Month: March 2021

Coronavirus - Family - Language learning - Language teaching - Poker

Our only way out

March 29, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had no side effects at all from my much-maligned (totally unfairly) Covid jab. A slightly sore arm for a day, and that was it. I know others haven’t been quite so lucky, but c’mon people, get the damn vaccine. It’s our only chance of getting out of this.

My conversations with Mum and Dad revolve around when, where and how we can meet again. It’s already been ages, to the point where I’m struggling to piece together the timeline of what has happened since. I do know the dates, but my whole concept of time has been warped. Dad’s cancer, my trip to Bosnia, a few months which passed for normal, then Covid, the new normal. A little over two calendar years, but what’s that in lockdown years?

Today I felt quite angry. We could have eradicated this virus by now, but modern society – greed, entitlement, selfishness – hasn’t allowed us to. All over the world, apart from New Zealand, Vietnam, South Korea and one or two others, the wrong kinds of politicians have made the wrong kinds of decisions, and they still are.

Last week was my biggest for work in a while, with 36 hours of lessons, plus all the putting together of worksheets and what have you. When I’m locked down, I’m happy to take all the work I can get. Yesterday I had that 90-minute session with the young couple who are learning English from scratch, and it’s quite tiring having to speak a weird mixture of Romanian and English. One of the very nice kids I teach said he’ll be off to Egypt in a few weeks with his parents. Seriously, right now you can shove your pyramids up your arse. The bloke in the UK gave me a one-hour Youtube video of Romanian stand-up comedy to watch. That’s got to be one of the hardest things to understand in a foreign language. Shushushu zhuzhuzhu dududu. Ha ha ha ha ha! Um, I don’t get it, Toma.

Poker. I haven’t had much joy since I last reported. On Thursday I paid the price for my terrible passivity in a pot-limit badugi tournament. I was really kicking myself for failing to shovel chips into the pot. Today I had a similar spot and played much more aggressively. I got knocked out, but did the right thing I’m sure. My biggest problem continues to be how little I can play. My bankroll is $464.

Coronavirus

My first shot

March 25, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I had my first Astra Zeneca jab this morning at eight (well it was half-eight when it actually went into my deltoid), and right now I’m feeling fine. I was a tad nervous, not because of the needle or any potential side effects from the vaccine, but because of all the admin and forms and other associated faff which tends to stress me out. After leaving home I realised I’d forgotten to fill in the declaration form (we’re still in lockdown, so you need that every time you go out the door) so I had to rush back for that. When I got there just before eight, a queue of 20 or so people had formed outside. Then we all piled in. Though their system worked well, they did a really bad job of ensuring that we didn’t ironically contract the virus moments before being vaccinated. Just ugh. I had to declare on a form that I was taking antidepressants, then as soon as I produced my passport they started speaking to me in English. I got things like “you move there”. Please speak Romanian, I said. The woman who gave me the jab seemed lovely. She said she’d worked in America. Then I sat around for 10 or 15 minutes before getting my certificate. Congratulations, you’re vaccinated. It’ll take three weeks before I get protection, then I go back for my second dose on 19th May.

Our lockdown has just been extended for a second time. It was due to end last Sunday, and on Saturday the local council voted not to extend it (or rather, they didn’t get enough of a majority to prolong it). But Bucharest stepped in and sanity prevailed: we got a three-day extension. Today they’ve confirmed that a further seven days will be added. I use the word lockdown, but it’s nothing like the lovely tranquillity of one year ago. We sometimes get a blissful lull in traffic, but most of the time there’s a steady flow. It is extremely quiet in the late evening though. In the meantime there have been anti-lockdown protests right in front of my window. Lots of noise and flag-waving, and on one occasion someone burned a mask, but the turnout has never got above 150. I do find the flag business weird. Show patriotism by letting your fellow citizens die.

No lack of work at the moment. Five lessons on Monday and six yesterday. I’m grateful for an easier day today (just two lessons). It’s been a beautiful spring day. I took this snap from the rose garden this afternoon. If you look closely you can even see the moon.

Coronavirus - Language learning - Language teaching - Poker

Face-to-face? Are you kidding? And Romanian Commentary 13

March 22, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Someone’s just called me asking for a lesson on behalf of her husband. I managed to find a space in my diary on Thursday evening, and I was all set to pencil it in, but then she asked for my address. Er, Skype? Zoom? No, your actual physical address. We want face-to-face here. Fa-fa-face-to-face? No! No no no no no. Not until at least mid-April, three weeks after my first jab. I’m guessing these people might not be all that into jabs and stuff.

