Check out my new blog

I'm pleased to announce the new home of See Jayne Blog. Please bookmark the new site.

http://www.jaynebingler.com/blog/

See y'all on the other side.

Jayne

Check out my new blog

I'm pleased to announce the new home of See Jayne Blog. Please bookmark the new site.

http://www.jaynebingler.com/blog/

See y'all on the other side.

Jayne

Happy Birthday James!

Jimmy is turning a very young 34 today! Happy Birthday!

It's Dutch tradition that on your birthday, YOU are the one to bring in cake and treats to your work or school. How weird is that? So yesterday I baked 50 cup cakes and a tray of Rice Krispie treats for James to take to work today. For those of you who know me (and love me) y'all know that I don't bake. I cook... but I don't bake. So I think that these litle sparkle-laden cakes look pretty good coming from me. Icing, like a good matte foundation, hides alot of flaws.

Birthday Surprise Ruined

On Thursday, Jack and I went out on a quest to get James a birthday present. Seeing as he was complaining about the week-long rainfest we call 'summer' here in A'Dam, I decided to go to Bever and get him a nifty rain coat that he could call his own. Bever which is Dutch for... beaver.... is a lot like Mountain Equipment Co-op in Canada. It's a huge store and they have everything for outdoor living and sport. I ended up getting him this swish North Face one - with a hood. And then I augmented the gift with a Swiss Army knife to replace the one that he had that got lost in the move over here. And I picked up a nice, new, airplane-friendly first aid kit.

After the purchase, the cashier wrapped it all, because that is another 'Dutch Surprise' that I've discovered. It doesn't matter where you are or what you buy, the Dutch will gift wrap everything for you for free. (This includes their version of Home Depot, Toys R Us, their version of Shoppers Drug Mart... etc.) So I was done. I explained to Jack on the tram home that these presents were a secret and that we couldn't tell Daddy about them until he opened them on his birthday. He was totally with me on this one.

Hours later, James arrived home from work and as usual, Jack met him at the door with a big hug and kiss and a "Daddy I missed you so much." This was immediately followed by, "Daddy, we bought you a rain coat!" I was so pissed at him, I started to cry. James just started to laugh. And Jack laughed too.

Once I calmed down a bit, James and I recalled how the story resembled the great Sheppard lore of the time that a young James, ruined the surprise of his Uma's birthday present by yelling out, "It's a pink housecoat!"

Like father, like son.

Side note: Luv this pimped out car I saw on the Overtoom. The purple tinted windows were all I needed to see before falling in love.

"We had a penguin wreck"

This story made me laugh and tear up at the same time. How awful would it have been if you killed a penquin with your car? Could you stand the guilt? And at the same time, how funny would it be to see a big bag with an octopus and some Nemo fish rolling down the road? Side note: They were moving the animals to "Moody Gardens" - who the hell names a zoo, Moody Gardens? I guess they put them in Prozac pens.

Penguins scattered on Texas highway
MARSHALL, Texas (AP) — A truck transporting zoo animals overturned Tuesday, spilling about two dozen penguins, tropical fish and an octopus onto an east Texas highway, authorities said.

"We had a penguin wreck," Department of Public Safety trooper Richard Buchanan said

The driver, Kelly Hodge, and a passenger sustained minor scratches and bruises. The Indianapolis Zoo employees were taking the animals to Moody Gardens in Galveston when Hodge lost control of the truck on U.S. Highway 59, Buchanan said.

The penguins were travelling in heavy tubs, which broke open when the truck crashed. Three penguins were killed by oncoming traffic; one died in the crash. Another penguin suffered a broken wing.

The octopus and fish were being transported in water-filled plastic bags. The octopus survived, but some of the fish died when the bags burst, Buchanan said.

Troopers and workers from the nearly Caldwell Zoo in Tyler helped corral the penguins and rescue the fish, Buchanan said.

The penguins were taken to the Caldwell Zoo for examination and then sent on to Galveston by mid-afternoon.

"They were doing remarkably well for what they had been through," he said.

I vant to suck yer blood

Ok... this story has some severe freak out factor. I especially get creeped out by the line, "so anyone who awakens in a room with a bat, should assume they have been bit and immediately contact their family doctor and the local health unit". And then get some garlic, a cross, and a wooden stake. Yikes.

