International womans day

IWD has never even been on my radar prior to this year. I didn't know there was one.

Normally, I don't like celebrating differences. Times, however, have changed, and so have I.

Today will be spent pitching a presentation to someone in Childrens Services to see if it's good enough to present to the Children and Young Families cross partnership panel. Then I'm meeting our GIS team to explain to them the pro's and cons of assorted web mapping solutions and to explain that I am officially giving them their bunny back. After that (lunch a distant hope) it's into a Sharepoint demo from ICT for 2 hours, following by meeting someone I've been chatting to for a while on Twitter and going for a coffee or two.

After that, I've got a IWD event pencilled in but I don't know a single thing about it.

Compared this to a year ago, sat in front of a PC, on a refuse truck depot, in a portacabin, the nearest geek 2 miles away, with no meetings, nothing to say and  nothing to share and, well, this ones for me to contemplate what getting off your ass does for ones self esteem and self belief.

But there have been some frankly, amazing people along the way who've helped. And a lot of them have been female, really quite a lot.

So, today, I'd like to celebrate the support, the care, the listening, the advice and the sheer patience of Shirley Ayres, Andrea Sturgess, Laura Howarth, Emer Coleman, Ann Kempster, Julie Wareing, Chris Doyle, Janet Davis, Karen Ramsey-Smith and actually, many many others. Many. 

I'm trying to be less sappy, but you see, at least 3 people on that list, I don't think they've even given a thought to the fact that they might be someone elses role model. That someone else looks up to them. So it seems to me, that's the point of IWD. To say thank you, to acknowledge, to pass on back some of the things you've been given and most of all to celebrate what we can achieve.

I have, quite frankly, met some utterly phenomenal women in the last year. Here ends the gushing.