I’m starting to beef up my work volume again. Last week I got 30½ hours, and this week should easily surpass that (but you never know; sometimes it just rains cancellations). Some of my lessons are dead easy and don’t remotely feel like work, but others are a test of mettle. I recently started with a married couple who have a nine-letter, seven-vowel surname, and they want to learn from scratch. Hello, how are you, my name is, would you like a vowel? I have to speak a lot of Romanian in these lessons, and although I get by, I still make mistakes and get tongue-tied. For instance, last weekend I couldn’t say “he likes to run” correctly in Romanian. Sounds a simple sentence, doesn’t it? The verb to run is a alerga in Romanian (well, there’s also a fugi, but that’s more like “to run away”). Here’s how you conjugate a alerga in the present:

eu alerg – I run
tu alergi – you run
el/ea aleargă – he/she/it runs (notice the extra a before the r)
noi alergăm – we run
voi alergați – you run (more than one person)
ei/ele aleargă – they run

That’s great, but with sentences such as “he likes to run” we need to use the subjunctive, and for the third person (he/she/it or they) this is different from the normal form of the verb. The form I needed was alerge, not aleargă. The full correct sentence is Îi place să alerge. (The first word of that sentence, if you’re wondering, is an i with a hat followed by an i without a hat.)

By contrast, the very common verb a merge means to go, and it’s conjugated like this in the present:

eu merg – I go
tu mergi – you go
el/ea merge – he/she/it goes
noi mergem – we go
voi mergeți – you go (more than one person)
ei/ele merg – they go

If I wanted to say “he likes to go”, I’d once again need the subjunctive, and this time it would be Îi place să meargă. So the subjunctive ending of “to go” is just like the normal ending of “to run”, and vice-versa. I understand this, but I still get tripped up from time to time.

Another problem I have is stress. Not that kind of stress, but the way words are accented. Just like in English, it isn’t always obvious which part of a word gets the emphasis. I managed to confuse a kid this morning when I said “martor” (meaning “witness”) with the stress at the end, when it should be at the beginning. Unless it’s a word I use a lot, I often find myself guessing.

Poker. My biggest problem is how little I’m able to play. I haven’t run very hot since I last posted. In one tournament my laptop crashed five times – hopefully I’ve solved that problem. My bankroll is $470.

Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Poker

A shot in the arm

March 19, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

To my surprise I’ve managed to book myself a Covid jab. That’s exciting, honestly. I’ll be getting it bright and early next Wednesday morning – I never expected it would be so soon – and yes, it’ll be the Astra Zeneca vaccine. My second jab will be eight weeks later. I’m not counting any chickens until I actually get the needle in my arm, because there’s still a chance Romania will suspend the AZ vaccine like about half of Europe has done so far, crazily if you ask me. One of my students didn’t react well to his first AZ jab, and in the meantime he’s picked up Covid, which he says is far less severe than his reaction to the vaccine. We then did some exercises from a book produced by Oxford University Press. These are the same guys who concocted your awful vaccine; I hope you don’t mind. Everyone has become a vaccine expert – a vaxpert? – seemingly overnight. In Romania the numbers continue to climb.

Mum and Dad are now official owners of property number five. It would be nice if they could offload their big place, and until then they won’t be able to relax. I look back at my grandparents and think how much simpler their lives were, and I dunno, are all these extra complications really worth it? When I spoke to them yesterday, there was a lot of excitement about the America’s Cup, which had completely passed me by. It’s not a sporting event that’s ever captivated me, with the one exception of the time we went to New Zealand in the summer of 1986-87 and the Kiwi boat KZ7 was racing against an American crew to the sounds of Rod Stewart’s I Am Sailing. Both KZ7 and Rod Stewart were national obsessions then.

My aunt called me on Sunday. We chatted for half an hour; we rarely make it that far. She talked about my brother’s ex-fiancée and what a bullet he dodged there. Then she admitted that she had a drink problem. That’s a start, but like her other problems, she’s never seriously tried to solve it.

I’ve had some great feedback from my lessons in the past week or so, and that does make me feel good. In two recent lessons I’ve had that lovely feeling of seeing someone “get it”: the difference between for and since, or when to use the present continuous instead of the present simple. Last night someone said he’d learnt as much in that one session as he would expect in five. One of my advanced-level students enjoys the variety of listening, speaking, reading and grammar activities we cover.

Poker. On Monday evening I made a quick $25 from a cash game (nice), then decided I’d play a bounty tournament which started at 9:42. Normally it kicks off at 10:42, but the clocks had gone forward in the US. I was lesson-free the next morning, so I thought I’d give it a go. Big mistake. I was finally eliminated at 2:08 in the morning, finishing third for a $28 profit. As almost always, I did a bad job of collecting bounties. It’s not like I didn’t try. With four left, I got it all in as a 57% favourite with the short stack who had a hefty $20 bounty. My hand didn’t hold up, someone else soon got his bounty instead of me, and I was out almost immediately afterwards. The next day I was a complete wreck and had a terrible headache. I just can’t do late nights anymore; I’m getting old. My bankroll is now $489.

