What a week! Okay it’s been longer than a week since my first post, but let me tell you what was really going on behind the scenes!

First up I have been so overwhelmed by the support from fellow bloggers, old friends and new friends for my first week of posting. Tears have been shed! I am an artist, what can I say, and artists are a sensitive bunch who need to hear their work is touching someone, therefore I am more than thankful for those of you who like my work to have commented. It has kept me going…

…and going while I lay half conscious in bed for the entire lead up to Christmas, and the eve, and the day until yesterday – ridden with the horrible epidemic that has hit France. I won’t go into the gory details of the sickness (but you can read about this latest plague here), however I was determined to push through and deliver what I set out to for the first week albeit a little inconsistently.

I did not lose my sense of humour though, and during the heaving and head-in-a-steel-vice I would lay half asleep thinking about how I had stated in my very first handy hints post that ‘While everyone else around me is coughing and sneezing I am not.’. The stuff was bloody useless this week.

Another inner titter came in one of my comatoses when I realised I had just lectured a friend who had said she got back from a holiday with her husband to Paris and was horribly ill for the whole trip. I replied very seriously and told her that it is all too common to get sick when you have been working yourself so hard and not keeping a balance, and that the moment you go away your body relaxes and the toxins come out. I left her with something along the lines of ‘make sure you look after yourself’. Meanwhile I was juggling well more than my two hands worth and the balance of nature took hold of me.

So while I lay barely alive realising my ridiculousness, the mind image of my friend Jboo was circling around the mess like a ghost, her arms half cocked in the air with her now quoted line for when things get chaotic on set: “everybody, just caaaaaalm the #%*! down”. (wish i had an image of her for you)

I was over-ambitious for my first week I concur. There were posts I said I would write that I didn’t. But I never back out when I say I will produce something, so it is all coming in good time, and I am thankful for your patience with my little blog learning curves.

In case you missed some of the good stuff, what did we all get up to in the (blog)house this first week?

Plus I have just figured out bullet points.

And the spilt milk? On my travels I decided to take a jar of soymilk, as I love my black tea with soy. And even though I tried to keep it upright it slowly but surely spilt all through my handbag and by Christmas Eve the jar was empty and my handbag had hardened to a crusty milky piece of cardboard fabric. Over-ambitious indeed.