Month: January 2022

Life :) - Maths teaching - New Zealand - Poker - Tennis

Hard to keep in touch…

January 31, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

What a final that was, all 5 hours and 24 minutes of it. I never imagined Nadal would find himself anywhere near the final, let alone winning from two sets down against Medvedev who is one of the best players on a hard court. I still don’t know how he did it. That game where he dug himself out of a love-40 hole at 2-2 in the third set was the catalyst for his fightback, and you could see Medvedev tire ever so slightly towards the end of that set. There were so many long, draining games in the match, going several deuces. Nadal won less than half the points – in the first set he was completely outplayed, and he got hardly any easy holds until the very last game. Just wow. There it is then, his 21st grand slam in extraordinary circumstances, with Roland-Garros around the corner. The French don’t take kindly to anti-vaxers either.

Last Sunday, on the morning of my trip to the fortresses, I heard from a friend I first met in Wellington back in 2011. She shifted to Auckland not long after that, and then upped sticks and moved to Naseby in Central Otago. I’d sent her some pictures of apartments – I still haven’t made much progress there. It was a huge pleasure to hear from her. To get up and see that message felt great. It’s sad that I’ve fallen out of touch with most of my NZ-based friends, and even some of my extended family, and that hasn’t been for want of trying. I send sporadic emails but don’t get replies, then eventually I give up. People are selfish. They want contacts that will give them results. Tangible benefits. Access to other people who will give them results and tangible benefits. Friendship itself doesn’t cut it. (It doesn’t help that I don’t use social media. Communicating with one person at a time, like in an email, is oh so cumbersome and inefficient.)

Yesterday I had my maths lesson with Matei. I didn’t see him last Saturday because he’d gone with his family to Milan for the long weekend. As you do. My job as a maths teacher is to explain things that are obvious to me but non-obvious to him, and I partly failed to do that, as a result of my inexperience. I’ll revisit the topic at the start of next week’s session, after giving it a lot more thought.

Some good news, I suppose, about my book. I’ve completed my journey through the thousand or so words and expressions that baffle and bemuse Romanians. I still need to put some more meat on the bones in a few of the sections and add one of two appendices. But then what? How will this huge tome (that’s what it is) ever see the light of day? I could go back to the Romanian teacher at the university. She stopped communicating with me too. What is it with people?

Wordle. It’s taken the world by storm, in a way that no puzzle game has since Sudoku back in 2005. If you haven’t heard of it by now, it’s a daily game created by Josh Wardle (hence its excellent name) where you have to guess a five-letter target word. Enter your guess (which must be a real word) and it’ll highlight in green any letters that are in the right place in the target word, while any letters that are in the word but in a different place are coloured yellow. Letters that don’t appear in the word at all are highlighted in grey. Then you try again, until you (hopefully) home in on the final word. This was my attempt today. I think I got lucky:

I average about four guesses. The concept of the game isn’t new, and it’s interesting (and surprising) what takes off and what doesn’t. As someone who has created a whole ton of word and number puzzles in my time, I’m pleased that this has been a success. Why has it blossomed? Well, it’s simple, it’s pleasing on the eye, the coloured grids are shareable on social media (gotta have that), and best of all, you can only play it once a day. A couple of minutes, then gata, as they say in Romanian. The ultimate anti-Candy Crush. It takes you back to the days of internet cafés when you’d pop in for ten minutes to “check your emails” and then return to glorious disconnection.

Poker. Not my best session today, but it’s been a good January. I’ve made $205 this month, and my bankroll is now $1648.

Photos - Poker - Travel: Romania

Some Romanian ruins

January 26, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve just been alerted of Romania’s huge virus numbers today. Ambulance numbers are on the rise too. If only the country hadn’t failed its vaccine IQ test quite so spectacularly, we wouldn’t be facing another month of utter carnage.

On Saturday Mark, the English guy, asked me if I wanted to join him on a trip to Arad the next morning, where we’d look at some churches and stuff. Sure, sounds good. I cycled to his place, where I expected his girlfriend to come too. She stayed at home, but he brought their dog along. It was an icy morning, and the flat expanse – bleak but beautiful – stretched out to the horizon. I’d imagined we’d explore the city and maybe grab a coffee somewhere, but Mark had other ideas. He wanted to visit two ruined fortresses. Great. But then I realised I’d need to climb icy hills and I didn’t exactly have the right footwear. Neither did he. Going up wasn’t easy, but coming down was even dicier, and we had no choice in a couple of spots but to slide down on our arses. For the dog it was dead easy. The first fortress, at Șoimoș by the Mureș river, was built in the 13th century, and seemed to be on the way to disappearing entirely. That’s how Romania treats its history. It was probably possible to get to the top – someone had stuck a flag up there – but we didn’t dare try. From there we drove to another ruin at Șiria. This was a longer but easier (less icy) climb than the first. On the hill near the fortress was a cross and a Hollywood-style sign that lit up at night.