The crappy weather continues. This morning’s sleet turned to rain which hasn’t let up all day.

Coronavirus - Family - Other sports - Poker

The nightmare of normal

March 15, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today Mum and Dad will have got the keys to their latest property. They’re quite stressed at the moment with trying to sell their current place as they head into autumn. Mum seems to spend half her waking hours dusting or vacuuming, in case somebody shows up out of the blue. They feel about as locked down as I am.

At the weekend I watched John Campbell’s fantastic video on the impacts of Covid on mental health: the depression and anxiety caused by all that worry and isolation. But what he didn’t mention were the anti-effects. If I had an office job and had been able to work from home for a year in relative peace, how would I cope with all those people again? With extreme difficulty, I’m sure. This was the case for me in 2011. I quit my insurance job at the end of 2009. For the next 15 months I travelled, read, played online poker, and did temporary work which I enjoyed because I never had to involve myself in all the crap. Then (and I still can’t believe it happened) I got sucked back into the corporate world. In my first few weeks there I was like a fish out of water. Possum in the headlights doesn’t begin to cover it.

Yesterday I heard that Murray Walker, the Formula 1 commentator, had died at the age of 97. This came as a surprise to me, because I thought he was already dead. Somebody quipped that Walker spoke like a man whose trousers were on fire, and that was why he was so memorable, even for someone like me who was mostly uninterested in motor racing. He voice was cars zooming around a track on a Sunday afternoon. These household-name sports commentators of my childhood and early adulthood are rapidly becoming history. Peter Alliss – it’s hard to imagine the 72nd hole of the Open championship without him – died in December aged 89. Then there’s Richie Benaud, voice of the Ashes, and Sid Waddell, voice of darts. Going further back, there’s Bill McLaren (rugby – again, what a voice), Peter O’Sullevan (horse racing, another sport I didn’t care about but was hard to avoid), Ted Lowe (snooker), Brian Johnston (cricket again), and Dan Maskell (tennis, “Oh, I say”). All gone. Dodgers baseball fans had Vin Scully, who commentated on their games, with extraordinary wit, for sixty-seven seasons until 2016. At 93, he is still with us. But these voices, beamed into our living rooms and onto our car radios seemingly since time immemorial, won’t be replaced. They’re gone for ever, as (for me) has sport itself, largely. I think back to England’s 1998 cricket tour of the Caribbean and how exotic and far away those islands seemed as I listened to ball-by-ball commentary on long-wave radio. As money has flooded top-level sport, that remoteness, that wonder, it’s all gone.

Four more poker tournaments at the weekend. Saturday evening’s fixed badugi went nowhere, then by Sunday the US had moved to summer time, meaning all the day’s tournaments kicked off an hour earlier. (They’ll be back to normal in two weeks, when we too put our clocks forward.) The early starts reduced the fields by about 20%. I had a good run in the single draw, picking up some monster hands to amass a big stack, but I couldn’t make much headway at the final table. I had a big stack to my left who kept bombing after the draw and I never made a hand I felt I could call (or check-raise) with. Being out of position in single draw is tough. I was out in fourth for a $21 profit. At the same time I made a deep run in the pot-limit badugi – being in contention in two tournaments simultaneously is fun when it happens – but though I finished sixth I only made $7 because I once again did a terrible job of picking up bounties. I had a particularly unlucky bust-out hand, but that happens. Then I ran badly once more in last night’s fixed badugi, winning four of the 78 hands I played. My bankroll is $436.

We generally get very nice weather in Timișoara – that could be another reason why it’s become my happy place – but right now it’s grey and wet and miserable.

Finally, I’ve just found out about this new website – radio.garden – which lets you tune in to any radio station in the world just by clicking on a map. You can spend hours on it.

Coronavirus - Poker

Confidence boost

March 13, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

My 18-year-old student cancelled last night’s lesson two hours before we were due to start, so that meant only one thing: poker. And as it happened, a nice win. I won the fixed badugi from 153 entrants, making a $79 profit in 4½ hours. That felt pretty good. I took me a while to get going though. My starting stack of 3000 had dwindled to three figures before I made a monster on the last hand prior to the first break, giving me a toehold. From there it wasn’t plain sailing. I’d chipped up to just over 10,000 not long before the money, but I gave back almost half of that when my opponent underplayed a big hand. I should have lost more. When we reached the eight-man final table I quickly relinquished over half my chips to become the short stack, but when I recovered from that I came into my own. In fact at times I was just about running over the table. That’s always fun. I entered heads-up with just over 60% of the chips. My opponent wasn’t bad – he knew how to bluff – but he was too passive at times, not betting when he had a clear advantage and giving me the chance to catch up. We swapped the lead a few times, but after our 70-hand battle I emerged the victor. My bankroll is now $420, and hopefully that win will give me the confidence to play with more freedom, to bluff more, to make make more moves, and to be less timid in bounty tournaments. Let’s see.

