Month: February 2022

Life :) - Poker

Here’s some better news

February 28, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

As promised, here’s the good news. My sister-in-law is pregnant. She had her ten-week scan last week, and I got a suite of photos showing something clearly moving. Animated. It’s miraculous when you think about it. I knew that she was pregnant a month ago, but I didn’t mention it here. She also got pregnant last summer, but lost the baby after six or seven weeks. That was devastating for her. This time I’ve got my fingers and just about everything else crossed. My sister-in-law will be 37 in April.

Day nine for me. A better day. After another chat with my parents (we’ve been talking a lot lately) I fired up two poker tournaments, and I’ll be damned, I went and won the same one that I won last Sunday. I made a $75 profit from the session to go with last Sunday’s excruciating $69, and my bankroll is now $1904. In the intervening week I never even considered logging on. After that, I felt physically closer to normal than at any point since this all started, so I went for a proper walk.

In my next post I’ll write about the Ukraine invasion, which I’ve had plenty of chance to follow in bewilderment on TV.

Life :)

This isn’t going away

February 26, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

After I wrote that last post, I had a horrific night. I woke at 12:30 in agony, and couldn’t sleep for hours. I woke up from my short sleep to see that everything had kicked off in Ukraine. It’s now day eight and the pain has moved from my lower stomach to my groin. I have the symptoms of kidney stones, but it might not be that. I did manage to see the doctor this morning. I nearly took a taxi, but in the end walked, slowly. I pressed the button on the door, and the doctor – not my normal doctor but another man in his fifties – let me in. His nurse and the cleaner were there, but no other patients. Great. I lay down on the bed. Does it hurt here? What about here? And why are you so tense? (I’m on my own, in pain, and have been for over a week. And I’m having to explain myself in a foreign language. Tension would seem utterly logical.) He prescribed me some pills to reduce the pain, counteract all my gas, and improve the flow of my pee (which seems fine anyway). Then he told me to get an abdominal ultrasound, which I hope I’ll have early next week.

Since I last wrote, I’ve been reading, watching the terrible news coming from our European neighbour, and struggling to cope with lessons. There is some better news though, which I’ll talk about next time.

Life :)

Coming back, I hope

February 24, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Maybe my five-day ordeal is coming to an end. I had three lessons today, and one of them was literally painful – I had to move from my desk to the couch, which I can when it’s online – but I managed. Just yesterday I was worried out of my skin. I’d become so tired and weak and my whole existence had taken on a metallic tinge. I was scared I might nosedive like I did in 2001. In the evening I decided to see the doctor – it was a Tuesday, so I knew he’d be there. My walk there was slow, and I stared for a while at a “lost dog” notice. When it was my turn to see him, instead of taking me into his room I was shunted into a corner of the waiting room where I attempted to tell him what was wrong. (I’d prepared to tell him the details in Romanian, but this threw me.) “Wait here, and you’ll have a Covid test.” I waited for an hour until ten, then thought bugger this, I need to sleep and I’m pretty sure I haven’t got Covid symptoms, so I gave up and went home.

I’m now trying to stay off the internet as much as I can (which with my work isn’t a lot). I know the TV is depressing right now with everything brewing in Ukraine, but the internet is something else.

Tomorrow I have five lessons, so that’ll be a test.

Life :)

It’s all two much

February 22, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Today is 22/2/22. It reminds me of my job in Wellington, where we had a scheduled coffee meeting at 11:11 on 11/11/11. Then my new boss came the following week, and soon after that my job careened off a cliff.

I’ve had a terrible last few days. On Friday night at around 11 I suddenly had pain in my stomach and spent the whole night going back and forth to the loo. I think I had food poisoning from some leftover chicken I’d probably left in the fridge too long and later made a soup out of. I continued feeling terrible the next day, and cancelled the only lesson I had that day. No worries though, it’ll surely soon be over. On Sunday morning I woke up feeling just about normal. Great. Just rest, drink gallons of water and some electrolyte powder, and I’ll be fine. I joined two poker tournaments because why not, and two hours later when I was still involved in one of them, I was in agony. I had to lie on my tummy, and looking at the screen made me feel even more ill. I soldiered on, and bizarrely won the most excruciating tournament I hope ever to play. Although the pain eventually subsided I felt that something was eating away at my stomach and I had low energy. And I’ve been depressed. Being ill makes me feel very very alone. Yesterday I got through a painful 90-minute lesson with the twins. Please just let this be over. I also had a new student – a Bucharest-based woman of 34 who looks much younger – and we had our first proper lesson last night.

