Life :)

Family - Life :) - Tennis

Kids and pics

September 16, 2020 plutomanby 1 Comment

If any of you are wondering what my little profile picture is, it’s of a busker drumming his guitar on Wellington’s Cuba Street. I thought I wouldn’t mind being him, so I took six snaps of him, and spliced them together to make a shaky, slightly manic-looking GIF. It’s cool that WordPress lets me use it as my pic.

I had a look at my posts from a year ago, and although the world has changed so much in that time, so much was the same: wishing I had a bit more work, Brexit, Sfânta Cruce, hot weather, and a gripping men’s US Open final that I failed to see.

Dominic Thiem came from two sets down to beat Alexander Zverev 8-6 in the fifth-set tie-break. It doesn’t get tighter than that, or harder to take for the loser. Zverev was distraught at the end. It’s the first time the men’s final has gone to 7-6 in the fifth. I’m happy for Thiem that he won – he’s been close in grand slams before – and this might help him to win another slam, one that won’t be “asterisked” by the absence of players like Nadal. I didn’t see the match – it started late and I had a lesson early in the morning.

It was striking how many children were milling around in town today, either with their parents or without. Today is the second day of the school year, but most schools are doing some hybrid system of both online and in-person teaching. In some parts of the country, this is a real challenge, because not everywhere has the super-fast internet we do. (Those mostly rural places tend not to have much Covid either, so they have the green light for school to go back as normal, but there are exceptions.) Seeing all those kids, and the kids I work with, those incredible bundles of life full of so much hope and joy, makes me a bit sad that I’m unlikely to have any of my own.

Sfânta Cruce – or Sfânta Corona this year, perhaps – was as big as ever. Crowds outside the cathedral late night, and a long snaking queue today. Earlier this evening it was right back to the bus stop. Masks, mostly, but not much distancing.

Dad sent me a nice picture of Mum and me in Ireland. We went there as a family when I was ten. It was a very different country in 1990; the Celtic tiger hadn’t begun to roar. They still used pounds (for money) and miles per hour. It was beautiful but also bleak. We boarded the newly kitted out ferry, named Felicity, at Fishguard in Wales, and that took us to Rosslare. We spent two weeks, mostly in Cork and Kerry, where we camped. Mum saw a priest in Kerry to help with a family history request. (Her family came out to New Zealand from Kerry in 1874.) The weather was good for the first week, but it rained almost non-stop the second week. We came back a different way, from Dun Laoghaire to Holyhead, on an older ship.

Some good state polls for Biden today. “Only” seven weeks to go.

Here are some pictures.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :)

What do you say?

September 1, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

This morning one of my students called me to say he won’t be coming to our lesson tomorrow because his 64-year-old father had died of a heart attack. His parents live in the country and his father was out doing heavy physical work in the blazing sun. Yeesh. What do you say when somebody’s father dies so suddenly at a too-young age? He says he’ll be back to see me on 22nd September, but seriously, just when you’re up to it again.

Just last night I happened to be reading about Romania’s low life expectancy relative to other EU countries, especially among men, and especially in the countryside where people are poorer and have less access to healthcare. For a man born in 1956 in rural Romania, 64 is probably about average. Heart disease is the number one killer.

I had a good lesson this morning. My student couldn’t get the sound on Zoom to work, so we made do with WhatsApp. She got the present simple. To be in all its forms, and the positive forms of all other verbs. She’s got that first brick in the often-flimsy verb wall in place. After that we played Taboo and she added half a dozen words to her vocabulary. I happily extended the lesson to make up for all the faff at the start. Our next session will be on Wednesday. (I’m grateful for the 7:30 starts which are forcing me to get up earlier and helping me structure my day.)

My parents keep me updated on the Kiwi coronavirus situation, and I keep telling them that Romania is getting about as many cases daily as New Zealand has had in total. Tomorrow Romanian restaurants and cafés are opening up again inside. You can count me out, thank you very much.

