Thursday, November 03, 2011

The Sun Will Come Out (five hours earlier) Tomorrow

Today is a day of both excitement and anxiety. We fly to the UK tomorrow for our annual series of lectures. It will be three weeks full of travel, of hotels and of restaurants. This means, of course, never knowing, from day to day, what obstacles and barriers we'll run into. To be sure every hotel has been checked and double checked for accessibility but, we've learned the hard way, that doesn't always matter.

Even so, we go with anticipation. After all the years of making this trip we know people there. We will be seeing old friends, perhaps making new, renewing acquaintances and shopping at Tescos. It's part of the year that we really look forward to, and we do again this year.

But we've found that our access to Internet is not always guaranteed and that the hours we work are long. So, though I'll try to post regularly over the next few weeks, I can't promise to keep up the daily posting. I will have my trusty journals with me so on days that I won't be writing on screen, I'll be writing on paper. I do try to write every day, even if I can't publish every day. So, there will be stories.

I ask for your patience over the next little while.

There will be no regular post tomorrow, but I'm going to share two videos with you. Both of which touched me in different ways.

See you on Saturday!

13 comments:

  1. Hi Dave,
    I met you at a conference we were both speaking at in Edinburgh last year. Where in the UK are you speaking this year?

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  2. Hi, hwga, I'm not sure, I don't have the full agenda yet. I know I start out in the South ... I also know I'm not going to be in Scotland this year. Send me an email and I'll send you the list of places once I have it.

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  3. Have a great trip, enjoy the UK.
    Jill

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  4. Best of luck with the trip.

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  5. Dear Dave,

    sorry I did not respond to your post right away. I was on holiday in Berlin for five days with a very very good friend. It felt both wonderful an shattering to be at a place where people have been killed and a land had been broken apart by a wall. A wall in the land and a wall in the hearts of people...

    Thats why I just respond today. And yes I talked about this experience with many people. Because it made me feel sad how rude people can be. It made me feel sad and very unconfortable that I reacted to hateful words in the same hateful way.

    And I asked my psychotherapist who is a very kind guy (and lives with his male partner since 30years) what I could have done different. And he came up with very similar ideas you wrote.

    He told me next time something like this happens just to say what I feel. I felt that the man acted soooooo mean. And I could not stand it...

    Thank you. Through reading your blog I got kinder with myself and with others. I am not as hard in judging differnces as I have done before.

    And yes for being how you are and giving the ideas that I can follow on the internet too,
    I am very glad to have a friend in Canada now.

    Julia

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  6. Enjoy your travels. Hope everything goes well.

    Message to Julia - thru Dave's blog you actually have several "friends" in Canada!

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  7. Hi Dave! Best of luck on your travels and safe journey! One more thing... I saw this video on facebook today and I'm sure you've seen it... in case you haven't..
    http://www.facebook.com/#!/photo.php?v=10150373441113934
    Talk about community!

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  8. To Julia

    Following on to what Princeton Posse said --

    Yeah, and you also have a few internet "friends" here in the US, too!

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  9. "Bet your bottom dollar... there'll be sun!"

    Looking forward to your across-the-pond posts. Godspeed you two!

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  10. Have a great trip! Looking forward to the posts.....conditioning works best when you don't know when there'll be a new one!

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  11. Julia, I was so pleased to see your comment here. When you didn't comment on the Dear Julia post, I was worried that I'd somehow offended you. So it was with great relief that you responded. That post has been the subject of several requests for reprinting, you sparked something much bigger than a blog discussion with your question. I'm guessing that one bad experience will have good ripple effects for others. Thanks for coming back and commenting to let me know all is well. You can see from other comments that you have a fan base here yourself!!

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  12. There is a new global accessibility map being created. Perhaps you can add info to it ;-))

    http://www.rickhansen.com/en-ca/home/globalaccessibilitymap.aspx

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