The TheMHS (The Mental Health Services – a national annual conference in Australia) Book of Proceedings is now published! Cary and myself wrote a paper for this after presenting at the conference in 2011. We only found out about the opportunity to write a paper about four days before it was due, so it was a pretty frantic effort. Cary is an early morning sort of person and I’m an late night sort of person so we worked on it in shifts over a weekend and submitted all 3,000 words of it by 5pm the day it was due… the next morning I got up and anguished over all the errors we hadn’t polished out yet. It’s called Grounding as management of dissociative experiences.

Nevertheless, it was published, and in the Recommended Reading section too! You can read the contents page here. Unfortunately the publication costs $50 to purchase, but as it’s my first published paper I think I’ll try to scrape it together from somewhere and put it on my shelf. Charlie continues to improve ear-wise, although his digestive health is at an all time low – probably due to the high doses of antibiotics he’s on. Hopefully the vet checkup this Thursday will give him a clean bill of health and I can take him off them and the twice daily ear cleans and the twice weekly medicated baths… all of which would give me a little more money to spend on frivolities like the Book of Proceedings. Wouldn’t it be nice if you got a free copy as an author of the paper?

In other exciting news, I am in the complicated process of downloading/purchasing the Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 with In Design – this is the software I will learn to use so I can lay out my booklets for printing. It’s supposed to be a fairly simple process, download the download manager, that sorts out downloading the trial version of the software you want to test. Then just pay for the set you want which activates the trial already loaded onto your computer. A friend has kindly donated the cost for the student version which is fortunately much cheaper than the full price adobe asks, but still too much for my budget to manage.

Yes, well, four days of wrestling with the adobe download manager later, following the instructions in the many online forums full of deeply frustrated people, uninstalling and reinstalling the stupid thing and still not getting anywhere… someone else has downloaded it for me onto their machine, and now we are going to try and transfer it across to mine and see if that works. Pretty please! It’s hard to be patient about this kind of thing, but my frustration is tempered by the knowledge that I really don’t have time to learn how to use it this week anyway. But soon! soon…