Happy New Year! This is my favorite time of the year. As the song goes, “It’s the most wonderful time of the year!” The children all come home and we are a family once again, if only for a few days. The grandkids fill up the house and the cousins get reacquainted with each other. I try to take off a couple of weeks...and even stay away from the computer. It is a time for family!
I am writing this in late November, and we already have the tree up and the outside lights in place. My wife, Sue, is bringing out all the Christmas decorations, and it is “beginning to look a lot like Christmas” at our house. By now, you probably have already put away all the decorations and broken several of your resolutions. But we love the season so much that our decorations usually stay up till the end of January. I know the neighbors must think we are crazy!
This is also a time to be retrospective like a lot of the TV shows, rerunning the events of the past year. One of my favorite year-end tasks is to run the numbers and go over the final results. I like to share these results with Sue. Even though she no longer works at the office, she is still very interested in what happens.
As many of you know, my life has become very busy. It seems that I travel every week of the year, either to attend a meeting for the magazine or to speak to a group of dentists. I am not complaining because this is a dream job. I get to go to all of these meetings and I get paid for doing it. This is heaven for a continuing-education junkie like me.
Many times, I tend to lose touch with my friends, so after our annual review of the year-end figures, Sue and I sit back with a glass of wine and discuss what happened to us during the past year. There are many happy times to remember and some sad ones as well. Sue and I will be doing some strategic planning with our good friends, Bill and Colleen Fitzpatrick. Hopefully, we will be able to slow my schedule down.
I want to take this opportunity to thank you, the reader, for taking the time to pick DE® out of the huge stack of mail that you get every month, and then taking the time to read what Kevin Henry and I have selected out of the many articles that we receive and read every month. Please accept my heartfelt thanks for making DE the best-read magazine in the dental industry.
I hope that you are enjoying the new look of the magazine. One of the “Focus On” articles is about the accreditation process of the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry (AACD). I am excited that the AACD will be contributing articles for the coming year. In February, a new column on implants will begin appearing every other month, and in March, a new laser column will be added to the mix, also on a bimonthly basis.
As you do your planning for the New Year, don’t forget to include the great PennWell events, such as the “Professional Dental Assisting Conference” to be held May 10-12 in Indianapolis (www.professionaldentalassisting.com). For the hygienists, “RDH Under One Roof” will be held Aug. 2-4 in Washington, D.C., (www.rdhunderoneroof.com). The deadline to register your assistant for the DUX Dental Assisting Award of Excellence is the end of February (to register, go to www.dentaleconomics.com and click on the DUX logo).
I just returned from the Greater New York Dental Meeting, which is the largest dental meeting in the country. Sometimes, when you are dealing with so many people, customer service goes out the window. Not so with the New York meeting. Thanks to the great work by Dr. Robert Edwab and Dr. Leslie Seldin and all of their many committee people, this meeting had great CE, terrific special events, a spacious exhibit floor, and friendly people who really cared about how you were doing at their meeting. What a great time to visit New York City!
