Life :)

Life :) - Scrabble

Slowing me down and tiring me out

February 19, 2019 by 0 Comments

My mood is certainly better than when I last wrote. The spring-like weather, the snowdrops coming out, and the people filling the squares, might have something to do with that. Yesterday Piața Unirii was heaving. This permanent state of being a bit ill is one thing I really could do without, however. It’s slowing me down and tiring me out.

Last week I had 31 hours of lessons. Right now, that’s about my limit. They included two hours with my eleven-year-old Mr I Don’t Know, preceded by (for the first time) an hour with his mum. I could see where he gets it from. She was terrified to actually speak English, preferring to focus on grammar instead. I kept telling her that gaining the confidence to speak is more important (at the beginning, at least) than learning grammar rules. Her son had to contend with a day of school, followed by two hours of me, followed by three hours of Romanian. This was a Friday. Poor chap. I made sure we just played games during the second hour.

I now have a bookcase. On Saturday S an I went back to one of the hardware stores, and surprisingly the two-metre-long flat pack fitted in her rather small car. I put it together yesterday. My level of practical nous just about stretches to that.

Scrabble. I’m not playing all that much, concentrating on learning words (sevens and eights) instead. When I have been playing, I’ve mostly been winning, and my rating on ISC has hit the low 1400s once more. Come the middle of this year, the lexicon will have expanded to include three extra two-letter words (EW, OK and ZE, with OK being the most controversial), half a dozen additional three-letter words, and many more longer ones.

Tomorrow I’ll try and get an appointment with one of the ENT specialists. This has been going on for too long. I’m even looking into surgery, but I don’t like the idea of going under the knife unless it’s absolutely necessary. (I’ve just spoken to my brother about this, and typically, he says I should just get on with it.)

Language teaching - Life :) - Tennis

A bump in the road

February 14, 2019 by 0 Comments

I’ve hit the skids in recent days and weeks. All this being sick all the time, the sinus pain, the serial colds, the lack of energy, has caught up with me. I guess I’ve been experiencing low-level depression. I’ve had an extremely good depression-free run since my move to Romania; it was bound to rear its ugly head again at some stage.

Last weekend was a low point. Some cancellations meant I had no work at all on Saturday. Lack of work is rarely a good thing. In the morning a shelf loaded with books and files collapsed. This was my stupid fault; I knew the shelf was far too flimsy for everything I had sitting on it. Luckily nothing was damaged. In the afternoon I decided to walk to Shopping City and try to find a bookcase. This took forever; just putting one foot in front of the other was a serious effort. I was also completely unable to relax.

This anxiety continued into Sunday, when S picked me up to take me to some of the various hardware hypermarkets in the southern part of the city. I wasn’t in the mood for any of this. She thought I just wanted a shelf, not something far bigger. We found something suitable but it didn’t fit into her car. She suggested getting her brother (who has a bigger car) to pick it up for me, but I hardly know her brother. During our trip, she tried to execute a U-turn that I’m amazed was even legal (this is Romania, though) and could easily have caused an accident. As it was, her manoeuvre led to a queue of cars and honking horns left, right and centre (again, this is Romania). We got back into the centre of town, but many of the bars near the river were inexplicably closed. We ended up in a café in the square, where they were showing the Fed Cup match between the Czech Republic and Romania, on Czech turf. S knew almost nothing about tennis (she said she’d never played it), and I tried my best to give her a run-down of the rules in Romanian. Simona Halep beat Karolina Pliskova in a tight three-setter. When I got home, I saw Mihaela Buzărnescu lose in straight sets to Katerina Siniakova. That left the encounter tied at two matches apiece, and the doubles match would decide it. This was one of the best doubles matches I’d ever seen. Drama and quality from start to finish, and a great atmosphere. When the Romanian pair dropped the first set on a tie-break, I expected the Czechs to rattle through the second, but no. Romania won the last two sets 6-4 6-4 to record something of an upset. A great result for Romanian tennis. (This reminds me, it would be good if I could start playing tennis again soon.)