I’ve been looking forward to bedtime and dreading having to get up in the morning. In between lessons I’ve been reading – something about the internet has made me want to avoid it, although I did read about the cross-country skier whose penis froze and thought, I suppose things could be worse. My biggest fear has been of falling into a deep depression, like I suffered in 2001, when suddenly getting off the couch became an effort. Yesterday my phone rang three times and I didn’t answer. This morning I noticed I’d lost weight. I called my parents and we had a long chat, and that definitely perked me up. I’ll try and have a proper lunch now, then get through my lessons, and with a bit of luck I can be back to some sort of normality, whatever that means.

I’d meant to write about all the flats I looked at last week, including one on the tenth floor, but that dropped way down my list of priorities.

Coronavirus - Life :)

Don’t need the stress, and a pleasant bike trip

February 14, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Maybe, just maybe, we’re now nearing the end of the pandemic for real. People here thought it was all over in the summer of 2020, and incredibly they thought the same a year later when it was blindingly obvious (given the pitiful vaccination rate) that more Romanians were yet to die from Covid than had already done so. Țara struților, I remember saying. Nation of ostriches. But the Omicron variant is acting as a like-it-or-not vaccine, so we could be entering the final lap of the Covid marathon. This morning my parents told me that New Zealand’s daily figure for infections had whopped up into the 800s, which will soon seem a tiny number, like on my graphs. It’s now in South Canterbury – there are a smattering of cases in Timaru. Right now, they know zero people who have caught Covid; that will soon change. (The majority of people I know in Romania have had it, at pretty much every level you could imagine, and in some cases twice. I’m fortunate not to know anybody who has died from it.) Perhaps this week it will show up in Geraldine, then the week after on their street. Thankfully both my parents are triple-jabbed, and with the possible exception of Dad’s blood tests, they could get by for a month without leaving the house if they really had to. They might just about have half a cow in their freezer.

On Friday I had coffee with the woman in her early fifties whom I had lessons with in 2018 before she moved to Austria. She’s now come back to Timișoara. She had Covid in November, during the Delta wave, and said she wasn’t at all concerned despite (or perhaps because) she hadn’t been vaccinated. The survival rate is 99%, she said, as if somehow live and die are the only two outcomes. Some of the survivors have been to hell and back. She was fine. Lucky her. Anyway, she suggested I ramp up my teaching by joining British School in some capacity. Perhaps I could even teach maths there, she said. That all conjured up images of stress on a stick. WhatsApp groups filled with angry parents who’ve paid an arm and a leg for their kids’ education. I want to get a flat sorted before even thinking of anything on those lines.

So, on to today. Mark, the teacher, had the bright idea (no sarcasm) of going on a bike ride. He asked me if there were any good options, so at eleven we met outside the cathedral and set off on the track that I’ve now been on dozens of times. I suggested we stopped at La Livada, a friendly-seeming restaurant next to an orchard (which is what livadă means). Mark had a well-used mountain bike. I warned him that my bike wasn’t capable of high speeds, and neither was my body. We got there before twelve and grabbed coffees before getting something to eat. We both had a ciorbă (Romanian thick soup) and papanași, an extremely yummy fried pudding. We just sat around and chatted for a while. We both liked the place so I’m sure we’ll be back there. There wasn’t as much wildlife on our journey as I might have expected, though on the way back we saw a kestrel. On our return, Mark told me I went much faster than he’s used to. That surprised me, because I don’t think I’m a particularly fast cyclist. It was probably just a case of staying at by-myself speed, when I should have slowed down to with-someone-else speed. I’ve often been told I walk too fast.

My Sunday evening lesson with the guy in London isn’t far away.

