the idea of buying a home – I’d like to have my own place in Timișoara – but the property market itself leaves me stone cold. My own experiences don’t help here. When I bought my flat in Wellington, people asked me if I was excited. What sort of question is that? I’ve just spent a ton of money, most of which I don’t have, and to pay off all that debt I’m using the income from my job which I probably won’t have in a few months either. (As it turned out, I didn’t have it in a few weeks. My salary almost halved at that point. Then a few months later my apartment block was basically condemned. Plus I was suffering from depression. All very exciting, right? Like riding the crest of a high and beautiful bloody wave.) No, buying that place felt like an obligation and nothing more. Done, ticked the box, phew. I was happy to oblige because I thought it would be the best move for me financially, even if paying off the mortgage might soon become a challenge. Renting it out was a good move certainly – my rental income in the last four years has helped me take giant hunks out of my mortgage – and to escape with the sort of money that can buy me something is a better result that I dared to imagine, but it’s perhaps understandable that I’m hesitant about diving straight back in.

But it’s not just that. To give yourself the best chance of avoiding poverty in New Zealand (or Australia or the UK, for that matter), you need to get on the property ladder. That’s becoming a harder proposition all the time, mainly because both Labour and National governments have done nothing to change the insane tax legislation that makes property investment more attractive than other (productive!) forms. Immigration policy and lack of cheaper housing haven’t helped either. As time goes on, you’re forced to enter the market later (unless you have wealthy parents), mortgage yourself even further beyond your eyeballs, and the profits you make will shrink as you spend less time in the market. But you still have to do it. It’s reality, but a very shitty reality. It beats me why anyone would be excited about any of that.

When I went anywhere with my parents in New Zealand, they always took detours to look at houses. If we happened to be in a town centre, they’d be peering in through real estate agent windows. It drove me nuts. And they were pretty low on the scale compared to others. They didn’t attend open homes as a hobby, for instance. As for my aunt who would come round and gossip about what places in Geraldine had sold and for how much – seven sodding sixty for whatever place up on the Downs – I’d just about lose it. Yes, always up on the Downs.

What a tennis match I got involved in yesterday. Singles. I hadn’t done that for ages. My opponent was 58 and super-fit. Much fitter than me. He plays other sports like football and possibly handball and volleyball too. I started well, moving out to a 4-1 lead. He won the next two games but I then served for the set at 5-3 and had two set points at 40-15. They came and went, and it was soon 5-5. His unforced errors were a big help to me as I got my nose in front again, and then came the 12th game. A ridiculous game. Lobs that he was able to retrieve, somehow. A gut-buster of a rally on my third set point that I lost. I was gasping for air after that. He had five chances to force a tie-break. On my fourth set point we had another crazy rally, and eventually he hit wide. After escaping with the set I was buoyed and he had a slight let-down. I led 3-0 in the second set. But then he came roaring back. I was up 4-2, but he levelled at 4-4, after I’d had points to win both those games. I then led 5-4 and 0-30 on his serve, and had a match point. I couldn’t put him away. He held on and broke me easily in game 11. Then we ran out of time; we’d booked the court for 90 minutes. He was an extremely tricky customer. Controlled aggression throughout, and solid on both sides. I needed to take big risks to hit winners against him. I hit uncharacteristic unforced errors which dented my confidence, and meant I got bogged down. My biggest failing was an inability to take the ball earlier; I felt I was giving him too much time. But his fitness, at his age, was remarkable, and it made me think I need to do something. Buying a better bike would be a start.

St Andrew’s Day (30th November), Romania’s national day (1st December) and Moș Nicolae (St Nicholas Day, yesterday) have gone by without a whimper. No market stalls outside. No slănină or mămăligă or mulled wine. None of those inescapable smells. It’s all very weird. Soon I’ll be having my third Christmas alone in five years, so that won’t feel weird at all.