I’ve had a solid amount of work so far this week. That seems to be a good remedy. Yesterday’s early-morning lesson started in amusing fashion: he’d been driving the car immediately behind S’s when she attempted that U-turn. He said he recognised me in the passenger seat, and thought my face was a picture. One of those funny coincidences. Last night I had a new student, and I should have another one – my 70th – this evening. The sun is shining, there’s a busker outside singing Vinovații fără vină, and I’m reasonably confident that this latest episode will be no more than a bump in the road.

Language learning - Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

Making a difference

February 4, 2019 by 0 Comments

The last few days have been a struggle. I’ve picked up my fifth or sixth cold (I’ve lost count) this winter, and I feel feeble. All the colds have pretty much merged into one, and with all the sinus pain that never totally goes away, it’s a long time since I felt anywhere near 100%. Maybe I contracted this latest bout at the doctor’s surgery on Thursday night. As I do every four weeks, I went to the after-hours doctor to pick up my prescription, but that might not have been all I picked up. There had been a flu outbreak and the woman behind the desk was wearing a mask.

The good news is that I met S for coffee this morning, and we spoke for two hours in Romanian. Being able to speak someone else’s language is one of the most awesome things ever. I haven’t seen a lot of S lately. She got sick, I got sick, she went skiing in Austria, she got sick again, I got sick again, and so on. Before we met it was just lovely being out in Timișoara on a Sunday morning. It’s always so quiet and peaceful then. Then it was equally lovely having somebody to talk to. On the way back from the café I filled a pair of six-litre water bottles from the well, as I do every few days, but this time the bottles in my backpack felt unusually heavy. My life here is primitive in a lot of ways, and I don’t mind that too much. The water trips, the tram trips to pay my rent in cold hard cash, and of course work. My work is deliberately manual. The world we live in is automate, automate, automate, but manual is often way more interesting and fun.

I had a bunch of cancellations again last week, but the lessons I did have went pretty well. One of my latest exercises for kids is asking them to come up with 26 foods, or animals, or games, one for each letter of the alphabet. Last week one of my eleven-year-old students thought of Tasmanian devil, or diavol tasmanian in Romanian. He wanted to put that under D, but he already had “duck” there. Of course it needed to go under T instead, and that letter was free. It’s cool when kids come up with stuff that I hadn’t even thought of. I asked another eleven-year-old boy to write about his favourite time of day, expecting about four lines. Instead he wrote almost a whole page about why he liked evenings. I was bowled over, not just by the amount he wrote but also by how much his English had improved since I started with him in October 2017. Man, this is fantastic. All my work is making a difference, hopefully.

The men’s Australian Open final sure didn’t take six hours. It barely lasted two. Djokovic was brilliant and Nadal was very passive and indecisive, perhaps simply because Djokovic was playing so well as to leave him flummoxed. That’s the 52nd grand slam won by either Federer, Nadal or Djokovic. Thirteen years’ worth of majors. Extraordinary stuff. I’ve sat in Rod Laver Arena once, back in 2005 (I did also visit the Open in ’08, but didn’t have tickets for the biggest court). In ’05 the experience felt “big” but not too big. Not like today, with obnoxious electronic advertising boards pulsating in between games. Wimbledon seems to be getting too big as well. They’ve purchased the adjoining golf club, so more land, more courts, bigger, bolder, better. Bleuugh.

Scrabble. I’ve had a fairly iffy start to 2019, but I won all seven of the games I played yesterday. Although my results haven’t been fantastic so far this year, I’ve made some interesting plays: my first-ever triple-triple (ACTIONeD for 149 – he left the C in the triple lane, not particularly dangerous in second position, but I just happened to have a play that fitted perfectly); TOUZLED for 120; SqUARELY (the first time I’d ever used the blank as a Q); and two nine-letter bingos in ASPERsION and OVERDOINg (that last one in the final game I played yesterday; OVERDOg was also playable but I didn’t see it; I only saw its anagram gROOVED which didn’t play).

Brexit. Oh dear. Last Tuesday was a quieter than average day on the work front, so I watched a stream of the debates and series of votes, open-mouthed. One of the amendments was to extend Article 50 in the event that no agreement is reached by a certain day. A chance to sit down, have a cuppa tea, and think about what you actually want to do. It was voted down. So hang on, there are barely 50 days until the scheduled exit day, you’ve got no bloody clue what you’re doing, you’re fast running out of options, and you’ve just voted to deny yourselves the option of a bit more time in the event that no solution magically presents itself in the next few weeks. Are you insane?

