Well done Calvin! :hurray:

Correct - but in the UK we pay the same per head of population in taxes for medical care as you do in the US, but we get care for the whole population, while you're only paying for whatever portion of the population are on Medicare & Medicaid. So essentially it is 'free' because you're paying the same amount in your taxes but not getting anything back, as most people then have to pay extra for insurance/co-pays etc. etc.

But the key point, particularly for maternity and neonatal care, is that there is no charge related to the care that you get. No-one has to go without maternity care because they can't afford it, and no-one is bankrupted by the birth of an extremely sick or premature child.

I read 'The Time Machine' recently and it is very short - much shorter than 'War of the Worlds' (which is one of my favourite re-reads and is set in my hometown).

I've not used Dancing Bears, but that is exactly how I taught 'said' - 's-e-d', just explaining that 'said' is a funny word and the ai makes a different sound than usual. Well I don't know how you pronounce 'been' (and of course it'll vary around the UK quite a lot for regional accents) but I pronounce it b-ee-n (same as I pronounce seen, clean & green bean!)

Actually I can see the value of contradicting in maths too. Sometimes teachers get something wrong, and if you can't say "Is that right? I thought it was ..." then you'll have a whole class taking something wrong down in their notes as the correct method/answer.

I'm not great sewer (is that a word?), but I will try to make a block. Our house is entirely concrete - poured in-situ concrete, and it has a steel frame inside the concrete, and re-inforced concrete bands at 3 levels (ask how we found that out! - drilling into the walls for any reason requires a fairly substantial drill!). Outside it is rendered, and has a tile roof, except the garage, which has a flat roof, covered in roofing felt. It was built in 1954, and lived in by the one family until we bought it last year.

In London, you rent! Or you have a very high paying job (think bankers or what have you). Honestly the %age of home owners is currently going down and the age of first-time buyers is going up because prices are so high compared to salaries. However, because prices are high, that makes rent high too - where we live at the moment we can afford our mortgage, but we couldn't afford to rent the (identical) house 2 doors down as the rent is 2.5x our mortgage payment! Many younger people who are able to buy are doing so with support from their parents, either "inheritance in advance" if parents have the cash available or with parents co-signing mortgages to allow them to borrow enough.

I can't vote - if we put more rubbish out than our wheelie bin they just leave it (i.e. they only empty the bin). Our rubbish is fortnightly, and so is recycling collection (alternate weeks) with food waste collected every week. In the UK the cost is part of our property taxes (Council Tax), so we don't pay for it separately.

Well the original marathon runner is supposed to have died afterwards, isn't he? :001_smile:

Would a little heart shape work?

Off the top of my head, in the UK there's a GCSE (exam sat by 16 yr-olds) in Statistics, so I'm guessing that any text/resources for that wouldn't require calculus, since there's no calc in GCSE Maths - I don't know of any specific books, but thought that might send you in a useful direction?

Also, I don't know where in the UK you are, but it's probably worth investigating museums etc. in your local area/region - e.g. we live quite near Oxford, and the Ashmolean museum there has fantastic collections for many of the ancient civilisations discussed in SOTW1 (I've only got book 1, so I haven't investigated resources for the later books at all).

There isn't an official order list like that, but if you join the BFSU yahoo group, I think there is a list of a possible order in which to do the lessons. The idea is that so long as you cover the prerequisites you could do a lot of BFSU in any order - it doesn't matter hugely which thread you're in and you can vary it depending on things that come up in life/the news/weather etc.

I basically only got a nook in order to be able to get books from the library that they only have in electronic format - and most of my reading is books from the library, so I read paper/nook depending on what I can get (and whether I can be bothered to go out to the library if the weather is foul!)

I've never heard of it - but we don't have broadcast TV, so I'm incredibly out of touch!

Well as a Brit I guess I should say skeleton! But actually I think they're both completely insane sports, although I suppose luge is a bit less insane, going feet first rather than head first.

This is a complete aside, but I' in the UK, and I've never heard of playgrounds that charge a fee - how does that work? Do they have a gate-keeping sitting there taking money or something?

I wore my engagement ring and DH put the wedding ring above it, and then switched the two over later on. (If I could be bothered, I'd check in the photos if I did it immediately, or not until the evening, but they're upstairs in a box in a cupboard.)

Also the bishops sit in the House of Lords, because we have an established church.

Mine has been following me around various places online for so many years, I can't remember where she came from. I did do some colour editing of the original image when I first adopted it though. I really can't imagine it being anything else (is that rather sad?)

If you like Cabin Pressure, then a good thing to do would be to look at all the programmes in the Radio 4 schedule at 6.30pm - that's the comedy slot on weekday evenings. Some of the current events comedy there can be rather UK specific though - like the News Quiz or the Now Show. I would guess that 4 and 4 Extra will have lots of good drama on over Christmas too - I thought Neverwhere was excellent.

Sorry no-one is coming up with any ideas for you, but the only homeschooling book I have on my nook is WTM (and I bought that from Kobo and sideloaded it).

The group is very quiet at the moment, and since you have to wait for your membership to be moderated when you want to join, it may take a while to get your confirmation email and get into the group archive.

If things haven't changed in the last few years, he should know before Christmas. Anyway, just came here to wish Calvin all the best with the waiting...