Marian - the paper size is 11"x17" for the course but I gather in 'real life' it would be at least 24"x36" or bigger... Mary - I have noticed the ads for the English Gardening School in the RHS magazine. And there are the RHS courses too... I guess one advantage of the U of G courses is you can just take the courses that interest you and they can count towards a certificate/diploma or not, as you like. So there no feeling that you didn't complete a program if you want to stop after just one course. The Internet format was ideal for me; it's just that the course content wasn't quite what I was looking for. I'll have to look around at options and then see whether I'm still in the mood to do something more once the gardening season is over for this year. Saucy - The reference to the clematises is in the verbal description of the plan. You need the plant list key to find them on the drawing (and the drawing posted here is too small to read the numbers anyway! :-) GB - I was going to consult with you about what ones to use but ran out of time and just named ones I was familiar with! The transparent house was interesting. I had to 'build' it from scratch with only the floor plan outline, the height of the walls as provided by the teacher, and the fact that there was a 2' roof overhang! It's not quite right I think on the back part of the house but good enough for the purpose of the assignment. The whole isometric drawing thing is actually quite simple to do - if a bit fiddly and tedious! You follow a straightforward process using fairly crude shapes for the plants (drawn to scale based on mature height and spread) and, when you put it all together, it produces that rather astonishing drawing - with zippo artistic talent required on my part! Since it was all done at a scale of 1/8" = 1' small details were killers to work with. It took me two days to draw that table and tuteur! Rotating things 30 degrees when they're that small and have so many lines (all those chair legs etc.!) is hard on the eyes... And since the technique produces a 3-D effect, I kept losing track of what was bottom and what was top as the little image seemed to have a life of its own and 'morphed' a lot :-) And tilting everything at 30 degrees started to 'get' to me - when I was reading something after working on the drawings for a while, the text of what I was reading seemed to be on a slant! But it was mostly fun - and good mental exercise :-) But now it's time to mess around in the real garden! I do hope to get out and measure things next week and do a proper scale drawing of the front garden and the changes I want to make there. (I suspect I may end up just 'winging it' as usual if spring gets underway quickly sometime soon and I run out of planning time....:-)

"Accepting Assignment" has to do with how the payment is made. If the doctor Accepts Assignment, he accepts a lower approved amount in return for getting the check made out to him and sent directly to his office. The patient is then billed only for the 20% balance. If he does NOT Accept Assignment, the approved amount is a little more and the check is made out to the patient and is sent to the patient. The doctor bills the patient directly for the full APPROVED amount. You should never pay a doctor before you know what Medicare will approve as it often changes. If you overpay, you may never know that the doctor is carrying a credit balance on your account. It's not the doctor's fault, it's more the fault of the insurance clerk or the office manager. A doctor has to apply for a Medicare number and be approved to see Medicare patients. And he MUST bill for ALL of them. To opt out means that he agrees NOT TO SEE MEDICARE PATIENTS, as he cannot bill either them or medicare for the service. At least that was the way it worked a few years ago. I don't think it has changed. He can't bill for just some of his medicare patients. He has to bill Medicare for ALL of them. He may accept assignment on some of them, and refuse assignment on others, but he has to bill Medicare for all of them, and he has to accept the approved amount as the entire charge and write off the unapproved amount. For example. Let's say that the usual fee for a service is $50.00. Medicare might approve it for 25.00. If he accepts assignment, the 80% (20.00) goes directly to him. If he doesn't accept assignment, Medicare may approve it for a little more, maybe for 28.00. 80% of 28.00 is 22.40, the patient gets a check for the 22.40 and the doctor can then bill for the entire 28.00. But NOT for the full amount of 50.00 A doctor that no longer wants to see (and accept Medicare terms) may opt out of the program. I think we may not be talking about the same thing when we speak of Opting Out of the program. It's not the same thing as not accepting assignment. As far as what it means to your pocket book, that's another thing. The approved amount may be 25.00 today, and Medicare may change it to 18.00 tomorrow or 26.00 at another doctor's office. I think that sometimes it depends on how fancy and detailed the diagnosis is. High Blood Pressure gets X amount of dollars, If the doctor also adds that you have rhinitis ( a runny nose)the approved amount might be more. It would depend on who was handling the claim. Dealing with Medicare and it's thousands rules and regulations is a royal pain in the you-know-what. I expect that more and more doctors with full patient loads will be opting out. They don't need the hassle. That means that the over 65 patient will be seeing the doctor that hasn't built up a good practice yet.

Diane, I'm sorry I did not respond earlier. The only reason I want to know who did not send in 2008 and 2009 is to not have those same people in our 2010 group. I think it would be wonderful if someone might volunteer to take the name of some who did not receive this year or last year and would make that block for them. Once we get into 2010, I will try to do this on a volunteer basis but just for that year - matching people if there are any problems. As for 2008 and 2009, I don't want to try to play catch up before I even start. It woudl be very thoughtful if someone wants to take on matching for the months gone by. Jeanne

Students should not be punished by being required to write. Perhaps that's one of many reasons that people tend not to like to write. Additionally, writing 500 sentences as a punishment for 2nd graders seems excessive. I would find out more about what is happening in the class. Does the teacher talk a lot with little opportunity for student interaction? Then she should consider providing opportunities for small group collaboration. Are the students talking because they're bored? Then she needs to experiment with different ways of apporaching instruction to find out what will engage her students. Student talking is the result of an underlying issue. Rather than trying to bully students into submission, she should try to discover and address the underlying issue. I'm not trying to sound judgmental. I am a former teacher who has sucessfully taught in innercity schools. [I am no longer in the classroom because I train teachers now.] When I first started teaching, I used to punish students for inappropriate behavior. I spent a lot of time putting out behavioral fires. Once I realized that student behaviors are the result of classroom, community, and/or home conditions, I focused on addressing the underlying issues. After that, I had few behavioral problems with my students and student achievement soared. I also agree with a previous poster that telling your son that he is an exception to what the teacher has said is counterproductive. He may come to believe that school rules only apply if his mother says that they do and it undermines the teacher's authority.