Month: December 2018

Language teaching - Life :) - Photos

Cold hard facts

December 18, 2018 plutomanby 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 plutomanby 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 plutomanby 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.