Month: February 2021

Coronavirus - Language teaching - New Zealand - Poker

Tough times ten years apart

February 28, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

My friend from Birmingham emailed me yesterday to say that he’d just seen his mother (who lives in the same city) for the first time in months, all masked up and physically distanced. No hugs. His father died about seven years ago. That must be hard. My parents live on the other side of the world so seeing each other is hard enough, virus or no virus, but when your mum is just there… I have been toying with the idea of a trip to virtually virus-free New Zealand. (NZ likes to be free of things. GE-free, pest-free, predator-free, smoke-free.) I’d have to quarantine for two weeks, but I could work in isolation.

The numbers are going back up in Romania, no doubt about it. The more contagious UK variant is, slowly but surely, becoming the dominant one. The weather is rapidly improving – we’ve had glorious days that have felt like May – but we could be in for a spring just like in 2020, under national lockdown. Unlike the UK, Romania is employing a two-jab strategy, so while 600,000 Romanians have now received both shots of the vaccine, most people are still fully exposed. (Anybody who has only just had their first dose is fully susceptible, too.)

Last week was the tenth anniversary of the deadly Christchurch earthquake; 22/2/11. I was still living in Auckland then. Three weeks earlier I’d had an interview in Wellington for the job that I didn’t want. I was going through a bout of depression, though the previous evening I’d managed to play tennis. (Yes, tennis night was Monday. From memory I lost my singles but won the doubles.) I was in Devonport library when I heard the news, and a couple of hours later my boss at the insurance broker’s on Queen Street called me to ask if I wanted my old job back. I’d worked on claims for the first Christchurch quake until December. Yes, please! I was back there the next morning. A meaningful job with no bullshit (especially in such circumstances). I had a relaxing ten-minute ferry journey each way. Then in another three weeks they offered me the Wellington job, and with much (justified) trepidation I took it.

On Thursday I had one of those rare car-crash lessons. It was my first lesson with a woman who said she knew no English whatsoever. The charger port on my laptop had broken, and no matter which way I wedged the cable in the socket, it wouldn’t charge. I used some very good materials from the Lingoda site, but had to explain them in Romanian (with difficulty) while being distracted by watching the battery level drop like a stone. My laptop was about to die so I resorted to using my phone, and I must have seemed rather unprofessional. I’ve since managed to make a connection again – I daren’t move my laptop a millimetre from its current spot on my desk – and I hope I can get it fixed on Monday. Hopefully my new student hasn’t already given up on me.

Four more poker tournaments today. The first one (Omaha hi-lo) lasted barely ten minutes. A crazy five-way all-in on the flop, I had good equity, but none of it materialised. Then single draw, which came to an abrupt halt when my good hand was outdrawn. Then pot-limit badugi. I made a very fast start, then went card dead, then kept sticking around until I was the short stack with only three remaining out of 100 entries. I survived some hairy moments and eventually eliminated one of the other players for a useful bounty. (Makes a change.) I didn’t last too long heads-up, but I made a $48 profit for finishing second. This evening I played the limit badugi and chipped up well, but when my big pat hand got outdrawn in a monster four-way pot, that was pretty much that, and I fell four places short of the money. I’ve made a couple of hundred this month; my bankroll is $353.

We were supposed to restart tennis today, but someone decided to call it off because it was too windy. Too windy?! You gotta be joking. In Wellington, that would have been a joke.

I no longer own a property. I do however own a meaningful sum of money, finally.

Family - Life :) - Poker

More house stuff

February 21, 2021 plutomanby 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 - Poker

Winning ways

February 18, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

My parents have put their offer for the house. Seems like a ton of money to me but I’m no expert on this stuff. Or rather, I haven’t a clue. They’ll find out in the next few hours, I expect. The stakes aren’t really that high – if they get it they win, but if they miss out they also win.

Dad diced with disaster again at the weekend. He fell off an unstable stepladder, his big pot of denim blue paint went flying, and so did he. He landed on his back in the grass, narrow missing a large rock.

I had a rare free evening last night, so I played a low buy-in poker tournament, and guess what, I won it. It had 165 entries including rebuys, and I was the last man standing after 4¼ hours. It was good old fixed-limit badugi, my mainstay, and my win came after a very barren run in that tourney. I wound up on tighter tables than usual this time, and played more hands than normal in the timeframe because so many of them ended long before showdown. I was pretty sure I was dead meat well before we entered the money, but when I got almost all-in, my opponent either misread his hand or was clueless, probably the latter. A bit later with a dozen players left, I hit a four-outer on the last draw to survive, meaning I had a 90% chance at that point of instant elimination. I rode my luck a bit from there, though when we got heads-up I was at a small chip disadvantage which became lop-sided when I lost the first few hands of our 62-hand battle. Luckily for me, my opponent wasn’t that great, and I gradually chipped away at him. On the last hand I hit a lovely low spade to make the second nuts – a colossus of a hand – and that was that. Because it was a limit tournament, I didn’t have to worry about knocking people out, and my win netted me an $85 profit. My bankroll is $296, almost twice what I started the month with.

Dad sent me some information about an app for learning Urdu. I don’t have much use for Urdu right now, though it would surely be fascinating. The Urdu script, known as Nastaliq, is difficult to typeset. Because of this, there is an Urdu newspaper called the Musalman, based in Chennai, that is handwritten – calligraphically – to this day. It’s a thing of beauty.

It’s been a slowish start to my work week, but I’ve got ten lessons scheduled for the next two days.

Family - Life :) - Poker

Money talk

February 16, 2021 plutomanby 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 plutomanby 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 plutomanby 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 plutomanby 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?