It was a quiet, still day, as Sundays in Romania so often are. The terrain in this part of the country is pancake flat for miles on end, but then hills soar out of nowhere. There was plenty of bird life, as usual, and we met a herd of goats on the way. It was great to get all that exercise, even if I wasn’t prepared for it, including the bike rides to Dumbrăvița and back.

Monday, which was a public holiday, was a far less energetic day. I could feel my exertions of the day before. I played six poker tournaments, grabbing a satisfying win and two smaller cashes. I’ve had a good run since mid-November, with numerous first and second places. I made $62 on the day; my bankroll is now $1625.

Here are some pictures from Sunday:

Buying property - Coronavirus - Family - Language teaching - Life :) - Poker

My flat search, my brother’s job search, and 19/1/12

January 20, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s a nippy Thursday morning here. I took this picture just before my lesson which started at eight. You can see the hoar frost on the trees and the near-full moon. The days are noticeably pulling out: a fortnight ago it was almost pitch black at that time.

I haven’t had much luck getting new students at the start of 2022, but yesterday I got a call from the mother of a 17-year-old girl, and I agreed to give her daughter tuition for her C1 Cambridge exam. Teaching for advanced-level exams is not my forte – they’re basically a game in which I lack experience, rather than a simple test of English – so I might not be much help.

No maths lesson with Matei this weekend – his family are going away. It’s been interesting being back in his room again. The huge world map on his wall always fascinates me because it makes Europe seem so small. He told me that his grandmother, whom I often had conversations with, is now suffering from Alzheimer’s. She must be almost eighty. That’s sad.

I saw the doctor on Tuesday to get my pills. I mentioned my headaches and gummed-up nose, but after seeing 35 Covid patients in a single day, his focus was on the virus which wasn’t my issue. (I took a rapid Covid test last week, just in case. I was negative.) He gave me the requisite temperature and oxygen saturation checks, and even checked my blood pressure and gave me a once-over with a stethoscope, and everything was fine. He then prescribed me a drug called Quarelin for my headaches. If I can’t rid of this head pain, and the frequency and duration reach the levels that Dad had to deal with when he was my age, life might not be worth living. I’m serious. Dad had a wife and family. I don’t.

I’ve finally dismissed that flat which initially seemed so promising. The lack of sun isn’t something I can risk. I look back at all those places in Auckland and Wellington, and the correlation between natural light and my mood – if not necesarily a causation – is definitely there. I’m interested in three more places and I’ll make some phone calls later today.

My parents told me that they heard a loud bang last Friday. What the hell was that? It was the Tongan volcanic eruption. They could hear it from 1500 miles away? Holy shit. The scenes following the eruption are of total devastation.

My brother wants to leave the army. He’s had enough of his courses that take him away from home five days a week and hardly inspire him anyway. He recently applied for a job which he didn’t get (unfairly, he thinks). He’s invariably grumpy and uncommunicative at the moment, so I really hope he can find something to cheer him up.

Poker tournaments. Since Christmas I’ve had one win and five second places. What a shame it isn’t the other way round. At the weekend I was heads-up in a $4.40 pot-limit badugi. My opponent covered me, just. I got dealt the 204th best hand in the game. That doesn’t sound very good, and it’s not, but heads-up against an aggressive opponent it shoots up in value. It was just a bit too good to fold. We got all our chips in, he turned over the 203rd best hand (!), and I had to be content with another runner-up spot. My bankroll is now $1562.

It’s now ten years since my grandmother died, four months prior to her 90th birthday. How time flies. I often wish she could have seen me in Romania. I sometimes dream about sitting in the square with her, having a coffee or a glass of wine, watching the world go by.

Buying property - Films - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

A real headache

January 16, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

In a follow-up to the previous Thursday, I had a really really shitty start to this week – headaches and just no energy. On Wednesday, even though my headaches had pretty much gone, I’d taken a hammering from having what felt like a screwdriver jammed up my nostril for two days, and I couldn’t steel myself do anything outside my online lessons. On Monday I did manage to make it over to the apartment for a second look. It ticks a lot of my boxes – it would be great for teaching, I think – but the sun is a big issue. The flat has windows facing both north and south, but unfortunately the south-facing windows look out on tall apartment blocks that cut out the sun. I thought about this earlier today when the sun was streaming through my south-facing window as I washed my lunch dishes. Now I’m about to get the sun through my west-facing living room window. Before moving to Romania I faced ongoing battles with mental health. I now have that under control, and I hate to make a change that puts that in jeopardy.