In the last six months, coronavirus has shone a 500-megawatt spotlight on Western society in 2020, and not in a good way. The misinformation, the politicisation, the tribalism, the selfishness, the entitlement, the steaming pile of shit that is social media – it’s hard not to feel extremely pessimistic. I was just reading an article about Marseille’s anti-mask, anti-science, anti-Paris warrior – he’s all over social media, potentially killing the city’s residents with his advice, but they don’t care because he’s on their team. No country is immune from this nihilism, not even New Zealand who are perhaps the nearest thing to it.

In New Zealand, they seem to have good scientists who people (by and large) respect. One of these is Siouxsie Wiles, infectious disease expert. Judging by her long curly pink hair, she’s probably ever so slightly mad, but she’s done no end of good during the pandemic. As I said about Donald Trump and Boris Johnson in another post, mad does not have to be evil; most of the time mad is good.

Yesterday, as I heard the strains of Por Una Cabeza and Vara la Țară from the buskers on a scorching late-summer day, I thought of how much time I’d spent alone this summer, even more than usual. The odd face-to-face lesson, the occasional drink with Bogdan, a few games of tennis, and that’s been just about it.

Last week I spoke to my brother – it was great to see him in such an upbeat mood. The UK Covid situation seemed to have dragged him down, even if he was managing fine from a practical perspective – but being back at work has given him a much-needed boost.

A pigeon has just laid an egg in a ledge outside my laundry.

Language teaching - Life :) - Politics

No going back

August 30, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Right at the end of August, we’re hitting the mid-30s. Hot, soporific weather. At the same time, people in the UK are firing up their central heating.

This summer I’ve been eating a healthy diet. Tons of fruit and vege, mostly from the local produce market – the best market – and very little processed food. And I’ve been exercising more. Those 26 km round trips on my bike to Sânmihaiu Român – where I can read a book in the park and listen to the birds – are helping me shift some of my burtă (tummy). I’d like to get below 75 kilos. I’ve also ordered some second-hand clothes from Ebay – smarter stuff but stuff that’s still me.

It’s six months since the Covid freak-out started – did people even call it Covid then? – and two-thirds of the year is now in the rear-view mirror. It’s therefore just four months until the Brexit transition period expires. I really really hope all my pre-Brexit papers can be converted and I can stay here. Timișoara has been life-changing for me. Timișoara is my life now. Then if the Wellington sale goes through I can maybe look at buying a place here with a dedicated space for teaching, setting up an actual business, getting myself a car, and really building something. Perhaps – who knows? – even a relationship.

I had a busy first half of last week, and it’s amazing what that did to my mood. On Monday I started online lessons with a 41-year-old woman who lives in a place called Negrești Oaș near Baia Mare (which I visited in 2017). She’s at a fairly low level – no more than 3 on my 0-to-10 scale – and WhatsApp lessons with her were no easy task. Tomorrow we’ll be switching to Zoom. Without an easy way of sharing documents, we’re both pretty much hamstrung.

At the market on Wednesday I was still thinking about the world I used to live in. The ego-driven meetings, the desk moves, the restructures, the pretending to care, the slinking into the background to cope, the barrenness of each day, the futility of it all. How could I go back to that? For any sum of money? (And in 2011, I did go back after a much shorter time away, and the money was good, but I was like a fish out of water.) Now I get the sights and smells and sounds of the markets and the grandmothers and Simon Says and the Formula 1 game and the handmade cards and it’s all more real, more raw, more colourful, more mad. If I went back I doubt I’d even survive.

So much is going on in America, and very little of it is good. Fires in California, a hurricane hitting the Gulf Coast, a man shot seven times in the back and the dreadful aftermath of all that. And of course Covid-19, which is still killing about 1000 a day. The official death toll will likely hit 200,000 in the middle of next month. With all of this, and Trump’s failure to even acknowledge most of that, the vile man still has a shot at re-election. I found an free-to-enter online prediction game, open to anyone with a Twitter account (I have one, even though I hate social media), where the organiser has stumped up prizes for the top three predictors. I picked a very narrow electoral college victory for Trump combined with roughly a three-point popular vote win for Biden. I very much hope I’m wrong.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Writing a book

Steady progress with the book

August 11, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I spoke to my aunt this morning. We both had an almost total lack of news. It was hot in Earith where she lives, just like here, so at least this time she couldn’t contradict me on the weather front.

