Finally A New Post

Yes, it's been a long while since I last wrote anything of substance. I've been busier than I have been in the past since arriving in Amsterdam, and that's a very good thing! I guess foremost would be my work with ACCESS, which is a not-for-profit organization here in The Netherlands, with offices in The Hague and Amsterdam, that helps English-speaking expatriots deal with their new home. Most people may speak English, but when dealing with government agencies, some utilities, and various other entities, one is not always met with someone you can communicate with. ACCESS helps people with all kinds of matters, and I answer questions that come in via email or phone call. Recently I put in a lot of time and effort on something called the Creative Contest. Art students in the English language schools have their creations chosen by the art teachers in their schools and then a panel of 3 judges, of which I was the head judge, chooses 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners in several age categories in 2D and 3D work. I am also the associate editor for the ACCESS magazine, and that occupies a lot of time developing and writing stories, editing other writers work, taking photographs for publication, even doing some distributing. Outside of ACCESS there's workshops. I've held four so far. I went to Munich for a week to assist a commercial photographer on a Caterpillar project (heavy equipment, not the little fuzzy tubes on your 'maters), and I do all the research, planning, and reservations regarding our travels (the holiday when Radhika's family was here took a while to put together, then there was the Normandy weekend, French Open at the end of May, this long weekend trip to Brussels, Belgium and Maastricht, Netherlands, and our week in Ireland.) Also there are personal photo projects that I do with another US photographer here, tennis (of course!), movies (3 Star Trek viewings under my belt), and the little things and daily battles.
One of the battles recently fought was with our bank here, ABN AMRO. Let me start by saying banking sucks here. Charges for EVERYTHING and severe lack of service. I went into the branch near us one day to conduct some business - it was 4:20 and they close at 5pm. The girl tells me I have to come back another day because their personnel cannot serve the amount of people waiting in the lobby. This was the latest in an endless line of poor service experiences with the bank. I went outside, unlocked my bike, but locked it back up because I didn't like where this ended. So I went back inside, asked to speak to the manager, and waited while I was scoped out by several bank employees. You see, the Dutch do not generally make "waves" when they are treated poorly - they just take it. So, when someone ramps up and starts asking questions like "How is it I come into this bank at 4:20 and am told to come back another day when there's 40 minutes left in the business day?", or "How much more pathetic does the service have to be here before I take my money out of this sorry institution?" things get interesting. Mr. Manager says they don't have enough associates for the number of customers (wrong answer!) - "Not my problem", I tell him. I was in there in the first place because of their poor security and incompetence. Someone copied our card and got the pin and started withdrawing money from Indonesia. Luckily we caught it on a Sunday and put a stop on the card immediately (Radhika wanted to know what in the hell I was buying and spending so much money on! 18 years together - - has she met me?). So, the Barney Fife's who run ABN AMRO security can't see a suspicious pattern when the same amount of money is taken from an ATM in Indonesia 1 or 2 minutes apart repeatedly? What kind of programs do they have in the network to sniff out this type of obvious nonsense? Questions that I posed the desk jockey in the bank. I appreciate when Citi contacts me in China, India, or wherever when I make a withdrawal in these places and didn't tell them beforehand that I would be there. ABN AMRO knuckleheads would sit back and watch withdrawals from an ATM installed in The Sea Of Tranquility and not blink an eye! To continue, they gave us various time frames of when they would replace the stolen funds into our account, so that was a fight. Finally, Radhika called them and she was told by the Female Fife on the bank end that they didn't know when the money would show up! Well, Muffin went off on the hapless Dutchy, got the manager on the line after verbally abusing "Ding-Dong" for a spell and Miss Manager said the funds would be put back by Monday, along with the charges for a new card and stopping the old one. YEAH!!! Can you believe their security fails and they are going to charge us for stopping the card and issuing a new one??? CLUELESS!!! But, they get away with it because the government lets them and the Dutch "take it". We finally got that settled. Next was figuring out this 200+ euro bill from the water company. Seems it's a water purification tax. Not only is the income tax 52% here, but you get taxed from every direction too, not to mention VAT, which is another 19%!!! Oh, they give some dandy tax breaks for having kids, because the Dutch have stopped having babies and in a few years there's going to be far less people to tax and support the socialist agenda here. But that baby break does nothing for us. Maybe we can go out and rent a few for the next 18 months. Anyone want to send their tax deductions (er, I mean children) over to us for a while? I got plenty more to bitch about, but I'll move on to more pleasant matters.
As you know we have been traveling fools of late. Vienna, Prague, Rothenberg, Luzern, Bordeaux, Paris, Luxembourg, Normandy, Munich, now Brussels and Maastricht this weekend. Paris again at the end of the month for the French Open before I hit New York for 3 and Orlando for 10 days before a week in Ireland and returning to Amsterdam the day of the ACDC concert. Of course that's the obvious upside of living where we are living. Still planning some more travels in the year - Barcelona being one of the destinations. It's late, and I got stuff to do. But it's good to get some writing down after such a long break. I'll try for more a little later.

Normandy

Okay - - still haven't gotten around to my writing, but I have another batch (21) of photos from our long weekend visit to the Normandy area of France. Was a great place, as you can see. As usual, go to the link, and the album is Normandy (duh!).