I'm with Birdy on this one. Our workplace has been nickle-and-diming us for years, right Birdy?
Mancks

Hello all and thanks for greetings--yes I have been lying low--but am feeling fine now. Nothing lasts forever (as my Mum would have said,) including colds, flu,  and depression.
mancks

Yo Birdy
I see now how thoroughly corrupted you are--the regular game, the challenge game and the forum. Oh to be a lady of leisure like you...

I saw something this morning that would have interested you, on the way back from the park--a woman with a portable birdcage on her back, with one of our local monk parakeets in it. Apparently someone had pulled down a nest and she rescued the babies, of which this was one. I know you like 'em wild, but it was such a cute little bird-carrier--like a Baby Bjorn for birdies-- with a perch and food and everything.
Mancklin

And Binkie, in spite of my last post, I do feel bad for you too. It's horrible when a beloved plant is cut down for no reason. I bet they do come back though. Isn't that the principle of coppicing (sp?) and pollarding? Here is a bit about coppicing from Wikipedia to give you hope:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppice

mancklin

I noticed the other day that sanga was accepted, but not sangha. Unless sanga means something entirely different that I never heard of, I think sangha is the more accepted spelling.

Wikipedia:
Sangha (संघ saṃgha) is a word in Pali or Sanskrit that can be translated roughly as "association" or "assembly" or "community". It is commonly used in several senses to refer to Buddhist or Jain groups. Traditionally, in Buddhism sangha almost always has one of two meanings: most commonly, sangha means the monastic sangha of ordained Buddhist monks or nuns. In a stricter sense, sangha can mean the assembly of all beings possessing some high degree of realization, referred to as the arya-sangha or noble sangha.

Re dogging:
I just bought a book called "Dogging it in the Mid-Atlantic" listing the pathetic few places where you can take your dogie for a walk with slightly less than the normal risk of being told to put that animal on a leash. It's a new usage to me.
Mancks

I hate to have to disagree with the august Threeb, but Sicko simply confirmed for me what I already knew--that the US health care system is terribly broken and needs some radical intervention.
Being from the UK I know all about long waits for hip replacements etc, but the fact is, for most people health care is better and cheaper over there, and having lived under both systems--and with good health insurance here-- I know which I prefer. Everyone in the US should see this movie--after all, we are subjected to propaganda from the other side (endless advertising from drug and health insurance companies) all the time. As Viz so rightly says, M. Moore can be irritating, though he didn't irritate me this time.  The longevity studies and birth mortality figures are pretty convincing.
At least two articles in the NY Times this morning make reference to Sicko, so it is obviously making waves.
Re the UK health care system T--people were talking about it going down the can twenty years ago when I left. Maybe it's like people who think the world is coming to an end--they are always there, and things just carry on.
There are many reasons why people want to come to the US, and for most of them health care is not in the forefront of their minds when they make the decision to come here.
mancks

mancks