French, Kewpie and photos

This week I am taking French lessons. I'm doing a 2 week french conversation summer school at the university, 3 hours a night, 3 nights a week for two weeks. So far I've had two classes, and am thoroughly enjoying it. I'm finding it much easier and much less stressful than Japanese!

The end of my mammoth Kewpie cross stitch is in sight! Nearly. I have a lot of stitching ahead of me , still - but, look....



See! I'm definitely getting there!

Also - d'you remember a while back I mentioned that some Schamp, an online travel guide, was considering using one of my pics? Well, they did. You can see it here - mine's one of the pics of Blenheim Palace.

How awesome is that? But wait - it gets better... I had another email from them, letting me know that they're considering including another of my pics. Yay me! It's this one of Barry Island...

(Doesn't Barry Island look lovely!)

Almost a nearly published photographer... kind of

I had a message in my flickr account this morning, telling me that one of my photos has been shortlisted for inclusion in the next edition of the Schmap England Guide.

There will be no fee if my photo's selected for inclusion, and many of the pictures they had for the last edition were hardly professional-looking, but nevertheless I'm chuffed. Very chuffed indeed. Yay me! I love the idea that from all the pictures on flickr, somebody looked at mine and kind of liked it. This was the photo...

I took it last summer at Blenheim Palace (near Oxford) on my miniviv (aka Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim).

In other news... I'm all pshyched for tonight's Eurovision semi final. I loved what I saw of Tuesday's semi final (I missed the first part because we were at pottery), and am absolutely thrilled that Boznia & Hertzegovnia are through to the final. J's making himself scarce tonight, so it'll just be me, the cat, Eurovision and a tin of lager. Awesome!

And tomorrow night... we're very, very excited about this... tomorrow night we will be going to our very first ballroom dancing lesson!

This will be us...

It will be fantastic, and we will prove to be naturals on the dance floor!