My work volumes are relatively low so I’ve been working on the book. I’m now up to letter I of the dictionary part. My Romanian teacher is now tackling the first (most important) part which contains all the big-ticket items, in other words the mistakes that even good speakers make over and over. She’s made a good start at correcting my Romanian, which as I’ve said before, isn’t up to this kind of task.

I only had one lesson today, with the eleven-year-old boy who lives with his grandmother. I beat him in the Formula One game for the fourth time running. He’s a mild-mannered kid but I think he was ever so slightly pissed off today. In the first couple of games he didn’t exactly apply optimal strategy, but now it’s pretty much dumb luck. Today he drew a card that sent him into the pit stop on the last lap, and I was able to overtake him.

Last week we had that awful explosion in Beirut. At first I thought it was a terrorist attack, but it was a terrible accident. The warehouse was on the waterfront, right next to a grain silo, so the blast took out much of the city’s food supply. As well as the hundreds who have died, about 300,000 people have been displaced. Lebanon was in a deep enough crisis already, exacerbated by Covid-19, so this is an utter tragedy. It was impressive to see Emmanuel Macron make a hasty visit to Beirut, appearing in a packed crowd and risking getting Covid-19; I could hardly imagine Boris Johnson doing something similar. I’ve just read that the Lebanese government have quit.

Joe Biden’s lead over Donald Trump shows signs of narrowing. His average lead looks to be seven points, or perhaps half a point more. There are under three months to go, and early voting starts soon in some states. I see this election as a giant IQ test, but even if the country passes it (i.e. significantly more people vote for Biden than for Trump), will their sham of an electoral system hold up enough to be rid of the bastard?

Coronavirus. Romania is in what looks like a plateau, but it has spread to just about all parts of the country. My panic level has dropped just a tad, but I don’t know how justified that is.

Mum and Dad got their birthday cards from me yesterday. Their birthdays were six and eight weeks ago.

Family - Life :)

Fighting the fatigue

July 26, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Suffering from fatigue again, though nothing like last weekend. Today I was able to have a decent walk and play tennis without too many problems. I wandered into Mehala this morning, where the plum trees were packed. I’m pretty sure I picked some from the same tree outside the house where the woman shouted at me two years ago. I was going to say that Mehala is my favourite part of Timișoara, but in truth I’ve got lots of favourites. It’s probably my favourite residential area, though.

On Thursday night I went to the doctor to pick up my month’s supply of pills. I continue to be impressed by the level of medical attention I get here. I told him about my fatigue, and he tested my oxygen saturation (good), blood pressure (fine) and breathing (no problems). My temperature had already been checked on the way in to the surgery, and that was fine too. I told him I didn’t have a cough or fever when I felt so tired. He concluded that it almost certainly wasn’t coronavirus (I was pretty sure of that anyway) and prescribed me some multivitamin pills, one a day for 15 days. They contain, iron, zinc, selenium, manganese, fluoride, copper, folic acid, and a whole host of other minerals and vitamins, including a small amount vitamin D, which I’m taking a much larger dose of in a separate tablet. They also contain ginseng, which seems to be quite popular here. These pills won’t do me any harm.

I haven’t heard any more from my brother about the house. It was obvious when I spoke to him that the enthusiasm for moving came from his wife far more than from him. My best guess is that she’d like to have a family – she can’t hang around – and their current place isn’t very kid-friendly.

Tomorrow I’ll have my sixth one-hour session this week with the guy in Austria. That’s given me an unexpected boost.

Coronavirus - Life :)

Out of keff

July 20, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I think I’m over my three days of inexplicable fatigue. Uncontrollable yawning. Numbness in my limbs. Not wanting to do anything. In Romanian there’s a very handy word – chef – which we could do with importing into English. It’s nothing to do with food, and is in fact pronounced keff, which is how I’d spell it if it were an English word. It means desire to do a particular thing. Since Thursday I’ve been totally out of keff. Completely and utterly keffless. I still managed to drag myself around the tennis court twice though. Last night was hard work.

Over 90 workers have tested positive at the Smithfield meat plant here in Timișoara. They produce the Comtim brand of meat that you see everywhere. I’ve had students who work there. These meat plants have been an absolute menace all over Europe and the US; they have perfect conditions for the virus to spread.

