Fri, 11 Mar 2005

Conference timing inevitably sucks

One of minor disadvantages of working for ourselves is that Chrissie and I have to pay our own way to get to professional conferences. So we tend to each have one favourite that we try to get to each year. And, since we don’t get much time off, we tend to arrange a bit of leisure time along with the conferences.

The problem with that is that her national family therapy conference and my national AUUG conference both tend to happen in September or October. This year, to make things nice, they’re both in Sydney—which is good because it’s close enough to visit and we have friends and family to see while we’re there. But her conference is in the fourth week of October while mine is in the second week. There’s no way she can afford to be away from her clients for three weeks at that time of the year, so it looks like I’ll have to miss AUUG 2005. Bit of a shame really, as I’ve only made it to two conferences in the nine years since we moved to Brisbane. Oh well, can’t be helped. Maybe next year.

Yes, we could each go to our own conference on our own, but we do like to be together rather than apart, so the way to accomplish that is for us to go to Sydney for her conference and for me to whine about missing mine. Since she was the main organiser of her conference last year in Brisbane, she’s expected to play a visible role at this year’s event, whereas nobody will notice if I don’t make it to the AUUG conference.

Posted at: 16:27

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