Five lessons planned for tomorrow.

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Tennis

Tick-tock

January 18, 2019 by 0 Comments

Occasionally one of my students does something extraordinary. That happened this afternoon. I gave her an IELTS writing exercise, where she had to write a letter about sub-standard student accommodation. Twenty minutes, a minimum of 150 words. As always, I had a go at the task at the same time. Hmm, too much noise? Problems with the heating? Too far away? What should I write about? These questions posed no such problems for my student. With barely half the time gone, she gleefully said “Done!” and presented me with a letter easily good enough to get the grade she’ll need when she does the exam. If she’d actually used the last ten minutes it might have been just about perfect.

Dad recently acquired a 9-carat gold pocket watch that his great-grandfather (or to be specific, his dad’s dad’s dad) had received as a present from work. He showed it to me over Christmas. For some reason he was happy to throw it away, or get some money for the gold. It’s a double hunter, meaning it has a lid on both the front and back. The case (monogrammed on the back) has been battered a bit, and the glass is missing, as is the second hand. We couldn’t get it to work. I told Dad I would take it in to one of the watchmakers here in Timișoara; he might be able to do something. The shop, on Piața Libertății, was a delight to visit. Every type of clock and watch, and piece of clock and watch, and tool for mending clocks and watches, was on display. Old cuckoo clocks were going off, left right and centre. It was like visiting a clock museum. Fitting the theme perfectly, the pocket-sized man who dealt with my great-great-grandad’s watch was about seventy. Two hours after handing it to him, I went back to find he’d got the mechanism going. Tick-tock, tick-tock. It might have been the first time it had tick-tocked for half a century, perhaps more. Unfortunately he didn’t have a glass that fitted, nor a second hand, but that’s a start.

The Australian Open is back, with its crazy hours. Last night a match didn’t finish until nearly quarter past three in the morning. We’ve also got a new tie-break rule. There are (sadly) no more advantage final sets; instead there’s a first-to-ten tie-break at 6-6 in the decider. Even if it feels gimmicky to me, there’s nothing wrong with the new rule as such; I just think the old one was better. We’re now robbed of the kinds of drama-filled long final sets we’ve seen at the Aussie Open in recent years, such as in both the Djokovic–Wawrinka matches (2013 and 2014) and both marathons Simona Halep was involved in last year. If they wanted to change it, I’d have preferred it if they’d gone down the route Wimbledon has done: a normal (less gimmicky) tie-break to seven points at 12-12. But that’s not what they did, and we’re now in the slightly mad situation where all four grand slams have different systems for determining the winner of close matches. The French Open is the only one to retain a no-limit deciding set, although I can’t imagine that will be for long. If I had to guess, I’d say they’ll eventually plump for the Aussie system.

Towards the end of last week I got hooked on the BDO world darts tournament. This isn’t the biggest and best tournament in terms of standard and prestige (that would be the PDC worlds) but it has that pleasant eighties feel about it. The story for me was really the women’s tournament, with Mikuru Suzuki of Japan steamrolling her British opponent in straight sets in the final, walking on (and off) to the strains of Baby Shark, doo doo doo doo.

Eighteen games of Scrabble in 2019 so far, and I have a 50% record. Last weekend I got utterly taken apart, 574-313, in my biggest loss ever. That took my record for 2019 to 4-9, but to my surprise I followed that up with five straight wins, including (in my final game) a 557-336 victory where I out-bingoed my opponent 4-0, two of my bingos scoring in the 90s.

I’ll leave discussion of the Brexit shambles until next time.

Language learning - Language teaching - Life :)

Romanian commentary 12 – barriers

January 13, 2019 by 0 Comments

It’s ages since I last discussed my Romanian language skills, or lack of them. It’s an ongoing battle. People who don’t live in Romania might assume that after more than two years I’d be just about fluent by now. Total immersion, right? Well, no. Considering how many barriers there are to learning the language, I haven’t done too badly. What do I mean by barriers, exactly? Every time I go to a fast-food outlet or a bank or a pharmacy and I’m dealing with somebody under thirty or so, I get nervous. I’m going to get Englished again, aren’t I?! I always speak Romanian, but I might be the only non-native speaker who has attempted to speak the language that they’ve come across all week. Even if my Romanian is perfectly understandable, they’re likely to find my error-strewn version, with a funny accent, comical or worse. So then they reply in English, often with mistakes, and in a slightly funny accent: “Sorry. Are not dere.” But as a speaker (and teacher!) of a language that everybody wants to speak, I’m used to mistakes and funny accents. They don’t bother me. So Romanians can get away with their dodgy English whereas I can’t with my iffy Romanian. Usually I persist, speaking Romanian for the rest of the exchange, but still feeling that I’ve failed. Sometimes, if I’m not desperate, I simply walk away.