Rabid bat found in baby's room

An 11-month-old Newmarket girl is receiving rabies shots after a rabid bat was discovered Friday in her bedroom by her frantic mother.
“The central message here is that you can be bitten by a bat while you are sleeping and not know it,” Margaret McCaffery, with York Region’s health unit, said yesterday.

McCaffery said their teeth marks are virtually undetectable, so anyone who awakens in a room with a bat, should assume they have been bit and immediately contact their family doctor and the local health unit.

The infant, who has not been identified by health unit officials, is undergoing a series of five shots, spaced several days apart, as a preventative measure.

McCaffery said any danger of such a young child receiving the shots is outweighed by the seriousness of contracting rabies, a deadly disease.

“There is always a small risk with these shots, but once you get symptoms, shots are no longer affective,” she added.

The bat was caught in the home and sent on Friday to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which sent it to a lab in Ottawa.

The results, which confirmed the rabies diagnosis, were received Saturday.

The family was immediately notified and the child, who was already under a doctor’s care, began receiving shots soon after, McCaffery said.

This is the second rabid bat reported in York region so far this year. The first was found in the late spring, also in Newmarket.

In 2005, four rabid bats were found in York Region, five in 2004. Anyone in contact with them at the time also underwent preventative rabies treatment, McCaffery said.

“Every year, we treat numerous people with the rabies vaccine,” she added.

Rabies is a viral infection transmitted in the saliva of infected animals. The virus enters the central nervous system toward the spinal cord and the brain, where it multiplies and travels through the nerves to most parts of the body.

Rabies symptoms develop about 3-8 weeks after exposure, and by then there is no treatment. Death almost always follows within 2 to 6 days.

Some 20 people have died of the disease in Canada since 1925, including a BC man in 2003 and a nine-year-old Quebec boy, who was bitten by a bat at camp, in 2002.

Great Gift Idea

For the woman who has everything!

Care Plus Urinelle

It's a good thing

I remember back in the day when I was preggers with Jack, no one would give me a seat on the subway. I got so fed up with the ignorance of people that I would lean over, stick my belly in their face and say, "Scuz me, but I'm pregnant and I need to sit down in that seat." It worked. But it pissed me off that most people didn't offer. And on more then one occasion, I would give my seat up for a blind person or an senior. When I did that, I would glare at everyone else on the car - trying to send then some shame. My friend Lisa wrote an angry letter to the METRO TODAY about how rude people were in not offering seats to OBVIOUSLY pregnant ladies. And I remember Havoc having some pretty intense arguments with people on the Go Train when she was pregnant.

There was one time that I was attempting to get on the subway and I slipped on some spilled coffee. I went up in the air like a cartoon character and landed with quite a thud on the platform right in front of the doors. I was having trouble getting up (imagine a turtle flipped over and you'll get the picture) and I was flailing about. NO ONE OFFERED TO HELP ME UP! People actually stepped over me to get on the train. I was so pissed that when I got up, I started yelling at people and then I started to cry. I love acting all crazy on public transit. I miss that about the T Dot. Anything can happen.

And now for the article! I think this is a great idea.


Baby badges help pregnant women get to work

TOKYO (Reuters) - Tokyo rail companies are providing pregnant women with badges in the hope of prompting other passengers on the Japanese capital's crowded trains to offer them seats.

The pink and blue badges reading: "There is a baby in my belly" are being handed out at stations around the region to try to make commuting and other train journeys easier for pregnant women, who are often left standing. No proof of pregnancy is required.

"Especially in the early stages, it is difficult to tell from someone's appearance whether they are pregnant," said an official at the Health Ministry which came up with the idea. "But these early stages are rather unstable and it is important to take care."

The move comes as Japan scrambles for ways to persuade women to have more babies. The dwindling birth rate has left the nation with a shrinking population and the world's highest proportion of elderly people.

"We want to create an environment that is pleasant for pregnant women," the agency official said.

The move was welcomed by many.

"When I was three months pregnant and got on the train, no one would really notice me and I couldn't really ask them to give me a seat," said Yoshiko Kato, a self-employed 38-year-old who is five months pregnant. "So these badges, I hope, will help some people to notice I am pregnant," she said.