I’ve just been on the phone to my brother. They’ve had an offer accepted on a house. In the UK nothing is finalised until they have the keys in their hands, but that’s a good start.

Coronavirus - Life :)

Hair chop, and a second wave

July 9, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday I got my hair cut. I wore a mask and had my temperature checked. When the barber put his comb through my long, thick, grey strands, it was almost like he was putting a fork through spaghetti. The mask straps made the bits around my ears rather tricky. He lopped off more than I bargained for, but that saves me going back there for while. I might not be able to anyway, because of these charts:

The charts show seven-day averages, so the bars for today (Wednesday) represent the numbers reported from last Thursday to today, inclusive. Taking an average means you eliminate any day-of-week effects (less reporting at weekends, for example) or other random stuff that might otherwise give a spurious peak or trough. Things aren’t looking too good, are they? Today 555 new cases were reported, giving a seven-day average of 411, taking us into territory not reached even in April when the effects of lockdown were still taking hold. Now the lid is pretty much off. But for how much longer?

Melbourne is now under a six-week lockdown.

Coronavirus - Language teaching - Life :) - Politics - Tennis

Back on the court

July 6, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m back on the court, and it feels good. I’ve played tennis twice this weekend at the courts in Parcul Rozelor – seven sets of doubles with older people including the couple who live on my floor. Socially it’s incredibly stress-free. One of the blokes is 85 (!) and still hits a pretty mean ball. He can’t move much, but heck, I can’t imagine being anywhere near a tennis court in 45 years’ time. Will there even be tennis courts then? There were six of us this evening – at one stage I sat out with a guy who has worked for the railways for 33 years, and he told me about practically every railway line in the region, past and present, in great detail. He even told me about the declivitate of the lines. I figured out what that meant when he said things like “2.1 per 1000”: he was talking about the gradient. He surprised me by saying that what is now a handful of courts of varying quality was once a big tennis stadium with a running track around it. Back in 1981, Romania played host to Argentina in the Davis Cup right were we were playing tonight and yesterday.

With new tennis partners come a new set of “house rules”. So far I’ve picked up three. First, don’t change ends. Ever. Second, you don’t have to receive serve on the same side throughout a set (though you can’t swap during a game!). In fact, changing sides seems to be compulsory and I’m supposed to magically know when to do it. Third, and this is the weirdest, double faults don’t count in your first service game of the playing session. That’s nice, but it has the potential to become embarrassing if you really can’t get the damn thing over the net and into the box. In my first service game yesterday I strung together five straight faults on a single point.

I’m hitting the ball better than I expected to, and the benefits, fitness-wise, socially, and with the language, should be significant. This could be quite a boon for me, as it was in New Zealand at times.

We’re going to be stuck with Covid for the foreseeable future. We’re averaging about 400 cases a day in Romania, just like during the first peak in April. Although we’re now testing a bit more, the trend is clearly upwards. The situation in Timiș isn’t clear: in the last three days we’ve had zero cases, then seven, then zero again. I figure if I’m going to get a haircut I should do so soon before it becomes too dangerous again.

On a worldwide scale there’s little to be optimistic about. The crisis has been politicised to a ridiculous extent in the US, the UK and elsewhere. “Masks are taking away my freedoms!” How bloody stupid can you get? People are getting extremely angry about things they shouldn’t be angry about, and are almost silent on things that really matter. I feel that everybody is complaining about the guttering on their house while it’s on fire. (I don’t put the Black Lives Matter movement in America in that category, by the way. Racism in the police and in many other walks of life is a massive problem there. It’s literally killing people.)

I saw Octavian on Thursday after a two-week hiatus; he’d been on an intensive Zoom-based advanced maths course. Seven hours of maths a day. And he wanted more maths with me. I gave him a maths-only version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? He impressed me by knowing instantly that the square root of 18 was three times the square root of 2 (he’s nearly 13; I don’t think I knew that then), but he was flummoxed when I asked him which of 11, 12, 13 and 14 was the most likely total with three dice. I would have known at his age that 11 (along with 10) was the most likely. All in all, I think he’s marginally better than I was at the same age.

