by 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.