Musings at Museumplein

Jack and I took the maiden voyage of Bikeasaurus 2 to Museumplein. It's only a few blocks from our place but it's much faster to get there on wheels. We needed to go to a store there that sells the stickers required to drive on the Austrian motorways. After that was done, we hung out with the thousands of Italian tourists in the square that is bordered by all the museums. In the background of this pic you can see the Rijksmuseum. Jack played in the pond here, as did some boisterous black labs.

Happy Pride!

It's Pride Weekend in Amsterdam. Saw alot of big ol' gay cowboys in town for the festivities. We missed the parade cuz we were out bike shopping but I'm supplying a pic I took last year at Pride. James and I just happened to be here that weekend searching for an apartment. A year later, and here we are.

Anyway, Happy Pride to all my people.

Bikesaurus 2

Very, very excited! After spending the whole day driving all over town looking for a new bike for me, we finally found one in Rivierenbuurt not far from where we live.
It was such a struggle - there were hardly any women's bikes out there and most of them were way too big for me. As one bike shop owner lamented, "These bikes are built for the big Dutch ladies with the long legs." Yeah, thanks buddy! I know I'm short. But this one is the shit. I got them to install a kid seat. And I bought a better lock (about the third of the cost of the bike) and this bike has the rear wheel lock on it. I need to bring it back to get a basket and a better kick stand installed but it's good for now.

Ride like the wind!

I saw Suri!!!!!

No, I didn't. But apparently, everyone in Hollywood has and they think they are sooooooo SPECIAL. And raspberries to People.com for lacking in the reporting department. Can we not get another story on Lindsay Lohan's drunken rampage?


From August 4th,

Penelope Cruz: I've Met Suri
Tom Cruise's ex-girlfriend, Penelope Cruz, is the latest celeb to say she's seen Suri Cruise.

"I met Suri. She is really beautiful. She is really special," the 32-year-old actress told reporters Thursday at the London premiere of her new film, Volver. "One of the most beautiful babies I have ever seen. And I am extremely happy for them. They are really happy and doing great."


From July 26th:

Jada Pinkett Smith: Suri Is 'Gorgeous'
Suri Cruise has remained out of the public eye since she was born on April 18 – but Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes's daughter is "gorgeous," Jada Pinkett Smith tells PEOPLE exclusively.

"She's one of the sweetest babies I've ever met in my life," Pinkett Smith says. "She's an absolute beauty and she's Daddy's little girl


From July 19th:

Leah Remini: I Saw Suri!
But at least one famous friend has gotten to meet her: King of Queens star and Cruise pal Leah Remini, who saw Suri at the couple's L.A. home recently.

"She's a beaming baby," Remini tells PEOPLE in its new issue. "She looks like Tom and Katie. She's just beautiful."

Dontcha wish you could do this at the gym?

Screw Spinning. Fuck Yoga. Who needs Boot Camp? I'm starting a petition at my gym to create a treadmill dance class!

Family Time

This one is for Kathy! I hope that betch WBS at the Ceeb sees this article. There is some serious discrimination going on and this article nails it.

The Workplace: Differing attitudes to the right for family time
By Lisa Belkin International Herald Tribune

NEW YORK Two separate yet related bits of news have been causing a stir here in recent weeks.

The first is an announcement by Kathleen Rice, the new district attorney in Nassau County, New York, that she will not allow part-time work in her office. The dozen prosecutors - mostly women, mostly working a reduced schedule to spend more time with their children - were told they had to ramp up to full time or leave.

The second is the release of a study by the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California Hastings College of Law in San Francisco, which discovered, in effect, a new category of discrimination suit being brought in the United States - and being won.

Mary Still, a faculty fellow at the center and author of the report, has named the subgroup "family responsibilities discrimination," or FDR.

The plaintiffs are mostly parents and mostly women, but about 10 percent are men, and some are caring for spouses or parents, not children. All are claiming discrimination at work because they are giving care at home.

Like so many evolving subsets in law, family responsibilities discrimination does not exist in any statute. Rather it is an argument being made often enough that it can now be counted and analyzed.

"Discrimination based on caregiving is not an expressed category," said Joan Williams, executive director of the center.

"It's a reflection of the creativity of lawyers who have set up a new subcategory of litigation within existing workplace discrimination laws."

And they are doing so with increasing frequency. The first case that could be considered FDR was brought in 1971. There were eight such cases in the United States in the 1970s. From 1996 to 2005, in contrast, there were 481, which was a 400 percent increase over the total brought during the decade before. Strikingly, all this came at a time when anti-discrimination cases in general decreased 23 percent.

