Buying property - Coronavirus - Life :)

Could this be the one?

March 12, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

On Tuesday night all of Romania’s Covid restrictions were lifted in one fell swoop. Doing my supermarket shopping maskless will feel very weird; I’m sure I’ll still don my mask on my next visit or two. So Romania is clambering out of the pandemic at last – the country has had a torrid time, with the majority of deaths coming after the vaccines became available. It beggars belief, honestly.

Some good news on the flat front. Today I finally saw a place and thought, yes, this could be me. The kitchen cupboards are painted a lurid lime green, but that wouldn’t bother me. The appliances are modern, it gets the sun, it’s got plenty of space which I could turn into an office, and best of all I like the area. So many of the suburbs I’ve looked at have an absence of anything old, and that would get to me after a while. I had a look at a second place which had just been renovated and looked rather nice on the inside, but it was somehow too pastelly for me, didn’t get much natural light, and in the renovation process had been almost completely undoored. That doesn’t work for me at all. So I’ll have a decision to make, and then potentially all the legal stuff. Plus, should I be buying full stop? The economy is about as uncertain right now as the next lottery draw. Petrol prices have shot up so much that some stations might soon run out of digits on their displays.

My fridge-freezer has packed in. The light is on but there’s nobody home. I’ve been trying to get through a massive hunk of pork. My landlord came over tonight, and it looks like he’s going to order a new fridge. He took measurements, denoting the length (lungime) by capital L, and the width (lățime) by small l. That makes sense when the two words annoying begin with the same letter in Romanian.

I no longer have tummy troubles, but my drugs are about to run out. What will happen then?

Weather permitting, tennis might start up again this Saturday. Sadly there will be no Domnul Ionescu, who seemed such an integral part of the group.

Buying property - Life :) - Photos

Can I get my A into G? (And some pictures)

March 7, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

Not a bad day. It started with two Skype chats with people in New Zealand (my cousin and her husband in Wellington, then a friend in Auckland). After almost being hermetically sealed from Covid for most of the pandemic, they’ve most definitely got it now. But apart from a precious few muppets, some of whom spent three weeks in Wellington intimidating and obstructing, they damn well got vaccinated. In a month’s time, they should have just about weathered the storm.

After lunch, the English guy picked me up and we went for a walk by the Timiș river, just past Giroc. It felt good to be out and about again, and to spend time with somebody I feel comfortable with. We passed sheep farms (it’s lambing season) and plenty of bird life including something I’ve just identified as an African goose, which doesn’t come from Africa. A beach had been created on the bank of the river, which would be an attractive proposition on a 35-degree day. People were hooning along on motorbikes, and you could hire quad bikes – after rolling one and getting my leg trapped under it in 2004, these give me nightmares. Mostly though, it was nice and quiet there. On the way back to the car, we had a coffee at a newly-built café called Sasha’s Pub, which was great with the exception of the muzak. Play the real version of Right Down the Line by Gerry Rafferty, will you, not the lift version.

I looked at a whole slew of flats on Friday, one of which was owned by a bloke with a Rottweiler. I tried to give the agent the “I don’t want a conversation” look, because I really didn’t want one, but he started one anyway. Yeah, there were some OK-ish places, but it was the same story. If only it wasn’t this or that, and can I really be bothered? I’ve been dangerously unmotivated of late, even before the business with the stones started, and that just sent my motivation levels through the floor. I’ve got to somehow get my butt into gear.

In tonight’s lesson with the guy on the outskirts of London, we went through Joe Bennett’s recent piece about wanting to banish the internet from existence (I wouldn’t go that far, but I’d love to get rid of social media), and then an article about Shane Warne, bane of England’s cricket team over many Ashes Series, who passed away on Friday. He was only ten years older than me.

On a similar theme to Joe Bennett’s article, I’ve been reading Stephen King’s Cell, in which anyone who makes or receives a cell phone call is infected with a “pulse” that makes them go crazy. I first picked it up when it came out in 2006, when mobile phones were still primarily used to make calls, at least in the US where texting was yet to take off. The book starts off fantastically well – in Boston, which I loved when I visited the city in 2015 – but now I’m over half-way through and it isn’t quite the page-turner it started out as. I’ll persevere, though.

