I obviously like yellow, as can be seen from the backgrounds I have used for these pages. I am not too fussy about which yellow, but my favorite is primary yellow. Unfortunately, that is too bright to use as a background. It would hurt your eyes. If you really do want to try it out, here is a whole page full: YELLOW!.
When I did an extensive Net Search on 'yellow', I found endless Yellow Pages. Very useful, but not much fun. However, I also found a site dealing with the colours of the forests in the USA. Although I have never been there, the thought of having a 'Fall Color Hotline' appealed to me. Here it is: Fall Color Update.
I've initiated a personal homepage elsewhere, now. Please go and have a look; make my day! It includes a statistics counter which is so exciting! But only if there is something to do statistics on, of course...
I really couldn't resist this; I 'borrowed' it from www.holland.com, the official website of the Netherlands Board of Tourism. They have it scrolling across the screen. Haven't quite sussed that one out, yet. Watch this space.
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I was born in Alkmaar, The Netherlands. I studied Chemistry in Leiden, where I graduated in 1989. I then moved to York, UK, to do a PhD in Protein Crystallography in the Chemistry Department at the University of York. One thing led to another, and I now consider myself 'emigrated'. My husband, also Dutch, has a permanent job here in the same group as where I work. |  |
If you can read Dutch (you should give it a go, it's not that
difficult. My daughter could speak it quite well after about
2 1/2 years, and read it after about 6 years... Addendum: my
2 1/2 year old son is now pretty much fluent, too), and would like to
find out what I do for a living,
go to Nederlands.
I have now discovered an on-line Dutch Course!
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Isn't it curious how you can do something for years, feel extremely safe doing it, and then you meet somebody who is shocked by the 'risk' you've been taking all this time? I'm referring to living below sea level. Most Dutch people don't think anything of it, mainly because they have no choice, or because their parents don't make a fuss over it. At least my family (and that of my husband, as it happens) have been living below sea level as long as I remember. But a few years ago, an English friend of mine came to visit me at my parents' house. He felt quite at ease, I think, at first. A reasonably new estate, lots of 'normal' houses, fine! After a cup of coffee in the living room downstairs, I decided to show him the rest of the house. First floor: bathroom, two bedrooms, view over some fields from the back of the house. But when he came to the top floor, he suddenly realised he could see the 'IJsselmeer', and that the lower two floors really were below the level of the water. He admired the view over the water, but suddenly wasn't so sure about being lower down...
Another amusing IJsselmeer anecdote came about after I discovered a magazine with 'adventure holidays' on an American colleague's desk at work. In it, there was a description of a trip 'Blading the Zuider Zee'. She (the colleague) hadn't realised I would know something about this place, and we started talking about the 'Zuiderzee/IJsselmeer'. Was it salty? How long might it have taken to turn from salty to fresh water? The rivers going into it etc. Somewhere in this conversation, she called it a 'lagoon'. I thought that was a lovely description for a beloved stretch of water (if not technically correct, maybe).
Emigrating inevitably (or at least usually) means embracing another language. This is not without hazards, as is amazingly well-illustrated in the following poem:
(Anon.)
When the English tongue we speak Why is break not rhymed with freak? Will you tell me why it's true We say sew, but likewise few? And why the maker of a verse Cannot rhyme his horse with worse? Beard sounds not the same as heard Cord is different from word. Cow is cow, but low is low Shoe is never rhymed with foe Think of hose or nose, then dose and lose And think of goose and yet of choose. Think of comb and tomb and bomb Doll and roll and home and some And since pay is rhymed with say Why not paid with said, I pray? Think of blood and food and good Mould is not pronounced like could Wherefore done and gone and lone Is there any reason known?
This so well describes my own feelings, that I could not keep it from you. And eh... I still haven't found anybody (English or otherwise) who has been able to explain to me why 'height' and 'weight', two six-letter words with only one letter different, should be pronounced so differently.
One day, I will scan a good photograph of my children and put it on these pages. They are endlessly more appealing to look at than the best photograph of me could ever be. Says a doting mother. They are Laura (born in York in 1990) and Ruben (born in York in 1997). There is an almost amusing story in their names. Both my husband and I have names of five letters, and now our children do, too. When I started thinking about names for them when I was pregnant, I did try to find nice names with five letters (anything to make the picking easier, eh?!). Interestingly, the boy's name for Laura had four letters, and the girl's name for Ruben had six. So it's extra fortunate they are the gender they are...
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Laura on 'the car', may 1998. In the background small pieces of Ruben and my dad. | Ruben playing football, 2004 |  |
Laura has made me something to cheer me up:
Laura is convincingly left-handed, although she often makes a brave attempt to use right-handed scissors with her right hand, and she seems OK using cutlery the right-handed way. But her left-handedness prompted me to have a look round the web, and I found The Lefthanded Universe.
Our children are bilingual. Well, sort of. Laura prefers English, because most of her day happens at school, I suppose. And Ruben is only just starting to speak, so "lingual" is a big word to use at the best of times. But we speak Dutch at home, and on the 'phone to grandparents, for instance. So there's no avoiding it. And look what I found: Dubbelop - steunpunt voor meertalige opvoeding.
| Now that I've been fiddling with photos of my children, and you can see me on the lab's web pages anyway, and the photo isn't half as bad as it could have been, I'll put that here, too. |  |
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Some new photos of me (October 2000). Which do you prefer? |  |
I have put together a set of pages on RSI, from information I found elsewhere on the web. So it's all 'stolen' ware!
As you've probably gathered by now, my favorite animal is the hippo. Don't ask what that says about me. Here is my collection of links, both business and pleasure. Some have so many pictures, that you'll need a day off to view them all...
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