diotima

My sympathies! Just don't spray any aerosol in the vicinity of a hot stove, panic mode can take over and you can easily forget that aerosols + burning stove can have unwanted side effects.

Yes, that is the scheme, I'd forgotten the name of it. Thank you very much Clair, much appreciated :-)

As I understand it, France has had legislation in place for a while now, to allow banks to offer lifetime mortgages as we have them in UK: a property is mortgaged to the bank without any repayments during the life of the mortgagee, the house is sold on death to repay the bank, the balance to the deceased's estate. Are there actually any of these products available on the market? Or is it a question of buying your house first then approaching a broker to see if there's anything suitable available, and if you're lucky you get an offer discreetly delivered in a plain brown paper envelope? I have no dependants or anyone else I care to leave anything to, and darn well want to enjoy what I have while I'm here. I'd be able to pay cash for a little retirement pad but would want to remortgage to get the maximum income possible. My UK house is worth >£300,000. Does anyone have any info on this, or could point me in the right direction, please? I'm only looking for general information at this stage. Thanks!

Diotima of Mantinea, teacher of Socrates. Hypatia (5th c. Alexandria), astronomer and mathematician.

The normal.dot template can be overwritten without the user being aware of it via one of a suite of template bugs that have been in Word since at least v.6. They're so deeply embedded now that it's impossible for MS to do anything about it, short of re-write the Word code from scratch. I came across this when trying to use Master and Subdocument at Railtrack - Microsoft sent an expert to work through the issues with me. We finally convinced the management that the bugs were in the program and not my head. The only thing to do is to create a new normal.dot, as Clair recommended.

Be aware that some domain name registrars actually register your domain in their name, not yours - not so common now as it used to be but it still does happen. You can't actually 'own' a domain name, you register it so you have the sole use of it for a contracted period after which it becomes available again, but a good registrar will send you reminders to renew well before it expires. An excellent registrar is a French firm - Gandi - http://www.gandi.net. Their prices are very competitive and their user control panel that you use to point your domain name to your web host's servers (and access other services), is a doddle to use. I have no connection with the company, I'm just a satisfied customer.

If you don't mind trimming it to keep it to size, Viburnum Burkwoodii. It grows to about 8' high and wide, but I trim mine to 5' and it responds well, dense and bushy. You could keep it to 1 metre. The leaves are particularly pretty in spring, bright fresh green and glossy, and the scent is glorious. Semi-evergreen normally, but mine's in a sheltered spot and keeps its old leaves until the new ones push through.

[quote user="Will "]Who can tell which is the boy, and which is the girl?  [/quote] Mmm.... I think the girl's at the front because she's taking up most of the space!

I asked my vet about the difference a few months ago. She said that most vets (presumably meaning English vets) prefer the side incision as there's less risk of complications. The stomach (midline) incision is usually done on pedigree cats where the owner doesn't want to risk disturbing the way the coat lies, as the fur sometimes grows back unevenly after surgery.

Rowans, the Mountain Ash, are lovely trees, but mature ones have a tendency to split their trunks, and when that happens they can rot quickly and need to be cut down. We found that out when we called a tree surgeon to look at our purple beech which we thought was too close to the house. He showed us how to keep the beech in bounds, but said the rowan was terminal, there was no saving it because the trunk had split. We called it our cauliflower tree because of the size of the flower clusters.

Ceiling detail in the Alhambra Fort, Granada. [IMG]http://i127.photobucket.com/albums/p160/Figural/ceiling.jpg[/IMG]

Thanks, Dick. The photos I've seen here are terrific. I don't have a good camera right now, I'm hoping to get a decent SLR next year, and get started again. Pauline

[quote user="Tresco"]Hi. They look great, and I would love to look at them properly, but I can't make them any bigger. Am I doing something wrong? I made it a link to make it easier for others. http://pauline-caldwell.com/ Edit: I realise now, you have to click on the words/description, not the pictures. They are great shots. [/quote] Thank you! When I started that site several years ago (!), because I'm very word-orientated, I only made the thumbnail captions the link. Now as the Web grows up, making the thumbnail+caption the link is becoming the expectation. Books have developed a 'standard' layout to users' expectations, so it follows that the Web is probably going to do the same. I'll probably change it over the Christmas holiday.

