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.)

Feel-good factor

It's been a funny sort of weekend. My mood has run pretty much the whole gamut, which is unusual for me - I don't normally have much of a gamut. In my last year of university I'd sometimes wake up and feel I'd beat Agassi if we were to play in the final of Wimbledon. I don't mean thrash him - I'd have expected to go at least four sets - but I'd have still felt pretty good about the situation. That was a long time ago now, and I haven't felt like that since (nor did I ever feel like that in my earlier years at university).

I haven't been off the phone long. I talked to Julie for over an hour, or rather she talked to me. If you need your feel-good factor boosted, Julie isn't the best person for the job.

This morning I had walked to the top of Mt Victoria, down to Hataitai and back home through the tunnel. It was a fantastic day, and it's a great view from the summit of Mount Vic, seeing planes take off and land and boats out on the water. Being such a nice day there were heaps of other people wanting to do the same thing. I must make sure I go for a decent walk every weekend, pretty much rain or shine (the trips I go on with the tramping club don't happen all that often).

On Friday night I hardly slept so I didn't get up till ten yesterday. Ugh. I went to the market in the pouring rain, worked on my puzzles (that made me feel much better) and attended a meet-up group at the Ballroom (a pool hall on Courtenay Place). About a dozen showed up; we were quite a motley bunch. Also present, at the opposite end of the scale from our anxiety group, were a mob of rowdy beer-swilling 100-kilo-plus blokes, getting tanked up before watching the Warriors league game. After the pool, when I really felt like going home, we ate at a Mexican place on Cuba Street. I had a beef quesadilla. We sat at a table covered with marker-penned Spanish swearwords; I was surprised how many of them I recognised. After that we had a coffee at Espressoholic - that was probably my favourite part of the evening. I had an interesting chat with a woman who had emigrated from China two years ago.


At the back end of last week I struggled to concentrate at work. I also felt stupid because of the "mistakes" I made when entering data into what I think is an appallingly designed and totally counter-intuitive system. The best way I could describe the system would be to compare it to an online flight booking. Imagine you book a flight, you pay, you get one of those six-letter codes telling you that it's gone through fine, then you arrive at the airport and they won't let you on the plane because you entered your credit card expiry date with a dash instead of a slash. What really gets me is how some people find the system perfectly intuitive when I don't know if I'm Arthur or Martha. It's a recurring theme for me: ever since day one of my first job working for a large company, I've been trying to make sense of the nonsensical, and failing miserably.

I've signed up for another meet-up; on Thursday I'll be trying my hand at badminton. I don't think I've played since I was sixteen. I wasn't much good then (at least when they stopped me from serving overarm) and I don't expect to be any better this time, but it doesn't do you much harm to try these things.

Right on cue, here comes the flu (well I hope it's just a cold)

I've picked up a cold. Yet again. Tonight's pool evening in Petone with the depression group is therefore an unattractive proposition, but I'm still going. I'm picking Martin up (he doesn't drive - yet); that's a bit of bugger because he'll probably want to stay longer than me, although at least it gives me an excuse not to drink. I've never liked pool anyway - I'm only going so that I can get out and meet people. In my experience pool mainly involves flirting, with the actual game being accidental. And I'm hopeless at it - well I seem to pot a few balls but just hardly ever the black one, at least not intentionally.

My boss and his boss already want to know our leave plans for Christmas, even though it's 3½ months away. They want someone in the office at all times (except public holidays). I'd planned to take a good few days off for our first Christmas as a complete family for eleven years, but as I'm kidless and fairly new to the team I might be forced to work between Christmas and New Year.