Buying property - Life :) - Poker - Tennis

Some sad news, and my latest flat search

February 13, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

My neighbour called me yesterday to deliver the sad news that Domnul Ionescu, the 70-year-old tennis regular, had died just that morning. He’d died of lung cancer. It all happened remarkably quickly; in November I was playing tennis with him, often on the same side of the net. He was a heavy smoker. He could get through one set of tennis without a fag, but not two. He had a typical smoker’s cough, sometimes yacking out the contents into his hand. He was also pleasant to talk to, even if his favourite topic of conversation was how Romania had gone to the dogs. He was particularly scathing about Romanians’ attitudes to the pandemic; he’d been fully vaccinated. He loved following sport: tennis, football and handball. He worked for the railways, as some of the other tennis players do (or did), and as far as I can tell he reached quite a high position.

I got to look at four places on Wednesday. They were all built in the eighties and in a similar part of town.

The first one was a doozy. (Maybe I should choose that as my starting word for Wordle.) It was a biggish flat on the ground floor, owned by a couple in their sixties. The lady was cooking pancakes at the time. The place had unusual-looking archways and was eccentrically decorated, with no two walls painted the same colour. One of the rooms had snowmen and the like painted on the walls. Under the living room was a hidden storage space. One of the rooms could have been an office, but was rather small. In the bathroom, the sink and bath were shell-shaped, while the sink pedestal was in the shape of a fish. I had a certain admiration for the owners for deciding to decorate the place like this, and they seemed lovely. The woman even gave me two pancakes before I left. But really it was a non-starter. I told the agent I thought it was overpriced, and he agreed with me.

The second place also on the ground floor and had recently had a makeover. A large, typically Romanian elderly lady owned it. It was well furnished and had potential, but unfortunately was just too small. Then on to number three. I met the owner, a man of sixty or so, who might have been a welder. It seemed he could turn his hand to anything involving metal. I do admire people who have such practical skill. Unlike number two, this place was filled with cheap furniture. It had a garage I could have bought for a few thousand extra. Opposite was supposedly a brewery of some sort, which had ceased operations a long time ago. Just like the second place, this was also too small to run classes.

The final apartment was the best of the bunch. It was in a slightly different area, and one I prefer, because it is relatively quiet and has more green space. The flat was a decent size, and one of the rooms could have made a good office. I wasn’t sure about the electrics – the wires hanging from the ceiling in the kitchen looked a bit dodgy. Like the first place, it had a hidden storage space (basement) under the kitchen, with a ladder going down. The owner didn’t stop talking – he was in hard-sell mode – and I wasn’t sure if I could trust him. Again, there was a garage that I could buy for an additional €5,500, on top of the €120,000 asking price of the flat. I wasn’t sure if it got much sunlight. I soon learnt that the apartment had been on the market for a year, and the owners have increased the price by €10,000 in that time. The owner showed me some paperwork with various unaccepted offers, all around the €100,000 mark.

This wasn’t wasted time, because I felt I got my eye in a bit, which I need to do because it’s such a big decision.

Last week was a better one for work as people recovered from Covid, some for the second time.

Poker. I’ve been less active of late, but I got in two tournaments yesterday. In the single draw I snagged the last of the eleven paid places, while in the badugi I had a good run, finishing fourth for a $43 profit. After that successful session my bankroll is up to $1740. If and when my profit reaches $2000 – that’s $300 away – I plan to withdraw most of it, leaving $700 in my account.

Buying property - Life :)

Still searching for the right place (and the right word)

February 9, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Doing the Wordle has now become an early-morning ritual for me. Although the game is hosted on a .co.uk site, today’s one was an American spelling. I see American spellings pretty often without batting an eyelid, but I don’t immediately think of them, so it was a challenge today. I was happy to get the word on my fourth attempt after deliberating for ages. What could it possibly be? The best part about Wordle for me is that I can use it as a teaching tool. When you’re sometimes giving hundreds of lessons to the same person, you can never have too many tools. The Romanian version is also great for me because it gets me to think about words differently. For instance, last week COAJA was one of the answers. Coajă means the skin of a fruit, or the shell of a nut or an egg. I could lump that together with coadă (a tail, or a queue) and coamă (a ridge, or a mane), so that those three words no longer took up three separate spaces in my brain. (Edit: there’s also coasă, which is a scythe, and coală, a scrap of paper, to complete a quintet.) Yesterday’s answer, by the way was SOFER. The French word chauffeur was borrowed into Romanian as șofer, and like in French it just means driver, without the added swank that comes with it in English. It’s funny how a nine-letter French word became a five-letter Wordle-valid Romanian word.

