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I'm back

For those of you who were regular readers of My Diary, you will be aware that it has been some months since I regularly contributed my thoughts through these pages. There have been a number of reasons for this absence.

The old story of “what goes around comes around” meant that I was finding the same issues were arising again and again, and that it was hard to keep addressing the same themes when I had hoped that these topics would be issues no longer. In fact, it might be fun and even useful to look at some of the things I wrote years ago (I started this column in August 2002) and do some updates.

This year has also been rather different for me in other ways, which has affected my writing. I have been travelling less, due to the need to by in Sydney for family and other reasons and therefore there have been fewer adventures to report on. I am also involved in other community activities which has taken much time and energy.

And then one gets out of the habit of writing! Most of my musings are written at the late afternoon as I reflect on the events of the day. Once one breaks this habit for a few days, it can be hard to re-establish the pattern.

On a positive note, I now use Skype to chat to people via the internet. This is ridiculously cheap and very convenient, and it has made keeping communications going with our UK customers much easier. This has been important because we closed our physical office in the UK in December last year and centred all our business in Sydney. I still have a part-time person in the UK who maintains the basics for us, but everything is shipped from Sydney where it is much easier to maintain the inventory etc. For our UK customers, nothing much has changed, and we have a local phone number in London (another Skype service) that means people can leave messages or even call if the time difference is practicable. This number is 0208 123 6659 if you want to speak to me.

coming months are going to be busy. I have a trip to Cairns in a couple of weeks, and at the end of October I am going back to Iran for another tour of duty. More about this exciting trip later. The plans for our two Conferences (Sydney and Auckland) are complete and the programs are on the website. These will be special events, of interest to childbirth and parenting educators, whether they are starting out or have years of experience in this field.

Posted by andrea at September 29, 2007 05:32 PM