It doesn’t happen like this all the time, of course. Or even half the time. But it happens enough to frustrate me. Am I really this bad? Still? Often the person behind the counter will greet me with “Spuneți!” which means “Speak!”. Talk about putting the pressure on. Speak, boy, speak! Shit, what do I say now? The “Spuneți!” situation is just one of many where I become anxious and uncomfortable, and therefore less able to process the language. One of these times came up yesterday, when I got my hair cut in a place I hadn’t been to before, just on the other side of the bridge. People were talking loudly across me from opposite sides of the room, cracking jokes. I couldn’t see my watch from under the cape I was wearing, nor could I see the clock from where I was sitting, and I had a lesson to go to afterwards. That sort of stuff makes me tense in any language.

I’m more comfortable in open-air markets or funny unsophisticated dive bars, which are generally run by slightly older people who didn’t start learning English when they were at kindergarden. Those places also have a couple of side benefits: they’re more interesting and cheaper.

Since the start of the year (which isn’t very long, obviously), S and I have been alternating languages. We spoke Romanian the first time we meet up, English the second time, then switched back to Romanian again, and so on. This seems to be working. At one point, S suggested that my Romanian level is something like B2, but that can’t be right. Perhaps I’d just scrape B1, or about a 5 on my personal 0-to-10 scale.

It’s been brass monkeys here. We had heavy snowfall last weekend, and on Tuesday morning the temperature dipped into the double-figure negatives. One of my students then showed up on the wrong day: Tuesday instead of Thursday. Somebody else would be coming minutes later, so I had to turn him away. I felt sorry for him, having braved such bitterly cold weather to come here, and I also felt that it was partly my fault: I’ve been teaching in Romania long enough to know that everybody seems to struggle with the words Tuesday and Thursday. I’ve even had texts from people wanting lessons on Thuesday. In this case, a simple reply of Marți? or Joi? and this misunderstanding never would have happened. Luckily he was still able to come two days later.

It’s been a good work week, and the more work I get, the motivated I seem to be with everything else. Hopefully that will extend to the Romanian language.

Language teaching - Life :) - Photos

Cold hard facts

December 18, 2018 by 0 Comments

It’s been a bit of a crappy day. At the weekend It was possible I’d have up to five lessons today, but everybody has cancelled. Literally everybody. The weather might have something to do with that. I also have no hot water. The plumber (or handyman) was here for two hours and after speaking to someone on the phone, he fixed it temporarily. Very temporarily.

My parents landed in the UK five days ago, and in another five days I’ll be there. They aren’t enjoying the cold and darkness, least of all Mum. Here in Timișoara we’ve had quite dramatic weather. Snow fell almost constantly for about 36 hours at the weekend, and the city is blanketed. Today I slipped and fell, appropriately outside the skating rink that’s been put up in Piața Libertății.

Outside my window on Saturday night

Some good news is that last week I picked up a bunch of new students and had a busy week: 29½ hours of lessons. It bodes well for 2019. Some of my recent discussions have made me very glad not to have office Christmas parties anymore. One woman of about thirty sought advice from me after getting drunk and stoned at her work do, and finding out that a man of about fifty had supposedly kissed her. She couldn’t remember anything. I couldn’t think of much in the way of advice. Um, how about next time try not to get totally off your face at a work function.

Last weekend my body corporate in Wellington had their meeting. At 11pm on Friday I tried and failed to join the discussion on Skype. For some reason the plug-in didn’t work for me. The least bad option appears to be selling the whole block. With the deadline for objections rapidly approaching, last night I sent off my form to QV, contesting the latest hike to the rateable value of my apartment. I included the independent valuation report that we got six months ago, only to find an email this morning telling us NOT (bold and caps) to include it. Whoops.

