Totes

One of the topics at tonight's autism group was finances. That's quite a pertinent subject for me at the moment so I'd prepared a list of tips to help people on the spectrum with both the "ins" and "outs" of money, only I wasn't able to get very far when it was my turn to talk.

At work today we had afternoon tea - savouries and mocktails - to celebrate the new team structure. I happily partook in the food and drink but I couldn't see what there was to celebrate. I'm now officially part of a much bigger team with a more ruthless manager who has the same first name as my mother. My old boss is sticking around until mid-September. Last week he did my interim review, as they call it. We dashed into a meeting room and were done and dusted within five minutes.

On Saturday I signed up to play pool with the anxiety group on Meetup.com. I don't like pool that much, and I like sitting round a table with lots of people, drinking, even less. And that's what we did for an eternity (I think it was nearly three hours) before we even played pool. The woman next to me was extremely loud and kept saying "totes". That's short for "totally", which is bad enough as it is. I'd only heard "totes" as a joke before; I never thought, like, real people, like, totally said "totes" in general conversation. I'd totes had enough before the pool, and once I'd played a couple of games and blown what felt like dumb money on drinks, I was glad to get home.

On Friday night Julie put the phone down on me again. This time I didn't feel as guilty as I have in the past (my counsellor has helped here I think). I haven't called her back.

I attended the games evening at the library on Wednesday. I played canasta with the same woman from the previous week. She works at the library, doing some kind of strategic planning or something. In other words nothing to do with books. I really had no clue how to play canasta. She plays every other week, and my cluelessness soon became obvious. My family played a long time ago when the game was popular, and once in the early nineties I did join in without ever properly knowing the rules. My dad tape-recorded our canasta session (he'll still have the tape somewhere), hoping to get a few snippets from my grandfather who had Alzheimer's. Unfortunately my grandad didn't say a lot (he was very quiet, and placid, in his later years). Anyway, there are two main types of card games: trick-taking games and rummy-type games. Canasta is a rummy game but it doesn't really play as one. My instinct was to try and get rid of all my cards, as you do in most rummy games, but in canasta you often want to do the exact opposite - pick up a whole bunch of cards from the discard pile which you use to form melds that score points. This took some getting used to. It's not a quick game - it took me 1¾ hours to come second.

I've been reading a book called Truth in Advertising. In places it's hilarious. Slightly alarmingly for me, a lot of the humour revolves around the narrator's disillusion in his job, but he's actually less disillusioned by his made-up job than I am in my real one.

I've now seen the latest seismic reports for our apartment block. It appears my flat is in fact in the dodgy zone rather than the "safe" zone. By the way I now pay $1750 a year in insurance through my body corp fees. One highlight I just remembered from the body corp AGM: when asked if any firm decisions have been made about earthquake strengthening, a committee member said the process was currently at "ground zero".

Car number plates beginning with H appeared on our roads last week; it took a smidgen over two years to get through the G's. In the UK you can tell the age of a vehicle directly from its number plate. When I was growing up, the new letter (an H-registration, say) came out on 1st August each year, to a big fanfare. A few doors down from us was a garage; people would take off in their new cars on the stroke of midnight. Such is the status symbol that a new car provides in the UK. Used cars in the UK lose their value extremely rapidly; my brother has just bought a not-that-old Audi A4 for only £600. (It looks like my brother has got his old marine security job back. He's only been back ten days and things are already looking up for him. Hopefully he can consign his NZ experience to history.)

The luck factor

I've just got back from playing El Grande, a medieval Spain-themed board game, with Tracy and Tom. A very good game it is too. It's just about simple enough for me to understand (some of these modern games are too damn complicated for my liking) but it has multiple layers of strategy. It's dice-free and (on the face of it) almost luck-free, but as I actually won, luck must play a significant part. It took us two hours to play- if we were more experienced it would have been more like 90 minutes, which I think is just about the perfect length for a game. There was some faux-Spanish spoken, such as Tom's "el sixo" for a score of six.

Last Wednesday I attended the games evening at the library. It was nice to be in my comfort zone, playing games I'd actually heard of. I played Scrabble with one of the staff who organised the evening, and a guy from the autism group who talked almost constantly throughout. (It's amazing how many people I know who are capable of incessant talking.) I won by a decent margin despite being hampered by an unusable Q. I then played crib with that librarian - I happened to win by just one point in a dramatic finish.

