by I wound up with 22½ hours last week, which isn’t a terrible total. This week I’ve got a total of 31½ hours booked – a fairly busy week in other words – and I hope I end up with something close to that. Saturday morning’s session (I hesitate to use the word lesson) with the 17-year-old girl was interesting. As is her wont, she asked me not to bother with the Cambridge reading test practice I’d prepared, saying she’d rather have a 90-minute chat instead. In this time she told me about her exploits in the swimming pool, and showed me the medals (including a national bronze in breaststroke) to prove it. Her description of her training regime sounded rather, er, Romanian. Three hours a day, seven days a week. She described her programme and coach in good English, but switched to Romanian to say, “He hit me.” What with? His hand? Did it hurt? She said, yes it absolutely did hurt, and it was some rubber implement. She rummaged around in a cupboard trying to find one without success, then she brought up a picture on her phone. It was a flipper. Her coach hit her with a flipper. “But it motivated me to go faster.” On her mother’s advice she gave up swimming when she was 14. This morning I had a Skype chat with my cousin in Wellington and her family. Her eldest son is 16 and a very successful swimmer. I regaled them all of the flipper story.
It’s a shame I can’t watch the World Series. Well I could, but my sleep is too important to me. This morning I wanted to get up early, taking advantage of the clocks going back, and go fishing. I only spent an hour there and didn’t catch anything, obviously. But yesterday the third game went on so long that I was able to catch a fair chunk of it, including the wild 13th inning in which both teams scored. But I missed the end of it because I had go to Strada Timiș for my lessons with flipper girl and her little brother. (The game went for seven hours and 20 minutes, breaking all kinds of records. The Dodgers walked it off in the 18th.) The Red Sox bounced back last night in the fourth game to lead 3-1, and could wrap it up tonight. It’ll be party time, no doubt, in Boston if they do so. I don’t know if there’s another city on the planet as passionate about its sports teams.
Scrabble. I’ve now won eleven of my last twelve games and my rating has been gradually edging up. A bit more solidity on the three-letter words is helping me. My most memorable game among that dozen was one against a higher-rated player where I held a three-figure lead, only for my opponent to play a bingo on the triple lane while I was swamped with vowels. I made a clear blunder on one of my final plays, but got away with it, sneaking a confidence-boosting four-point win. And the very next game I lost by just three. That game illustrated the importance of the letter E in Scrabble, and indeed in English in general, as I only saw one E all game. I had a couple of milestone games: my first with four bingos, and my first 400-point game without a bingo at all. In my last game I out-bingoed my opponent 3-0 thanks to both blanks, but my opponent scored heavily on just about every turn, while I struggled with my post-bingo racks, and I had to sweat a bit on the way to a 49-point win.
