a month or two goes by

Babies occupy a lot of your time. However, there would still be plenty of time to get on and do other things in life if it wasn't for the bloody muppets in call centres who keep taking you details and messing things up. I would list all the ones that have just been incompetent gits but it would take even more time so i'm not going to.

SO the phd - well it's happening. But so are a lot of other things. I've just been online interviewing people about using the counselling service, but again it was quite difficult to get a useful interview - HOWEVER again i think a lot of this proves really useful paralells to the counselling process. For instance the person i met today was contacting the service from work. She found it difficult to access it elsewhere and there weren't any face-to-face services available for her to use at the mo. This made it quite difficult to keep a conversation going, but not impossible. It makes me wonder about the differnces between free to access services and ones that people pay for privately - rekindled thoughts from working face-to-face with young people as a counsellor. I kinda feel that i should clarify that i don't see that as a bad thing but one that needs to be worked with.
This is the first week that i've tried to do any interviewing for ages!!! so that's not too good, but it's i still feel on top of the phd - i need to start writing - and for practice i've got 2 articles that i'm trying to complete - one is a very short article about kooth while the other is about online methods. I think that i'll actually enjoy writing the phd stuff more than the articles as i can see the point of the phd stuff at the moment - obviously i see the point of the articles (after all i'd at least like to have a few things from 2007 on my CV when i become a doctor :)). Where was i going - nowhere probably....

lets start somewhere else - i'm off to dublin in a few months - i've been invited to take part in an online conselling thing that's looking at putting in some funding applications to carry on research projects http://www.esfworkshop.eu/- it all looks very interesting. Also i seem to have ended up getting involved in the development of some virtual learning environments at the university but i have no idea what that means yet.

Mixed methods and pretty pictures seems to be the way forward - i'll start them just as soon as i've got the bastard window replaced in the kitchen