LONG week...

This has been one heck of a week. I have been very busy - preparing photographs for upload to stock sites, communicating with a potential business partner who is interested in printing my photos on large size canvas and selling to hotels and restaurants, taking small children to extracurricular activities... and learning to read Czech. Yep - I kid you not. I never thought I'd have a reason to learn Czech. But there it is. Life comes at you fast.

Last week I received an invitation to join the Light Harmony team. I sent them a query a few months ago, but did not expect a reply. This is quite an honor, and I am excited about it. LH is a group of very good photographers and they have welcomed me very kindly. There's just one little hitch. The entire back-end website is in Czech. They have made efforts to translate the links into English just for me, but all the text and buttons are in Czech. So I'm sitting here with the Czech/English dictionary open in one window and the LH website in the other. One word at a time. It's like being a little kid again - not a clue in the world what anyone is saying. :) Many of them have taken the time to speak with me - in English. Which was very nice. And I'm working - like I said - to learn the language in record time. But it's not an easy language to learn... at least not in the US.

First, I hit the internet hard... all kinds of interesting sites that offer very little helpful information on Czech. Lots of overlap. And lots of oh so useful phrases like the following...

"Pštros s pštrosicí a pštrosáčaty šli do pštrosačárny." This means "A male ostrich with a female ostrich and baby ostriches went to the ostrich house." VERY useful, don't you think?

Then off to the bookstore - I asked if they had a Czech/English dictionary, and the woman cocked her head at me, started walking towards the language section, and said, "Well - I guess you'd better cross your fingers." In the end, we found three travel-sized phrase books. I bought two of them and learned some more important phrases, such as this one...

"Je mi nevolno." Which means "I feel nauseated." Great. I'm sure they'll be thrilled to hear about that.

And finally - after much more time spent on the internet than is reasonable for a normal individual, I decided to log in to the Czech google page - where I did a search for an "Anglicko-český dictionary" and lo and behold I found one. It works great! Mostly. Except when it doesn't. But heck - it's a whole lot better than the phrase books...

"Mám alergii na rajčata." - "I have an allergy to tomatoes." Only I don't have any allergies. So, what would be the point of learning to say that? And when would I have the oportunity to use it on a photographic website?

Actually - it occurs to me that I could use some of these phrases if I really didn't like a photo they posted. I could say I was allergic to the photograph and I was feeling nauseated! This is great! Now I'm really on to something! I'm not sure where I'll find a use for all that crap about the ostriches, though. Hmmm.

So there you go. That's the short version.

What... you want a photo? I don't have time for photography, man! Are you kidding?

:)

All right - there you go. Last week, this photo took first place for black and white in a Flickr landscape contest.
And this one took second place in the color category...

All right. Back to work.

Varina