My French ones are all here - http://pauline-caldwell.com/. It's purely a hobby site, not commercial, no sponsorship or advertising. Most of the text is my ex's so if there are any real howlers I'm going to blame him. The photos and site design are mine, though. All were taken with a film camera and scanned.

Re Brousse-le-Chateau, le Tarn is out of the picture too, it's on the other side of the buildings right of picture. If you visit you have to park outside the village and walk - the main street doubles as the boules pitch. Happy days :-)

Testing... Brousse-le-Chateau, on the River Tarn. Le Chateau is out of the picture. [IMG]http://i127.photobucket.com/albums/p160/Figural/brousse.jpg[/IMG]

Thanks, Clair. I must have missed copying the opening or closing bracket, I think.

[quote user="Dick Smith"]Have a look at http://www.completefrance.com/cs/forums/819635/ShowPost.aspx to see how to post a photograph. [/quote] I did. I followed the instructions, I thought. What did I do wrong? Thanks!

Cantobre in the Cevennes. It's perched on a knife-edged sliver of rock at the confluence of two rivers. This was taken at sunset. I think this is the entire village. [IMG]http://i127.photobucket.com/albums/p160/Figural/cantobre.jpg[/IMG]

[quote user="nicktrollope"]One should still pay taxe professionelle (I do and I don't do anything from home - it is just a correspondance address). Also, don't assume that you will be allowed to run a business from home. It is not always the case.   [/quote] Thanks for the heads up, Nick. So far this is just an idea, much more research to be done before I decide. [:)] Pauline

That's good to know - thank you very much for the info! :-)

[quote user="Benjamin"] Why aren't we all sitting in condos in  Florida drinking Ernst & Gallio Californian red  and watching the sun set with a couple of Detroit gas guzzlers parked on the drive? [/quote] Because Florida is drop-dead boring, it's flat - flat doesn't get any flatter than Florida, there's no scenery; on two visits, a road in central Florida that had a bend in it with a tree at the bend, constituted the best scenery we saw. France is often pretty, fairly often stunning, and nearly always interesting. The Florida climate is dreadful for three months of the year, when wealthy Floridians go to New England to get away from it. And the health system is far better in France - fancy a consultation with a doctor for $100? And that was what it cost me in 1994. But apart from that, it's o.k.

Instead of just retiring when I'm 60, I'm thinking of moving my business to France with me. My question is, will I pay a commercial rate property tax if I use one room in my French home for my business? My business is entirely internet-based, selling services, not goods, and it would operate in exactly the same way in France: no business visitors to my home, no commercial waste collection, no sign from the outside that a business is being conducted there, no stock stored there, and the room and equipment I use in my business - computer, software, peripherals - are also used for domestic, leisure and study purposes. Under these conditions I'm not liable for any business rate Council Tax in UK - would it be the same in France or not? I've tried searching for this info on the Web, but been unsuccessful. Does anyone know the answer, please, or a link to a site where I can find it? Thanks in advance! Pauline

In 1992 the ex and I were on holiday in the USA when we discovered our brand new Access cards started and expired on the same date. This was something of a setback, to say the least. Access were very helpful, they'd courier new cards to us if we could let them know where we'd be 36 hours later. We said Coulee City, Washington. Despite telling the person on the other end that it was up in the top lefthand corner of America, they still didn't have a map large scale enough to find it. They got our cards to us on schedule, sending them out with a uni student working as courier in his holiday, which didn't strike us as being very security minded. The courier was really pleased though, he was a civil engineering student; he changed his flight back and spent three happy days studying Grand Coulee Dam.

[quote user="Sc"]Any of you received a spam with 1.7 megabytes of attachments from a Tony Preston? 15 minutes+ download time on a dial up connection, what a nerve! In my opinion such a lazy and thoughtless e-mailshot for his property magazine is indicative of a similarly produced publication and I urge you not to give him any encouragement to repeat the practise. Steve[/quote] Entirely agree. Does your emailer have an option to leave messages over a certain size on the server, so you can review the subject line to see whether you want to download it or kill it straightaway? I really like this in Mailsmith. [:D]