Julie is someone else who can talk non-stop. She builds an impenetrable wall of words; every now and then I'll interject with "hmmm" or "that's right" and that's as far as I'll get. She'll get upset if I try to end the "conversation" which is usually a very negative monologue. Frankly Julie is a "time sink" I'd be better off without, even if (in her better moods) she can be understanding of my own problems.

Tom came over yesterday. He's got this amazing self-built briefcase computer. I wanted to take a photo of it and post it on here, but I could see he didn't like it when I pointed a camera in the general direction of the machine. Its innards include hard drives with huge capacities; it's got a screen on the outside and various protruding sockets. He transferred a bunch of comedy TV shows onto my laptop which was nice, but it took three hours, meaning he was here longer than I'd have liked. He gave me some handy pointers for my app though. I've been having all kinds of problems with it - everything that I could possibly think of has gone wrong, as well as many things I never would have thought of. I was over the moon this weekend when I received a much improved new version from the developers; up until then the problems seemed almost insurmountable.

At the weekend I heard a Scots College student (name Sebastian Hallum Clarke, born 14/7/97) talk on the radio about his success with apps. Later Kim Hill interviewed Eleanor Catton, 28-year-old author of an epic novel which has been nominated for this year's Booker Prize. In both instances you could see what a difference your upbringing (i.e. luck) makes.

This puzzle app is a lifeline to me. My chances of going anywhere in my current role are zero. Going anywhere good at least. My boss has sadly just been made redundant, meaning I'll soon have my fifth boss, and first female boss, in my time at the company. I don't think she'll be anything like as personable as my current manager. It's hard not to feel slightly edgy about it all.

Yesterday Tom told me that he went cold turkey on Efexor from a fairly high dose, with little in the way of an adverse reaction. He said Efexor numbed everything, as it has done for me. He now takes no antidepressants at all.

So Rubert Mugabe won the latest election in Zimbabwe by a landslide. Amazingly turnout for the election was 135%.

My brother had some drama at Christchurch when they tried to hit him with excess baggage charges running into the thousands. He should be back in the UK now, although I haven't heard from him.

23/3/13

My grandad - Mum's dad - would have been 100 today. He was born on a (very early) Easter Sunday in 1913 and died three months shy of his 90th birthday. He and my grandmother brought up seven kids on their South Canterbury farm. Living on the other side of the world I didn't see a lot of him. He was never much of a talker but he had a quick mind and a keen sense of humour.

In the late eighties Grandad had a car accident and never got behind the wheel again. In 1989 we landed in Auckland to begin our six-month stay in NZ. Grandad had bowel cancer and we thought he might be gone by the time we'd made our way down the country. When we got to Temuka he was skeletal. But somehow he made a full recovery. In late 1990 he and my grandmother flew out to the UK; they stayed with us for about a month. My gran had flown to England a few times but he'd hardly been out of Canterbury before. His first experience of an escalator was on the London underground. They even did a tour of Ireland, which I think was a bridge too far for him, but he was in tears when he said goodbye to us on leaving the UK.

My gran used to nag at him constantly and I could never understand why. Mostly he'd just be sitting in his chair minding his own business. He rode his bike well into old age - he'd often cycle to the library and take out a bunch of large-print books. He read them at lightning speed but whether he actually read them I don't know. I'm sure I caught him turning over multiple pages at once. I think the books were mostly a means of escape from his wife.

My grandad was part of the last generation to live what you might call a simple life. They didn't have a lot by our standards, but relative to their expectations they had plenty, and seemed to be happier as a result. Grandad's life revolved around his garden, the church and his friends. He'd often have his mates (or "cobbers") over for a game of cards: either euchre or crib. He had dozens of grubby, sticky packs of cards in the house; people wondered if he cheated by licking them. The last time I saw him was in 1997 when I must have played hundreds of games of crib with him during our month-long stay. It was a game rich in jargon; here are a few examples (some of which might have been Grandad-specific):

• "What Paddy shot at" - nothing, i.e. a score of zero
• "I've got the smell of ya" - I'm catching you up
• "Gooo" - Grandad's pronunciation of "go"
• Fifteen-two..."and the rest won't do"
• Fifteen-four..."and the rest won't score"
• Fifteen-six..."and the rest won't mix"
  ...and many more. A lot of his sayings were simply words that rhymed with the previous thing anybody said.

On the morning of our departure back to the UK in '97 we had to leave early. But not before he'd played a final game of crib with me. I won that game so we had to play again. He won the second game, we left minutes later, and that was the last I ever saw of him.