No Scrabble during the week but I got in seven games over the weekend, winning six. My rating has hit 1400, which I think is hugely flattering. (Average is around 1000, while 1800 is expert level.) In short games I’d be eaten alive. Likewise in games where you lose a turn if you play an invalid word. While my strategy is pretty sound, I still don’t know nearly enough words. Heck, I’ve played fewer than 300 games. One of my opponents at the weekend, also rated 1400-odd, had played 18,000. He was the only player to beat me, although we played a second game which I won.

Four lessons in my diary for tomorrow.

This is from last night’s carol singing in the cathedral


Life :) - Scrabble

Seeing some light

December 9, 2018 by 0 Comments

Last night I had a blissful nine hours of sleep, and finally I can see light at the end of the tunnel. It’s almost like I just have a cold now. This is one of the (few?) downsides of being self-employed: sometimes you get sick. Last year I was “lucky” enough for my illness to coincide perfectly with Christmas (I’d forgotten what that was like until I re-read my blog posts) so it had virtually no impact on my bottom line. This week I’ve got lessons scheduled with four new students, so I really hope I can re-enter the world of the living.

S is staying with her grandparents this weekend. They’re in their mid-to-late nineties, so S clearly has good genes. She said she’d just attended a traditional Christmas pig-cutting, er, event? Ceremony? Exercise? I think I prefer exercise. You can watch several of these exercises on Youtube, such as here. (Look at all the downvotes.) Since S is a vegetarian, I wonder what she thinks of it. My body corporate Skype meeting is on Friday night, so we might push off to Sibiu on Saturday and spend just one night there.

My illness has been terrible for getting out and entering the festive spirit, but good for Scrabble. In addition to the odd occasions I’ve used it as a stress-free educational tool with my students, I’ve played a fair few games online, and mostly I’ve been winning. Learning some high-probability sevens has been a huge help already, but I feel the biggest progress I’ve made has been in scrapping, finding ways to offload awkward tiles, finding less-obvious moves, and making better decisions about what to play and what to keep. I’ve certainly become better at endgames. Yesterday I won eight games out of nine, including three come-from-behind wins in a row. In the last game of the day I stormed out to a 163-point lead thanks to two natural bingos, but my opponent drew both blanks and found two impressive bingos of his own. On multiple occasions I had bingos on my rack with nowhere to play them that I could see, and I became more and more indecisive. I clung on for just a 14-point win. My favourite game was a remarkable one: despite being out-bingoed 3-0, I won 444 to 416, thanks in part to NOVELLA for 52, a double-double that hooked other words. It’s that kind of play that keeps me coming back.

Family - Life :) - Scrabble

Under the weather

December 8, 2018 by 0 Comments

I’ve had eight pretty awful days since I last posted. I should be in Sibiu right now, but when I met S yesterday at a café in her work complex she said, that cough doesn’t sound good, so how about we don’t do this. At least not this weekend. That’s a shame, but it was the only sensible decision. Although I was a bit apprehensive about going there with S, I was quite excited too. It’s a beautiful city after all.

I’ve cancelled only three lessons; my bar for doing that is quite high, probably too high. Last Thursday night, right after my last blog post, was the worst. I hardly slept a wink and by morning I felt extremely feeble. I’d have to bike to my 9am lesson, the temperature outside was well below freezing, and it just wasn’t going to happen. Early this week I started to feel better, but by Wednesday I was running a mild temperature and hacking up all kinds of lurid slime that looked rather the stuff some of my younger students play with. That day I went to the doctor’s surgery, a completely baffling place, especially when you’re sick. You have to see someone to make an appointment, someone else to pay, someone else to do something else… There’s no “Pay here” sign or handy arrows pointing to Dr Smith or Dr Jones. The onus is on me to figure out, or rather guess, where I’m supposed to be. It didn’t help that the lady at the desk kept telling me it was Tuesday, with enough certainly that I believed her, when it was actually Wednesday. Eventually I saw somebody, and that part of the process is nearly always fantastic. I got some drugs, although no antibiotics, and with a bit of luck I’ll be back in business before long.

