Geoff writes: today was a beautiful blue sky, flyable and skiable – but also the first day of our Supporting Deaf People (SDP) conference. Judith leads on this one, since it’s her field, whereas I lead on the e-learning conferences. This is the biggest SDP conference we have ever had, in terms of delegates – and the biggest conference of all types we have had in terms of postings, with the keynote session, about interpreting swearing and profanity, attracting a massive number of postings, around 275 so far. That’s a lot of words (and includes quite a few swear words too!). And it’s only 12 hours into a 48 hour theme.

Online conferencing is our main work (really, our only work now) – and in terms of online conferences where people pay a fee to attend (as opposed to free to register) we are probably the biggest in Europe and the US, certainly in the field of education. They are really interesting to do, but also very complex events to put together, and whilst the conferences themselves typically are only open for posting for four days, the event planning (and work) around that takes months. The big benefit for us is that the preparation work can, except in very rare cases where we have a meeting, be done at any time of day or night, and so leaves us free to do other things like fly, walk or ski if the weather is good.

The one thing we never seem to have enough time for is housework.

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