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Police and poker

April 15, 2021 by 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 by 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 by 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 by 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 by 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.

Family - Life :) - Poker

More house stuff

February 21, 2021 by 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 by 0 Comments

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

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

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

Family - Life :) - Photos - Poker

Simplifying life

February 8, 2021 by 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 by 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 by 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?