29 degrees but an ice-cold Christmas

Unfortunately all the tension between my brother and his partner has cast a shadow over what was supposed to be a family Christmas.

On Christmas morning we had bacon and eggs for breakfast, followed by champagne which I needed like a hole in the head. Mum made a wonderful dinner; as usual I ate too much. We watched Mary Poppins and the brilliant Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The temperature reached 29 degrees but at least we could switch on the air con. No such luck when we visited my uncle and aunt's place in Woodbury that evening - I sweated like a pig. My brother's partner didn't go, saying she was sick. She probably did have a slight upset tummy (I don't think the drink helped) but she'd already made up her mind hours earlier that she wasn't going. That night the engaged couple (ha!) had an argument and at 2:30am she sped off back to Rolleston in her company car. Since then she's been texting and phoning my brother incessantly. She's also been sending long eloquent emails to Mum, giving her side of the story. She'll be coming over soon to pick him up; they've booked an expensive whale-watching tour at Kaikoura. I'm hoping they call it off after that.

Last Tuesday - that's the 20th - I played a freeroll poker tournament at the Realm in Hataitai. I found it stressful, I found it gimmicky, I felt out of place, I didn't play well and I didn't last long. Martin never turned up.

I saw The Intouchables with Tracy (along with only six other people) last Thursday. I organised it - that's a rarity for me. It was a damn good film. She can speak good French so we were able to compare notes about how they decided to translate this or that in the subtitles. We had a chat after the film over a meal (of sorts - she has so many weird and wonderful food allergies). She gets tired easily as a result of her thyroid problem so we didn't stay long, but I felt there was at least the possibility of something happening between her and me. Since then she hasn't contacted me at all, but she's a bit like that so I'm not giving up completely. Not yet anyway.

I was glad to finish work on Friday. It hadn't been an easy week with people seemingly still on a high from the Christmas party. The next day I went to the zoo - for the first time since I was a kid - with some people from the depression group. They take far better care of the animals than in the virtual freak shows I remember from years ago. Here are two chimpanzees with their arms out for food, a tamarin (which I always want to spell with a D) and a pair of gibbons (males are black, females are white):

Voting with my fingers

I played my second live poker tournament on Tuesday night, this time at the Realm in Hataitai. My beginner's luck ran out as I lasted little more than an hour, only winning one hand. I didn't mind an early exit as I still found the experience a little scary. With my body completely uninked and unpierced, I felt a bit out of place there. After my swift elimination I popped over to Julie's. She still seemed on a high from her ten-day stint in that rest home but when she rang me today she'd definitely crashed down to earth.

Yesterday I went tramping at Butterfly Creek. I took some of the trampers in my car; I'm always nervous about driving to places I don't know with people I don't know. It was a good walk - nothing too strenuous -on a mostly sunny and (for Wellington) a remarkably calm day. Ten of us did the trip including Danielle and a young girl who must have had some sort of learning disability - she was with her father. I couldn't quite pick her age but I found out she was fifteen when we compared footwear and she said she was the same age as my boots. I'd add a photo or two but I've lost the ability to do that on Blogger. In fact I'm increasingly finding Blogger to be a pain in the butt and I'll soon be forced to vote with my feet (fingers?) probably by moving to Wordpress.

The British football season, which runs for nine months, started last night. There was an interesting article in the Guardian last week about the contrast between Olympics, which were conducted in such good spirits by and large, and football.

Belarus move down four places to 17th in my "best performing countries" league (see previous post) due to their cheating (fe)male shotputter. Belarus don't often make the news but they sure did last week. Valerie Adams claims a sixth gold for New Zealand who stay in third place. At the last depression group I said that Adams might still get the gold (just after she'd finished second) and Giuseppe looked at me as if I was stupid.

My brother and his fiancée arrive in New Zealand in just four weeks.

Going for gold

Today at work we were all called into a meeting - they want to introduce what I would call flexi-work, and asked for volunteers to take part in the pilot. Basically anybody who volunteers (or failing that, gets roped in) will have a complex role involving perhaps twice as many tasks. I can see the rationale for it (they want to leverage the know-how of both teams, enabling us to achieve our SLAs, whatever they might be) but I won't be volunteering.

