by I took Kitty to the vet on Friday for her latest round of flea treatments and a general warrant of fitness. As I suspected after changing her food, she’d put on a smidgen of weight: according to their scales (which have 50-gram precision) she was exactly three kilos. She’ll always be a little kitty.
Last week was a very busy one with 35 hours of lessons. That’s a lot of contact time. A lot of talking. When you add in all the preparation, it was a pretty draining week. I’m now staring at my diary for tomorrow; after my early-morning lesson with the Romanian teacher I’ve got six sessions, finishing at 9:30 pm. I’m seriously looking forward to the Christmas break, in particular the days between Christmas and New Year when not a lot happens. This morning I bought an artificial Christmas tree from the supermarket. In some ways I’d have preferred a real one – I like their smell – but I had a look at them at the market and decided they weren’t really cost-effective for a single person. I’m glad I got to the mall this morning at nine, before it became impossibly busy for me. (Only the supermarket is open at that time; the other shops don’t open till ten.) I wondered what the heck was going on with the decorations you could buy in beige and other pastel shades. “Billy, I’ll put the oatmeal candy cane on this side just above the pale lilac Santa hat, and you can put the taupe reindeer over there. There’s a good boy.” Is it because it looks better on Instagram?
Mum and Dad went to Moeraki last week. They called me from outside the fish and chip shop in Hampden, which is the only place they can get a signal. They enjoyed themselves down there, as they usually do. Mum slept a lot. They plan to spend a few days there straight after Christmas.
My first round of the Scrabble league finished last Tuesday. To my surprise, I narrowly avoided relegation with a record of six wins and eight losses. That might not sound great, but I was delighted with the result. It all came down to my final game – with four of the five relegation spots already taken, it was a straight shoot-out, with the winner avoiding the drop. The correspondence format, where you often have to wait hours between moves, made for some nerve-wracking moments. I’d built up a handy lead in that last game but, partly thanks to my total lack of experience in these sorts of situations, did my best to blow it. My last two tiles were Q and J, and I could only play one of them. I decided to play the Q, but that allowed my opponent to play MEOW which a J play would have blocked. (I really should have seen that word.) He then played one tile at a time to maximise his score while I was stuck with the J. I just had enough of a buffer though, and I won in the end by 19. It’s possible they’ll rejig the divisions and I’ll be relegated anyway, and if that happens I’ll be pretty peeved – eking out those six wins took a real effort. The next round starts this Thursday.
On Friday I met up with Dorothy and another friend in town for coffee. And three-way Romanian Scrabble. The café has an upstairs bit, so we took the Scrabble up there. Our friend hadn’t played before, so despite playing in her native language, she wasn’t tuned into triple word scores and the like. In the end I won, finishing just seven points ahead of Dorothy. At one point I had a bunch of vowels and I queried whether AIOLI was valid in Romanian. Our friend asked the waitress about the validity of AIOLI. Unsurprisingly, this was met by a Huh?
A song I’ve been playing a lot in the last few days is John Lennon’s Watching the Wheels, one of his last songs before he was murdered.
It really does feel like time for a break.