Today is a fairly big day for me, because I’ll get to look at two, maybe three, perhaps even four flats. I don’t even know which they will be – not for the first time, I’ll meet the agent outside a pizza place and go from there. Most the ones I’ve seen so far have merged into one big amorphous blob. At Mum’s suggestion I’ll go around with a checklist for each flat: sunlight, noise, wiring, security, furniture (that’s usually included), too open-spacey?, does it have a balcony?, parking, and so on and so forth. I really want to make some progress here, but I feel I’ve got two big handicaps. The biggest is that I’m on my own. Nobody to bounce ideas off or to tell me that the flat I’m eyeing up is ideal or utterly ludicrous. The other is that when it comes to home interiors, I’m colourblind, shape-blind, everything-blind.

Actually one of the places I looked at last week seemed pretty decent. This one was being sold directly by the owners, without an agent. That isn’t uncommon here. I met the owners, a very pleasant couple in perhaps their late sixties, who showed me around. The man first asked me whether my hair was natural or if I dyed it that colour. You seem young, he said. I was wearing a beanie (with my grey hair flopping out of it) and carrying a backpack. After I removed all of that, he could see I wasn’t that young after all. Once I’d been through all the rooms, I told them that I was a private English teacher and needed a room for work. The lady then said, well that explains why you have an accent. An accent? That’s one of the greatest compliments on my Romanian that I’ve ever received. I liked the area, and the flat was fine, if maybe a little overpriced. I really don’t know though.

On Monday I bought a fruit I hadn’t seen before – a nectarcot, a cross between a nectarine and an apricot (but apricot-sized). It tasted pretty good.

In my next post I’ll say how I got on today.

Buying property - Coronavirus - Life :) - Poker

Wobbling slightly

February 8, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Saturday, after realising I’d hardly taken anything in of the flat I’d rushed off to see, it hit me. I’m struggling a bit here, aren’t I? I’ve got a pretty big decision to make, and I can’t motivate myself, while this dump, the one I’m living in now, is a mess and falling apart. How great the initial lockdown was two years ago. No decisions to make. Just do whatever you can to stay safe. Walk in the park once a day and smell the daffodils and tulips, and be thankful that you still can, meaning that you probably haven’t caught the virus yet. (Did people even call it Covid then? I can’t remember.) Traipse up and down the stairs eight times with water bottles on my back. Listen to the birds and the trains in the evening. At times I wish the Sigma Max plus-plus-plus variant could hit us, and we could all go back there. (It’s kind of crazy that Covid is actually pretty bad in Romania right now, far worse than at the start of the pandemic, but it’s predictably bad, so everyone’s sort of OK with it.)

As I was writing the last sentence but one, I googled the name of an insurance product—which had Max and Plus in its name—that was sold by the large company I spent several years working for in NZ. For some reason the name popped into my head. I found out that the company, while large, was taken over by a three-letter-acronym behemoth in 2018, so no longer exists.

What I’m trying to say here is that my propensity for depression hasn’t gone away. I doubt it ever will. I’ve got to move, and until I do, and I’m (hopefully) settled in a new place, I’m probably in for a certain amount of mental turmoil. The good news is that it’s never that long until my next lesson, and connecting with a person for an hour or two (and no longer!) invariably lifts my mood.

New Zealand. There’s talk of opening up, and finally ditching the rather draconian MIQ set-up. I’d love to make a trip over there, but when could I do it? I’m thinking August, of a year to be determined.

I’m still Wordling. Mr Wordle (or Wardle, in fact) has now sold his idea to the New York Times for at least a million bucks, so I don’t know how long it’ll stay free. As well as the Wordle, I’ve been doing the Romanian version, plus a maths-based one called (appropriately) Nerdle.

Poker. I wonder if I’m enjoying that so much. Last week I decided to do a deal, which I basically never do. We got heads-up in five-card draw, and my opponent was happy to split the money 50-50 even though he had more chips than me at the time and (I thought) he was a better player than me. In those circumstances, doing the deal seemed a no-brainer. My bankroll is now $1694.