I’ve tried to simplify my lessons this week. Not too much complex grammar. I’ve certainly played the odd game of Scrabble, using the set I bought in Oxfam in Cambridge which has four of the requisite 100 tiles missing (they spell out LOVE; weird I know). In one game we made DICK and SEX.

After my only lesson today I met up with S again. She told me, no, you really don’t need to get your hair cut. It’s been ten months.

So that’s me. I spoke to my parents this morning on FaceTime. While I chatted to Dad, I could see Mum in the corner of the screen looking far from her best. She’s picked up a cold. “Really I’m fine.” Don’t lie. They’re flying to the UK, with a two-night stopover in Singapore, in little over 24 hours. The “I’m fine” thing, especially on the eve of a flight half-way around the world, is always a bit of a worry.

If we go to Sibiu next weekend, the last chance before I go away for Christmas, it’ll coincide with a fairly important body corporate meeting, or workshop as they’re calling it, in Wellington. They told me I could Skype in. It takes place between 11pm and 1am my time. There’s about as much certainty as to what we’ll end up doing with our apartment block as there is with Brexit.

Life :) - Romania - Scrabble

Centenary celebrations

November 30, 2018 by 0 Comments

One of my students is a chemistry teacher at a very good school called Waldorf (I can’t help but think of the Muppets when I see or hear that word) and she invited me to the school’s celebration of Romania’s centenary, which took place this morning. She gave me precise details about the two buses I needed to take, and stupidly I never looked on a map to see exactly where the place was. If I had, I’d have known it was almost right next to the apartment block of one of my students, and I would have walked or biked there. As it was, I went too far on the first bus (I didn’t realise it was only a five-minute ride) and had to call her. Um, what do I do now? I walked back to the stop I should have got off at, then took the second bus, and I got there just in time, or la țanc (an expression I picked up two weeks ago, meaning “in the nick of time”).

Inside the school, a drummer, one of the older pupils, gave everybody a rousing welcome. My English student led me upstairs into a hall, and a couple of hundred kids, most of them dressed in traditional Romanian attire, formed a spiral. (I didn’t have any clothing along those lines, and was concerned that I’d stand out in jeans and a plain white shirt, but I was fine.) The national anthem was sung. It was a good job the words were projected on a screen: “Deșteaptă-te, române!” is about as far as I get otherwise. The singing, sometimes accompanied by guitars, was lovely. After a video explaining the unification in 1918, some more songs and some readings, we joined hands for a hora, a traditional Romanian dance. I said “Am două picioare stângi” (“I’ve got two left feet”) but I managed, just about. (If you’re uncoordinated, or “unco” as some Kiwis say, you can say in Romanian that you have two left hands.) The kids filed out, to the beat of the drum once more, and I met some of my student’s colleagues, including Bogdan, the history teacher. He was the only man amongst them, although supposedly two other male teachers weren’t in attendance. Downstairs we ate bread covered in pork fat and red onions (some of the traditional food can be interesting) and that was that. In a funny way I felt quite privileged to be there. I could quickly tell that it was a good school; the kids behaved extremely well.

Otherwise things haven’t been so great: I’ve picked up a cold once again. Let’s hope it passes reasonably quickly. I spoke to Dad last night; he’s been having a terrible time with migraines. He said the only saving grace was the interminable spell of rain, which would have put the kibosh on a lot of activities, migraine or not.

The 100th anniversary of the unification is on 1st December, the day after tomorrow. The market stalls are all up in the square; they’ve been painted white unlike the last two years. Tomorrow they’ll be up and running, with the pleasant waft of chimney cakes and mulled wine. Outside my window is a sea of blue, yellow and red. I doubt I’ll see the parade because I’ll be working on Saturday, but I should get to see the lights being switched on and the fireworks, which last year weren’t until 11pm.

On Tuesday morning S and I had a text conversation while I was at Piața Badea Cârțan, the big market. She said, isn’t it wonderful that your job allows you to start the day in a marketplace among the vegetables and cheeses, and I said, yes it absolutely is. I’m certain that the fundamental change in lifestyle has been hugely beneficial to my wellbeing. I’m a different man. (Heck, I sure look like a different man. It’s nine months since I had a haircut.) It would take a helluva lot for me to go back.