Talking of weather, we got a fair dump of snow last weekend and early this week, making for picturesque scenes. On Thursday morning we plummeted to a rather brisk minus 12. This was as my parents were down in Central Otago to deliver paintings. Dad sent me a picture taken at a café in beautiful Ophir which I visited seven years ago.

On that awful Thursday – nine days ago – I watched the star-studded Don’t Look Up on Netflix, though I had to take it in chunks because the headaches were making me ultra-sensitive to light and sound. Some reviewers have panned the film, but it’s rather cool to pan something like that, and when all is said and done it’s likely to end up in four-star territory. Don’t Look Up is a pretty good parody of the post-truth times we live in, where everything is up for debate, everything must have two sides, social media is dominant, and the music is unbearably awful.

Even the Djokovic saga has polarised people, when it has no need to. The last ten days have been a bad look for everybody involved: the man himself, and the Australian government in its entirety. A 500-watt light has been shone on Australia’s pretty barbaric (and US-style) immigration practices. If Djokovic had any sense (I used to think he did), he’d have gone home by now of his own accord, but his ego is obviously too big for that.

Poker. I had another tournament win on Wednesday, which was nice. I’ve now had four goes at razz – a fourth place (which got my confidence up), a good run but far from the money, and two very early exits. My bankroll now stands at $1523.

Coronavirus - Family - Poker - Tennis

A GOAT and a donkey

January 8, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Just a quick one from me this morning, as I’m about to head off to Dumbrăvița in the rain for my maths lesson. (Update: the rain has turned to snow.)

Omicron is now spreading like wildfire in Romania; the doubling rate of new cases is four days. The graphs at the top of this blog are already hopelessly out of date – I’ll soon go back to daily updates. In countries like the UK, where people have actually been getting vaccinated, the new variant has been mild, but who knows what it will do in Romania where (incredibly) the majority of the country is still unjabbed. We’ll soon find out.

I spoke to my parents on Thursday night. They gave me updates on all the renovations on their new house. They might have bitten off more than they can chew. I just hope they get professionals in as much as possible – it’s not as if they can’t afford to. Will this be the year we finally see each other? It’s been three years, and I miss them terribly. Thank heavens for FaceTime.

Mum and I talked about the Djokovic saga. She’s a fan of the Serb, so she was much more equivocal than me. (I used to like him too.) To my mind, Djokovic is getting what he deserves here. His attitude to Covid has been lamentable from the start. He organised the Covid Cup superspreader event in summer of 2020 and has been a vocal anti-vaxer. He’s idolised in Serbia and has surely convinced many thousands of Serbs to remain unjabbed like him. Then he tries to waltz into Australia, which has some of the strictest Covid rules on the planet. Bugger him. And I don’t care if he’s won the Australian Open nine times and he’s the GOAT and blablablah (or is it maa maa maa?). He isn’t the only one to blame. The authorities, especially Tennis Australia, have behaved appallingly here too. His appeal hearing takes place on Monday, and it’s possible he’ll still be allowed to play. If so, he’ll be booed to oblivion. I hope he’s deported on the next plane.

On Thursday I had a terrible day. Luckily I only had two lessons – one in the early morning and one in the evening. I’m now almost sure that what I thought was acute sinus pain is actually migraines. I had two or three hours of intense pain in the morning and around lunchtime, and it took the rest of the day to recover. Dad has suffered from migraines (with much greater duration and frequency than me) since he was a teenager, so I suppose it’s not a surprise that I’ve ended up getting them. I tried to watch Don’t Look Up on Netflix and listen to one of the Reith lectures (about AI), but even all of that was a struggle because I was hypersensitive to light and sound. More about that next time.

Poker. Two second places on Wednesday took my bankroll to $1477. I made $46 on the morning. I tried, with no success, to play razz, a lowball stud game. I’ll give that another go, probably at the weekend.

The apartment. I’m still very interested, but also very apprehensive. I’ve booked another viewing for Monday.