This is gratifying to Williams because she helped start the trend. In her book "Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It," Williams refuted the prevailing argument of the time, one she sums up as "you can't sue for work-family conflict; that's a woman's choice." She argued that discrimination suits were justified when employees faced limits or penalties because of their role as givers of care.

And sue they have in the years since Williams first made her case. A school psychologist's right to sue was upheld when she accused her district of denying her tenure after telling her it was "not possible to be a good mother and have this job."

A sales representative for a mattress company was granted $1.1 million in compensatory and punitive damages (later reduced by the court to $301,500 because of a statutory cap) when she was denied a promotion because she had children and her supervisor "did not think she'd want to relocate her family." A woman who was being paid less per hour because of a part-time schedule was awarded $500,000.

It is a trend that has "confounded observers," Williams said, because these decisions are being upheld by both liberal and conservative judges. Recently the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of a man fired for taking time off to care for his extremely ill wife and, also unanimously, confirmed a lower-court ruling in favor of a woman whose hours were changed, preventing her from caring for her son, who has Down syndrome.

"The notion that children need and deserve time with their parents and that family members need to care for ill children, spouses and parents is widely shared from right to left," Williams said.

Which takes us back to the Nassau County district attorney. It would be simple to paint her as a woman without children and no sympathy for those who do. But, as she explained last month in an op-ed response in Newsday, a daily on Long Island, New York, it is more complicated. "By county mandate," she writes, "the district attorney's office is limited in the number of prosecutors it can have at any one time. Each part- time employee takes up one position as though he or she were a full-time prosecutor."

But there must be other ways. Changing the staffing formula comes to mind, so that part-time workers count as, well, part-time workers.

Lost in Translation

I read this great article on Wal*Mart today in the International Herald Tribune. It was all about how the American retail giant has failed in Germany and other countries around the world. Financial reasons aside, there are some big... I mean BIG differences between the uber-American shopper and the rest of the world. Do they really make the employees sing the corporate cheer before work everyday? And ice skates in Mexico? Really? Who works in merchandising at this place? Don't they know it's HOT in Mexico?

Here are some highlights:

Wal-Mart's overseas push can be lost in translation
New York Times

Wal-Mart's woes are not limited to Germany. The retailing colossus has struggled in several countries, from South Korea to Brazil, as it discovered that its formula for success - low prices, zealous inventory control and a dizzying array of merchandise - did not translate well in markets with their own muscular discount chains and shoppers with very different habits.

Wal-Mart also is trying to integrate acquisitions with more sensitivity, a process that involves hard issues, like deciding whether to consolidate multiple foreign headquarters, and soft issues, like how aggressively to push Wal-Mart's corporate culture on non- American employees. In Germany, Wal- Mart stopped requiring salesclerks to smile at customers - a practice that some male shoppers interpreted as flirting - and scrapped the employee morning chant that spells out Wal-Mart.

"People found these things strange - Germans just don't behave that way," said Hans-Martin Poschmann. But the problems it encountered in Germany echo elsewhere. For example, it never established comfortable ties with German labor unions.

Some of Wal-Mart's missteps - selling golf clubs in Brazil, where the game is unfamiliar, or ice skates in Mexico - have become the stuff of urban legend. But even more subtle differences in shopping habits have tripped up the company. In South Korea, Wal- Mart's stores originally had taller racks than those of local rivals, forcing shoppers to use ladders or stretch for items on high shelves. Wal-Mart's utilitarian design - ceilings with exposed pipes - put off shoppers accustomed to the decorated ceilings in E-Mart stores.

"They have stacks of goods in boxes," said Lee Jin Sook, 46, a housewife traveling by metro in Seoul. "That may be good for some American housewives who drive out in their own cars." But Koreans, she said, prefer smaller packages: "Why would you buy a box of shampoo bottles?"

Meet Miss Maple

Meet Maple! She is the 8 week-old Golden Retriever puppy and official luv muffin of our friends, Paul & Erika. I can't stand how cute this little girl is. I can't wait to come home and snuggle with Maple. Congrats guys, she's a keeper.