This week I’ve been thinking more about my long-term plans. I’m pretty they involve Timișoara which I still absolutely bloody love. The place makes me happy. I have everything I want here, or at least I will when we finally see the back of this virus. Having a job that works for me is the biggest thing of all, but the architecture, the parks, the markets, the squares, I can’t think I’ll ever tire of all of that. And I’m part of it, slap-bang in the middle, not stuck out on the ninth floor of Building D in some god-awful shoot-me-now business park.

On Wednesday my student was clearly still feeling the effects of the Astra Zeneca vaccine he’d had five days earlier. I would have taken that vaccine in heartbeat, and would still take it for sure, but seeing his pallor and lethargy, several days after the jab, gave me pause.

Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of the Japanese tsunami. It came on the back of the Christchurch quake, and in the middle of my horrible long wait to find out the Wellington job. Not fun times.

Coronavirus - Poker - Politics - Tennis

Back in lockdown

March 8, 2021 plutomanby 0 Comments

I was about to do my weekly shop, but then I checked the rules and realised I couldn’t until after lunch. Timișoara entered lockdown last night at midnight, and supermarkets are reserved for over-65s between 10am and 1pm. Good decision all round. The sunny early-spring weather had brought crowds of people to the centre, especially in narrow streets like Strada Alba Iulia where you’re all hemmed in. Hospitals are just about bursting at the seams when the new variants are starting to proliferate, so this increase in activity is at exactly the wrong time. There’s been too much “can we get away with it?” and general pussyfooting around, so I’m glad they’ve put the hammer down. I wonder if that would have happened under Nicolae Robu, our old mayor.

Leadership matters more than people think. Would New Zealand have done so well had the 2017 election turned out differently (or should I say, as expected)? We’ll never know, but it’s just a hunch that National would have been all “we’ve got a goddamn rock star economy and we ain’t gonna shut it down”. Team of five million? Maybe. Be kind? I doubt it. NZ’s messaging has been inclusive, not divisive, and that’s gone a long way towards their resounding success up until now. To be clear, I still think National would have handled it miles better than the US or most of Europe.

The British people’s reaction to their disastrous response to Covid is increasingly maddening. The death toll is around 120,000, and tens of millions of Brits aren’t only OK with that, they like what they see. Now they’ve got their vaccines and all is forgiven, if they ever thought there was anything to forgive in the first place. It seems that if you supported Brexit and voted Tory in December 2019, you’ll support the government come what may. And now they’ve got their vaccines that the EU don’t have, so hahahaha in your face! Take that remainers, we’re winning! Who cares about all that death now.

I played tennis twice at the weekend, and it’ll be at least three weeks before I’m back on the court again. In both sessions – four hours – I played with Domnul Ionescu, a man in his late sixties with a smoker’s cough who spat on his hand every second point or so. On the other side was a woman of 30-odd and the bloke I had that singles match with just before Christmas. Petrică, one of the other regulars who must be in his early fifties, couldn’t make it. He’s suffered from a kidney problem for some time, he managed to pick up Covid, and now he needs dialysis.

Four poker tournaments yesterday. All frustrating in their various ways. I cashed in two of them but barely broke even. In the Omaha hi-lo I amassed a nice stack but couldn’t build it up into something imposing. I treaded water for a long time, then when we got down to three tables I min-raised my high-only hand in the cut-off. I was unlucky enough for both the blinds to wake up with A2 and good side cards. I correctly got all in pre-flop three ways because I had plenty of equity (one third, as it happened) but the board ran out horribly for me and I was out in 15th for a small cash. In the single draw I hung around but a big stack on my left kept going all in over my raises and I never felt I had enough to call. Being out of position is horrible in that game at the best of time. I had another good run in the pot-limit badugi, knocking three people out early, but the bounties dried up and at the final table my stack did too. I got a small payout for coming seventh out of 100. Then in the fixed badugi I started OK but couldn’t win the big pots when it mattered, and was out well before the money. My bankroll is $337.

Update: The Romanian authorities have come to their senses and approved the Astra Zeneca vaccine for over-55s. The notion that it was unsafe or ineffective for older people has been roundly disproven, but sadly too many people might already have been spooked by all that bollocks.

This morning Adi Bărar, who founded the highly successful Timișoara band Cargo, died after spending two weeks in hospital with coronavirus.

Family - Life :)

Growing old quickly

March 7, 2021 plutomanby 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.