Buying property - Life :) - Other sports

The most promising place so far

January 5, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

I’ve finally found a flat that might fit the bill. It’s fully furnished, just in case you haven’t had enough Fs yet, and it’s on the third floor of a block built in 1986, just off Calea Aradului, one of the arterial roads through the city. I say just off, but it’s pretty much on it. I had a look at it yesterday. At 110 square metres, it’s big for just one person – the same size as the place in Wellington that I’m thankfully no longer burdened with. I found that too big, but in my new situation bigger is better: I need the space for work. This place has three bedrooms (I could convert one of them into an office) and two bathrooms – or rather one bathroom and an additional loo. Crucially it has a hall with the rooms leading off it, unlike more modern designs. I shouldn’t have problem parking a car there, if and when I eventually get one, assuming I haven’t completely forgotten how to drive. As always, there are minuses. The third floor is right at the limit when running a business in a lift-free apartment block. The location is very handy to everything, but it’s not exactly quiet. (I even went back there this afternoon and stood outside the block with a decibel meter that I’d downloaded as an app. Over five minutes the average reading was 76, and when a truck went by it hit 90. Where I live now, slap-bang in the centre of the city, we average 72 in the daytime.) I’ll have very little of the green space I’ve enjoyed in the last five years, although there is a park within walking distance. I’m still unsure how much sun the place will get. So there’s plenty to think about.

New Year’s Eve with the neighbours was nice, if a little tiring. By two o’clock I could not longer stay awake, and I really didn’t need all that food. I realise now that under normal circumstances (that means no jokes or obscure subjects) I can manage fine in Romanian. I should be proud of that, I guess, even if I’m far from fluent. For the second year running, Covid put paid to the big fireworks display, so a lot of people let off their own. Hospitals had a busy time of it. On New Year’s Day I met Mark, the teacher, in town. We sampled the food from the market – mutton, which was a first for me in Romania – and then went for a beer.

Last night I stayed up to watch the darts final on a temperamental stream. A good match, with Peter Wright beating Michael Smith 7-5, taking home £500,000 for his efforts. (Smith got £200k.) The second leg of the match was almost like two blokes down the pub, it took so long for someone to finally hit double one, but the level improved markedly from there. The best match of the few I saw was Wright’s 5-4 quarter-final win over youngster Callan Rydz, needing a tie-break to just about get over the line.

Here are some pictures from my New Year’s Eve bike ride. Below is the semi-derelict church at Bobda. I sent the photo to Dad, who said I shouldn’t put in an offer on it.

Films - Life :)

Final push of 2021

January 1, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Earlier today I did a 50 km bike ride. On the city bike that I have, that’s a lot. There were the usual flashes of lycra from people going at twice my speed. I went down the Bega to Sânmihaiu Român, where I’ve been countless times, but then took a different route, going through the sister village of Sânmihaiu German, which as the name suggests was settled by Germans, in the early 18th century. Even in the middle of the 20th century it was still Germans living there, as you could tell by the houses which were inscribed with their date of construction and owners’ names. The middle of the trip was the most interesting, as I went through Bobda (a fun name to say), Beregsău Mic and Beregsău Mare (where I stopped for lunch). The land is as flat as a pancake – it reminded me of the Fens, even more so because we’d had plenty of rain and some of then fields were semi-flooded. I didn’t see as much wildlife as I might have expected: the odd magpie, the usual farm animals, and that was about it. After lunch, with the kilometres-to-go figure still in the high teens, I just wanted to get home. I found myself on what was basically a main road, and cycling along it wasn’t that pleasant. I stopped for a quick coffee at Săcălaz, which I’d call a town rather than a village, and before too long I was back home. I took a few pictures until my phone gave out, and I can’t get the ones I took to show up here, so utter crap on that score all round. (I currently have an iPhone 5½. It’s not actually called that, but that’s effectively what it is. I need an upgrade.)

The date stamp for this blog post will be 1st January 2022, but that’s because I have it set to New Zealand time. For me it’s still the old year. I suspect we’ll have celebrations in the square tonight, unlike last year when there was a curfew. My neighbours have invited me over, but seem to have given me licence to come (and go) when I want, which is great because so often I’ve been to some New Year’s Eve thing and it’s felt worse than being stuck at an airport for hours on end. Yesterday I had my final two lessons of 2021. In one of them we watched part of The Terminal, a film all about being stuck in an airport. I have fond memories of that film, in a way. I saw it at the cinema in 2004, the night before I had one of my first actuarial exams. I only saw it to take my mind of the exam – I’d studied hard and knew the material well, but was worried that my nerves would get the better of me. I passed it comfortably, as it turned out. In the early days I quite liked studying for those exams – I could employ a method that worked for me, unlike in my job itself, where I was locked into systems that were pointless and mind-numbing.

I’ll play one more poker tournament before the year is out. I’ve had a couple of good results in the last week but from plenty of attempts; my bankroll is still in the low $1400s. Edit: It was a fixed-limit badugi and I came fourth, for a profit of $28. After making $254 in December, my bankroll is $1443.

The Covid numbers in Romania are climbing again. In the first two months of 2022 we’re going to be swamped with Omicron.