The war in Ukraine has shifted from something immediately shocking to dreadful drumbeat in the background. I’m no longer glued to the TV.

Life :)

Stone me

March 2, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

My doctor gave me an abdominal ultrasound last night. All my internal organs looked the right shape, size and colour, but my intestines are all gassed up, and I’ve got kidney stones. Three of them – two in my right kidney and one in my left, and they’re all small – 4 mm or less. He recommended that I just keep taking the painkillers and drink lots of water. Actual bottled water for the time being, not the stuff I get from the well. The procedure was painless and only took a few minutes. I ensured I didn’t eat anything for several hours beforehand. Then I got on the table where he greased my tummy, and images of my organs appeared on the screen, to which he took a virtual tape measure. I can have no complaints at the medical care I’ve had in my five years in Romania. It’s been bloody awesome, honestly.

I’m far better than I was, but I’m still struggling, and I suppose I will be until I pass those stones. That could be painful.

I’m watching the BBC World News channel. Amid rolling reports of the awfully primitive war in Ukraine, they just had a short “this week in history” segment. The event that caught my eye was the ferry disaster that took place in March 1987, killing 193 people, nearly 40% of those on board. A ferry called the Herald of Free Enterprise, operated by Townsend Thoresen, sank as soon as it left Zeebrugge, after someone (who think was asleep) hadn’t closed the bow doors. That August we took one of the company’s sister ships from Felixstowe to Zeebrugge – a six-hour journey – on the way to a very enjoyable ten-day camping holiday in Belgium. Travelling in Europe – well, anywhere – was so much fun then.

Life :) - New Zealand

Seismic times

March 1, 2022 plutomanby 0 Comments

On a snowy last day of February, I’m definitely feeling better. That might just be because the painkillers are kicking in, but I’ll take it. I’m taking a concoction of drugs right now. One of them comes in a partly pink box that looks like it should have a feminine hygiene product inside. Another has a name that sounds like somewhere Putin would like to invade, and consists of tiny amber-coloured pellets. But yes, I’m better. Last Monday, when the lesson with the twins rolled around, I was in pain and really didn’t want anything do with it. Today I managed to complete all my lessons at my desk instead of on the sofa. Tomorrow I’ll have my stomach ultrasound, which I bet won’t show anything.

The Ukraine war is mental, and unbelievably sad. Ukrainians are losing their lives all because of some twisted fucker whose delusions know no bounds. As my brother said, Putin has lost the plot. (He thinks one of his henchmen might take him out.) When I woke up on Thursday, it was like a magnitude-10 earthquake had jolted Europe. I googled Ivano-Frankivsk, a city 150 km from Romania’s border, whose airport had been bombed hours earlier. Google Street View showed a bustling city in summer, with shops and bars and a popular confectionery market.

The war is providing a grisly backdrop to everything. I’m grappling with all these Ukrainian names I’d never heard of before – all these harsh Vs and Ks. I’m not even quite sure how I should be pronouncing Kyiv, the Ukrainian (and therefore accurate) version of the city I’d always called Kiev (the Russian name). Yesterday morning there were at times both Ukrainian and Russian players at my online poker table. Last night Dad was complaining to me about the awful Australian-owned banks (and they really are profit-gouging bastards), and I jokingly suggested that the NZ goverment should kick them out of SWIFT, a system I’d only vaguely heard of a week ago.

Europe is increasingly uniting against evil. (I had serious doubts over this.) Germany finally got on board with sanctions over the weekend, and is now providing weapons to the Ukraine. I must say I liked seeing the rouble plummet to one cent against the US dollar this morning. Roll on half a cent. It’s bad that innocent Russians – many of whom already live in poverty – are going to be hit hard by this, but what’s the alternative?

I bought some shoes today, on the way to the supermarket. They’re leather, blue and brown – well mostly anyway – and made in Romania. A super-rare impulse purchase (and another sign I’m feeling better). They were 130 lei, or about NZ$45. A bargain.

I’m now seriously considering a trip to New Zealand in August. NZ is feeling the full force of Omicron right now, but with such high vaccination rates it should be much less painful than it was (and still is) here. Then normality, we all hope.

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.