The so-called quality team mark ten calls a month from each of the eighty or so call centre employees. Each call is given one of five grades. At the bottom end there's a "fail" as well as a "total fail" which kills off any chance of getting a bonus. Total fails aren't all that uncommon. The vast majority of calls get a simple pass. The top two grades - let's embrace the Olympic spirit and call them gold and silver - are reserved for calls in which a special rapport is built with the customer. Golds and silvers give you an increased bonus, but they're rather hard to come by. The quality team deliberate at length before dishing out a silver, and sometimes the head of department gets involved. As for gold, well that grade might as well not exist. Amazingly someone recently got a gold for the first time in 18 months. By my reckoning that's 15,000 calls! Of course this is rather convenient when it comes to remuneration. "You can potentially earn up to $xxx per week." Yes, if every one of your calls gets a grade which is only given to one call in 15,000.

The sport of badminton has been brought into disrepute at the Olympics. Four women's doubles teams were disqualified for trying to lose (against each other) to get an easier draw in the knockout stages. I can't condone what they did, and I'm glad they got booted out, but heads must roll over a competition format that makes it advantageous to lose. It's amazing how often the organisers of major sports competitions come up with formats and rules without thinking them through properly.

Thinking a bit about Monday's poker tournament, my nervousness might actually have helped me. I don't think I gave away much about my hand because I'm sure I looked petrified no matter what I had.

It's August already...

It was with a certain sense of pride that I watched last weekend's Olympic opening ceremony. Music, film, comedy, sport, industry, one small island was at the forefront of so much of it, and that small island happens to be where I was born and bred. Once or twice during the ceremony I thought, hey, that's a bit odd, but eccentricity is after all a particularly British trait. The only slight annoyance for me in an otherwise impressive ceremony were those film clips. I wanted to see what was going on inside the stadium. I bet the Chinese found it all rather baffling - it was a very different show to the one they came up with four years ago. I must say it made a nice change to see the teams come out according to the Roman alphabet for the first time since Sydney.

I do like the Olympics. For once individual sports get a look in. In the UK in the eighties and nineties, you'd often see individual sports on TV - athletics, swimming, boxing, snooker, darts, tennis, sometimes even squash or badminton. But in New Zealand in 2012, team sports are totally dominant: the various rugby teams, the Warriors league team, the netball franchises, and more recently the Breakers (basketball) and Wellington Phoenix (football). I gather (from hearing names like Susan Devoy) that people used to care about individual sports in NZ, but those days are long gone.

I've only caught sporadic Olympic action so far. I've enjoyed the weightlifting the most - it's simple, it's dramatic, and there's something quite marvellous about seeing someone lift nearly three times his own body weight (even if he might be juiced up to the eyeballs).

A couple of questions about the London Olympics:
1. Who designed the logo? It's awful! It doesn't help that the zero in 2012 looks a lot like Australia.
2. Who designed the font? I quite like it, but it looks a little too Greek for London.

Last Friday I saw a psychologist at Massey. She thought I did have Asperger traits but didn't think it was worth my while getting a diagnosis. She emphasised the importance of exercise and social contact. Perhaps most importantly she said I need to exercise even when I feel like crap both mentally and physically. The session cost me $130; I decided not to get a report which would have been another $130. It wasn't completely pointless but I still feel rather let down by the mental health system. I don't qualify for any actual help, without paying through the nose, simply because I've got a job. It wasn't always this way but the current government have cut back mental health funding to the bare bones. Now that's a false economy if ever there was one.

I'd planned to come off Efexor completely under my own steam but having reached 150 mg, I made an appointment to see the doctor yesterday. He recommended that I stay at 150. He also said I shouldn't bother taking any supplements, that I need to get back on that e-therapy course that I'd given up on, and that I probably should set aside a couple of grand for a full course of CBT.

On Monday night I played my first ever live poker tournament at the Cambridge Hotel pub, just down the road from me. It was all very anxiety-provoking for me - lots of scary people of both sexes with tattoos; at times it felt like being in a Western movie. I had a reasonable understanding of the game (no-limit hold 'em of course) but the physical chips and cards, as well as all those scary people who were regular players, added several extra dimensions to the experience. I bought in for $10; four hours (and plenty of good fortune) later I took home $85 for finishing in the silver medal position out of around 25 or 30 players. I've been on edge for the rest of this week - I wish there was some way I could calm down.

In other poker news, it looks like I might be getting my hands on the US$1400-odd I tried to withdraw from Full Tilt Poker over a year ago, just before the site was shut down. I'd almost given up on the money but Poker Stars have just bought the company. It's not a massive amount of money but it's still my bloody money, so this is excellent news.

It was sad to hear last week of Margaret Mahy's death. I read plenty of her stuff as a kid, completely oblivious to her Kiwiness.