Another week will soon be kicking off. Only two lessons scheduled for tomorrow.

Family - Life :) - Politics

Unfathomable

July 2, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’m having a better work week. Today I had four lessons – seven hours in total – and the boost that gives to my mental health makes everything else much more manageable, like, for instance, this flat going back on the market. I found out about that yesterday.

What an utterly mad first half of the year it has been. (My hair is now madder than ever, by the way.) I should be glued to Wimbledon right now, but a world in which people thwacked furry objects with bats, and other people queued to watch them do it, feels unfathomably far away. When will I next see any of my family?

Talking of unfathomable, what the heck is going on in the UK? How did we end up here? People throwing bottles and spreading Covid throughout Liverpool just because their team won the league. People shitting on beaches. People generally not giving a fuck. People handed a licence not to give a fuck because the people in power don’t either, beyond their own careers. A leader ripping whole hunks out of Trump’s book who is still remarkably popular (his fans include my own brother). I think how much better Britain would have handled the crisis back in 1995, when the country was led by John Major, who was very unpopular but objectively light years ahead of the charlatan currently in charge.

Last week I had something close to an argument with Mum. (That’s rare these days. Ever since my move to Romania, we’ve got on well.) She was blaming young people again. By young people, Mum means anybody under about 50. “They don’t have any money and for a lot of them it’s their own fault.” Um, OK. “They’ve got to have everything now.” Well yes, but whose fault actually is that? Are you really suggesting that they’re stupider than your generation? Seriously? Or maybe, just maybe, they’re essentially the same people, with at least 99.9% of the same DNA, but born into a very different world, with completely different decision paths available to them. Mum didn’t max out her credit card because there were no credit cards to max out. If Mum had been born in 1999 instead of 1949, I bet she’d be clambering over people to buy whatever the hell the latest number iPhone is. Honestly, this whole generation shaming, and it’s people of all generations who do it, is bloody ridiculous.

Coronavirus - Family - Life :)

Time marches on

June 29, 2020 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today is Dad’s 70th birthday. He’s dodged at least two bullets to get there, and altogether he’s had a remarkable life. I know it’s simple maths, and I hit my own milestone a couple of months ago, but both my parents being in their seventies is hard to comprehend. I called him early this morning (my time), before my aunt and uncle and a couple of friends were due to arrive. Mum had the fancy glasses out because, well, they were having fancy champagne. My cousin from Wellington had bought a job lot of Moët, as she can happily afford to do, and given my parents a bottle.

After talking to Dad I had a moment’s panic. I went to the loo and what’s this? Streaks of red. Crikey. If I see the doctor, how will I even explain this? Mi-am dungi de sânge în… what word do I use? Caca? Pupu? Luckily it’s 2020 and we have Google, and the culprit seemed to be the several great hunks of watermelon I’d eaten in the previous 24 hours.

It’s been another hot day, but I’ll soon be wishing it was only 32 degrees. My student friend who lives in Austria (she had to quarantine for two weeks when she returned to Romania to visit) gave me a guided tour of central Timișoara today. In fact she had some friends visiting from Moldova, decided to show them around, and asked if I’d come along for the ride. It was great. I know the centre of Timișoara pretty well, but she had encyclopedic knowledge of the history behind the buildings, and pointed out details, some of which had escaped my attention in all this time. Best of all, the commentary was in Romanian. (Her friends’ Moldovan accent was very noticeable, but didn’t stop me from understanding them.)

Back to medical stuff, on my monthly visit to the doctor on Friday, he tested the oxygen saturation in my blood. The readout flickered between 96 and 97; that’s good news should I ever contract the virus.

Dad has just sent me another batch of photos, including me in my 1984 Nissan Bluebird. It’s amazing how tidy that car looked – it was already 20 years old. There are also some pictures of my great-aunt, who was a lovely person from what I’ve heard. I sat on her lap once as a baby; she died of cancer soon afterwards.

It doesn’t seem long ago that the official worldwide tally of coronavirus cases reached half a million. Today we reached half a million deaths and ten million cases. The real case numbers are, of course, far greater. (It is now spreading alarmingly in poor countries with limited health care. Will we reach ten million deaths?)

Tomorrow I might go back and look at those bikes.