Friends 4 Ever

I contacted my friend, Eva yesterday. I hadn't seen her since the Havergal 15th year reunion in October 2005 (right before we moved here). I wanted to touch base, see how she was doing, what her family was up to, and mish mash the gossip if there was any. I’m happy to report that Evsie is doing great. She's back to work at IBM after having back-to-back babies. They're all living in their newly-renovated house in the city. And life is good.

We did the usually post-game catch up conversation and then we slid into the mommy talk. Is she toilet trained? Does he go to pre-school? Do you sleep much? Have you set up babysitters? How is he with traveling? Doctors? Ear infections? This sort of thing. We also talked about working and being a mother and a wife and a daughter and a daughter-in-law and a friend and how sometimes there is no TIME left to be anything else. I'm glad that Eva is working again, as much as it complicates the daily routine and the prohibitive costs involved, it is worth it. We both agreed that to us, keeping your mind active and having a life away from your children was important - more than important - necessary.

We didn't get to talk as long as we wanted to... Eva and hubby had to go grocery shopping before the Nanny got back from the park with the kids, and I had to walk a full-bladdered dog before bed. Sometimes life gets in the way. But long after the telephone call ended, I was sitting in bed thinking about how long I've known Eva and what a relationship of 20 some years translates into. It transcends mere friendship and comes closer to a definition of an extended family. Not the family that you see everyday but more like the family that shows up at the family picnic or a great-great aunt's funeral. You get close, and then grow apart and then you find each other again and it's as if there was not time apart to speak of.

When I thought about my high school friends, I was actually surprised to realize that of the inner circle of about 8 girls, we are all in touch with each other in one form or another - all except one. We've shared a lot over the years. There's the bad stuff: drug addiction, depression, abusive relationships, eating disorders, miscarriages, racism, problems with parents, divorce, and alcoholism.

And there have been good times, too. We've been to each other's weddings, bridal showers, birthdays, christenings, stagettes, housewarmings, baby showers, bon voyage parties, award ceremonies, and after parties. Oh... and I almost forgot, Beth's New Year's Eve dinner extravaganzas.

We've been university roommates, housemates, neighbours, traveling buddies. Some of us have worked together - sitting side-by-side in office cubicles, trading emails like notes passed in Grade Nine physics class. And we've been busted for doing so as if it were Grade Nine physics class.

Some of us married, some of us have not... it's about 50/50. Some have steady boyfriends and others are still looking. Eva and I are the only ones with kids but women tend to have babies later these days and I wouldn't doubt that some of our friends will surprise us with a pregnancy in her forties. But there are those who won't have kids and that's fine too.

Back in high school we all dated the same guys. It was a bit like ‘musical boyfriend’. Sometimes, when we're drunk at one of those reunions, we still talk about who was the best kisser, how far you went with whom, who you pined for and who broke your heart. Oddly enough, there are many of these guys that we keep in touch with although none of us ever married one of those heartbreakers.

We've traveled and lived all over the world. Beth is in Rwanda for the summer, working on a film about Romeo Dallaire with her boyfriend. Eva lived in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. Caroline lived and worked in West Africa for years. Lee just got back from NYC. Aniko was out of England for a while - and Japan too. Karla traipsed around Europe and the US. And here I am living in Amsterdam.

Our careers are diverse and all except the one whose name we don't speak, there isn't a lawyer or doctor in the bunch. But success is different at 35 than it was at 15. Most of us just want to pay the bills (more or less) on time, go out for a nice dinner (once and a while) and have somewhere decent to live. Not a lot to ask.

I don't know what defining force keeps us together. Was it because we went to a small, all-girls private school? Was it because that we all shared the same sense of humour? The same taste in music? Being dumped by the same guy? Is it because we all went through that awkward "My So Called Life" period together – run-ins with Toronto’s finest for public drunkenness, late-night telephone sobbing marathons and embarrassing Phys Ed. gymnastic routines? Is it because we all eventually come back to Toronto like bees returning to the hive? It’s most of these things.

I also think that after 20 plus years, there is less pressure to "be" something to these people. You're just who you are and when you think that you’re someone that you're not, one of these women will put you back in your place and remind you of the time you puked your guts out in her bathtub. We share a common past and it allows us breathing room complete with the comfortable silence of months and years that sometimes pass before we re-connect. And for the most part, we're cool with that.

So if you guys... are reading this, I just want to let you know that I love you. And I miss you too.

RTD Forever.