Scrabble. I’ve played four games in the last 24 hours. Last night I started with a shocker. I couldn’t get anything going at all. Just one of those games, and I went down in a heap, 283 to 418. My opponent played extremely well; she seemed to actually know words. Perhaps that’s what happens when you’ve played 9000 games. The next game went considerably better: I found an early bingo, my opponent hit back with two of his own but I made RITZ for 69 and that was enough for an 83-point win. I had TOASTER on my (toast) rack towards the end, but I couldn’t find anywhere for it. After the game I realised that of course it has an anagram, ROTATES, that would have gone down. Everything seemed to go right for me in game three. Four bingos and a 536-332 win, just four points off my record game score, which happened way back last New Year’s Eve. I’ve played one more game (so far) today, a 390-all draw. After an early bingo I held a three-figure lead, but my opponent slapped down a trio of bonuses. I continued to score well, without seeming anywhere near another bingo, and I still had my nose in front as we entered the endgame, but my opponent put down EXEC (which I hadn’t seen) for 45 and I was perhaps fortunate to have an out-play that allowed me to escape with a draw.

Language teaching - Life :) - Scrabble

Unashamed

November 26, 2018 by 0 Comments

When I met up with S on Friday I felt pissed off: my work day had been just about wiped out by last-minute cancellations. I asked her if she could help me write a short contract to give my students, starting in the new year. I knew what to say; she just needed to ensure that the Romanian was right. “Pay for lessons in advance, in blocks of five. If you cancel within 24 hours or don’t show up at all, that counts as a lesson. End of.” But a bit more politely. S surprised me by saying that a contract might not be such a good idea. Romanians are unashamedly late and unreliable; perhaps I just need to get used to that. Hmmm. It’s hard, because where I come from, cancelling an appointment half an hour before the start because you’re “not in the mood” (yes, I’ve had that) is laughably bad form. This weekend I took stock of what S said, and realised that my cancellations are running at the same 15% or so that they always have – it’s just felt as though I’ve had more recently because they’ve come in flurries. And heck, when I came here I didn’t know whether me teaching idea would even be viable. It certainly has been. I’ll finish 2018 with more contact hours than a schoolteacher would get in a year.

On a not totally dissimilar theme, today there was a blessing at the yet-to-be-completed monster cathedral in Bucharest. I saw the half-finished monstrosity when I visited two years ago. The final bill will be something like £100 million. In such a poor country it’s an enormous, and very sad, waste of public money.

More positively, buildings are being renovated all the time in Timișoara. There are a lot of them, and limited funds, so it will take a while. Today I saw this beautifully restored building near Piața Unirii. The picture doesn’t quite do justice to it. It’s on quite a narrow street; this was as much of it as I could get in the frame without doing anything fancy.

Today I sold my bike. That was my first bike, which I bought in March. I put it on OLX (Romania’s equivalent of TradeMe) this morning and within 2½ hours it was off my hands. I got the same 200 lei I paid for it, although I had to cough up a 20 lei fee. That’s a pretty good outcome.

Scrabble. I’m trying to learn some seven-letter words, which are extremely important for bingos. Eights are equally useful, and very occasionally you’ll even play a longer bingo. One of those occasions for me was yesterday – the nine-letter MENTIONER, through TI, as a 94-point double-double. That’s one of my best plays to date. Anyway, the sevens. Some people prefer to study alphagrams – seven-letter strings in alphabetical order, which they can map onto the correct word, such as ABEITUX for BAUXITE. This seems a terrible way for me to study. My brain doesn’t work like that. So instead I’ve been studying six-letter “stems” made up of common letters, such as ORNATE, and then coming up with mnemonics for the letters that combine with the stem to produce valid words. For instance, the mnemonic I use for ORNATE is “I’d pinch curving bums”. Any of the letters in that phrase can be added to ORNATE to give a valid seven. The first letter (alphabetically) is B, and that combines to make BARONET and the rather obscure REBOANT. Add C and you get ENACTOR. Adding D will give you TORNADE, which is another word for tornado. (Ashburton had a pretty impressive tornade last week.) The next is G, which makes NEGATOR. And so on, up to V, which gives VENATOR. I had to find a method that was an least vaguely interesting, or else I’d give up.

Three lessons scheduled (!) for tomorrow.