ghotiindustries

Today’s Table – Photography

Posted on February 13, 2013February 13, 2013 by ghotiindustries

Via a friend I heard about a website called Society6. A website where you can upload your photos, retain the rights to them, and they look after the printing, shipping, payment features, and re-sizing. Dream come true right?!

I have spent a fair amount of time in this last week selecting and sizing and uploading some of my vast collection of work which is now available for sale. Here it is, at long last, the Ghoti Industries Society6 store!

I have begun my store with some of my favourite photos, of some of my favourite places.

For those of you paying close attention, I have also added the link to the right hand column of this blog’s main page, and I have been tweeting some of my uploading progress via Twitter!

Now not only can you purchase my quality produced art prints, but you can choose between framed art, stretched canvases, note cards, phone covers, and phone skins, all with my stunning high quality photography on them.

I know some of you already have prints of some of these pictures hanging in your houses, and some of you have always wanted prints of my work for your very own to display, now is your opportunity.

Hang them on the wall, carry them with you, or send them to friends! I love the versatility and the possibilities available to you via Society6.

So please have a look, and if you like what you see, buy some! Then tell your friends! If you don’t like what you see, tell me so I can fix it! 😉

I’d like to thank Grace and Ivy for the introduction to such a wonderful opportunity, and to show you all her store also!

Snowfall

Posted on February 11, 2013February 11, 2013 by ghotiindustries

It is rather beautiful to awaken on a bright crisp Sunday morning and realise that there was significant snowfall the previous night.

It was a day for families to be out in Vondel Park, reveling in the rare sunshine to build snowmen,

throw some snow balls for the dog,

and this guy (and all the others out running) to make me feel completely slack in my fitness routine!

It was a glorious day, and a wonderful start to the week after a fairly quiet and tame weekend.

What have you all been up to recently? Being productive? Or taking it slow and easy?

Language Course – Week 3

Posted on February 8, 2013 by ghotiindustries

We were straight into learning new information with our fifth lesson. I love that you are there because you want to learn, so there’s a real drive and determination to everyone who is still with the class. (We appear to have stabilised with about half of the students who attended on the first night.)

We began with having a quick test to see if we could hear the difference between words as they were being said without the spellings in front of us to guide our judgement as to whether they were long (lang) or short (kort) vowel sounds. We were paired up to check over our answers and I didn’t do too badly.

Next we moved on to how the Dutch tell the time where I discovered that not only do the Dutch have five and ten, past and to the hour, but they also have five and ten, past and to the half hour. Also, it’s not half past the hour, it’s half to the next hour. This should be all sorts of fun to get my poor noggin around!

We then moved on to infinitives. This was made even more fun as, I’m fairly sure that when I was in school no one actually classified for me what an infinitive is. I’m sure it would have been easier if I had any memory of getting up to these in the bits and pieces of the other languages I did learn in school, but what with my age when I learnt Italian, and my absences from High School for French, German and Japanese … well, you get the idea. Just one more hurdle I need to overcome.

Lesson six began well enough, with all of us trying very hard to make it all the way through ordering at a café. The pilsje (beer), bitterballen (food), wijn (wine), and koffie (coffee) should make for a goed (good) feast if it ever arrives!

I’m fairly sure that in the future, so long as the waiter talks slowly and repeats themselves multiple times, I may get through it. Wait. What do you mean this won’t be an open book test?!?

We then moved back to grammar and structure, focusing tonight on syntax. Again, I have no recollection of lessons on how to correctly structure a sentence. But here I was, unlearning what I hadn’t learnt, and relearning the Dutch way. This one I’ll have to practice a little harder. It’s a good thing I have sheets and sheets of homework to do this weekend!

Speaking of languages, Kia Ora, and Happy Waitangi Day to all the Kiwis for last Wednesday!

Handbag Museum and Afternoon Tea

Posted on February 6, 2013 by ghotiindustries

Last Friday Titan and I packed ourselves off to the Handbag Museum. He wouldn’t let me go without him! He made a lot of new friends from the staff of the Museum!

Both Titan and I were disappointed that we couldn’t show you the inside of the Museum, but no photographs are allowed to be taken of it’s amazing exhibits.

So we left the Museum, and went for a wander.

How cool are these gnomes?!?

You see, I’d recently posted the blog’s 200th post, and as it’s been going for nearly 3 years now, I thought that was a reason to celebrate! So I headed over to my favourite macaron shop Poptasi Pastry in order to buy something to celebrate with.

It’s rather difficult to make a selection when the range is this good! But the staff are always willing to help!

My final choices were joined on the table with my favourite marinated cucumber sandwiches, and smoked salmon and improved cream cheese sandwiches.

And it just wouldn’t be Holland without ham and cheese on heavy brown bread!

Final touch was the T2 Blue Mountain tea. Not a bad spread if I do say so myself!

Though of course, I managed to forget to take a final shot with the teapot sitting proudly on it’s warmer! Oh well. I’m sure you can imagine it.

Now anyone for tea?

Language Course – Week 2

Posted on February 1, 2013February 1, 2013 by ghotiindustries

A new week arrived with a new focus. The teacher has been speaking more English during class now (though not much, just enough to assist) and by building on what we’ve learnt so far I can now read and fill in a basic form with my personal details. Which lead to a hilarious conversation about my name. Again.

Ghoti, though amusing and erudite in English, is far less so once you have to explain it, (over and over and over again) to people whose first language isn’t English. The irregularities in English spelling are even more pointedly absurd and frustrating to anyone who’s been forced to learn English as a second language, and already thinks the spelling is insane. Some of the humour is lost when after an explanation people just look at you like you’re bonkers. Oh well. I still like it!

We spent more time revising our vowel pronunciation, and the emphasis structure of the language. For short vowel sounds you repeat “Amsterdam heeft achtentachtig pachtige grachten.” (“Amsterdam has eighty eight beautiful canals.”) For long vowel sounds you repeat “Het Spaanse graan heeft de orkaan doorstaan.” (“The Spanish grain has the hurricane withstood.”)

As an interesting side note, that second one is used in the Nederlands translation of My Fair Lady as a stand in for “The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain”, and fits the music perfectly! Now if I could just get that song out of my head …

In theory, by the end of that third lesson I was now able to correctly pronounce any written Dutch word. In practice this isn’t quite true, as I was proving towards the end of the class. I have some revision work to do. But I’m improving!

Homework was all about familierealties names and ties. Which I’m sure will make my schoonzus (sister-in-law) very happy! It also brought us neatly into the next lesson where we discussed all sorts of things like colours, days of the week, and months of the year.

With just this information we have actually been able to converse with each other! Not with much depth, but we have! And it was wonderful!

Now to build on that!

Author: ghotiindustries

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