Hello people! It has been a little while hey. My last personal blog was my reflective stroll/roll in the park around New Years. I have made a few passing mentions of being happy, excited and planning lots for 2011. This was not meant to be so teasing, but truly my thoughts in that moment. When I looked back to the year before, I have implemented some positive changes. While my health and energy will always be precarious in the winter, I am stressing less, balancing social time better, working from home one day per week and if my car breaks I have a contingency to get to work – ‘access to work’ funded taxis. So in being able to enjoy my job, worry less, have some fun and generally relish waking up once again, my day to day stuff is nicer 🙂

In terms of plans, I refer to my blog and general disability related work. Having learnt lots about my blogs purpose, worked with Hackney council on Personalisation and written a toolkit/training programme on e-campaigning for Disability Lib, I thought what next. I am all too aware of the current economic and political climate seriously affecting disabled people. I have a passion to balance raising awareness of these issues, speak out against them (see my next post on Friday for the 1 month before heartbreak campaign) and try to instil positivity that things can still be ok. I am an eternal optimist!

My excitement is not of the horrific policy decisions being made, obviously, but that I can be a part of the next generation to safeguard disabled people’s rights, before improving them. You may have noticed a change in my blogs. I am keen to make them less about me, per se, and more general. However I think my personal experience is still important to bring the issues to life. I plan to give more facts and structure to posts. An example was the depth I went into for San Francisco, Vegas and LA. I hope some of you found my approaches to travel useful. Therefore with more general disability blogs, my random happenings, guest blogs and who knows what else – www.martynsibley.com and other blogs I write will be a valuable resource to disabled people, their networks and hopefully to non-disabled people generally. Lets change the landscape totally!

I am enjoying writing and sharing important information. By the end of the year I plan to have a range of experiential online disability resources. I am also looking at another Sunnier Days type event, but with learnings from the one last May. I hope they will inform, inspire and ultimately bring about change. Would love to hear any thoughts you have on my ideas and topic areas.

So beyond enjoying today, planning for tomorrow and running the blog, my personal news is minimal. Christmas and New Year were great just chilling. I have had a cold for 2 weeks but the cough assist machine has kept it off my chest.  So no antibiotics and no days off, I am giving myself a certificate. Once the weather warms up I hope to meet a few friends for a drink and have a couple of nice weekends coming too.

Hope you are all ok in the long January slog until pay day/brighter days. Feel free to comment on anything here, email [email protected] and tweet me @martynsibley. Best wishes and do follow http://thebrokenofbritain.blogspot.com/ from Friday. It is a vital campaign!