Weekly Roundup and News Items.

Would you look at that - it's been a whole week since I last posted. A WEEK! It was the back to school/work week though so I've had to adjust back to a schedule. On Monday was my first day back at work. My older children had left for school at 8am and at 8.45 as I was leaving, Hubby was playing on the Wii with Small Son who wasn't due back to school till the following day. Or so I thought. As I was getting into my car I noticed a lot of cars parked at the end of my road with small children in uniforms getting out of them. You have never seen anyone move so fast.

"Quick! Hubby! Small Son has school. You get him dressed! I'll make his lunch."

There was, what amounted to, a mini-tornado in my house as my poor little son was de-jammied, uniformed, toothbrushed, hairbrushed, coated and shoed in the space of about five minutes. He ended up only being a couple of minutes late. I, on the other hand, arrived at my meeting 15 minutes late. Still I felt that it was an achievement and Small Son couldn't have been happier to be back. He adores his school.

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The weather's been unrecognizably arctic for the UK. Personally I've loved its crispness and clarity but even I have to admit that we could have picked a better week to run out of heating oil. Let's just say that sleeping involved wearing lots of fleecy layers. We looked like we were going out instead of going to bed. We realised just before New Year that we were running dangerously low and so have been doing our best to conserve what little we had. But we ran out before the delivery. Almost two weeks after we'd ordered it the oil turned up. We only had a day and a half without heat but man! it was c-c-c-c-c-cold.

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I've been percolating a plan over the week. I'm ruddy sick of my own inaction in the writing department so I've decided to take on Aerin's writing challenge. Check it out. It's designed to get you writing and keep you writing. You only need to do a 1000 words a month and you don't have to publish what you've written if you don't want to but you do have to post that you have met the challenge. Go to Aerin's she explains it all better than I do. Anyhoo to get the ball rolling she said that if you entered Jason's latest contest at Clarity of Night those 250 words could count as your whole January total. That's a 4 for 1 deal. And Jason's contests are great fun. So I've done that. Although this kind of writing is out of my comfort zone (I prefer to write children's/ YA stuff) I did give it a shot because it's good practice. Isn't it?

If you are up to a little challenge then do sign up. If a 1000 words sounds daunting then why not try out this site which the utterly wonderful Fairyhedgehog blogged about recently called onetwofiver. It's designed to get you past the block of being able to put word to paper. To start off all you have to do is write one word. Just one. Then two words. Then five. Then ten. Twenty. Fifty. One hundred. Two hundred. Then finally five hundred. Before you know it you've written 888 words which is practically your In Search of Giants Challenge. Then this website will email your writing to you as one document. I've tried it and it really is helpful.

Aerin is working on a blog for the challenge and it's looking pretty awesome. Oh and I nearly forgot to mention - there are PRIZES! Isn't Aerin just fab for doing that? Now scooch over and check it out and if you can, do join up because, quite frankly, I need the encouragement.