Phew and that’s a wrap on Launch Week! I want to thank everyone who has liked, commented and shared my page and posts. And especially to everyone who has shown me love, support and compassion this last week. My Facebook page has 264 likes, Twitter 18 followers and Instagram (which is proving more difficult to get my head around, please bear with me!) 45 followers. My actual website has had 1,226 unique visitors, with 1,030 visits and 2,489 page views, but again I’m still getting my head around what all that means and how to increase flow through my Facebook page and website! These numbers pretty much blow my mind though... Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! ♥️

While I am thanking people, I do want to mention my friend Sue; without her help, support, drive and tenacious desire to learn the inner workings of SquareSpace’s back-end we would not be here today!!!

It was always going to be a tough week to go live, I had wanted to go live for my 50th, but Covid and the move to living my working days and social life online meant I wasn’t able to get myself ready for an early June launch. But 50 days later it felt very much ‘now or never’; so, 2 days after moving out of our house, whilst staying in a hotel in Albany with very temperamental WiFi seemed the perfect time! 

It is worth mentioning our hotel a moment because several people gave it a bad rep before we had even arrived, which caused a little unnecessary stress; I am pleased to say it has been fine, basic but absolutely what I was expecting for the price I paid. And the staff are amongst the nicest, most accommodating and helpful I have ever encountered in a hotel! Sure, the area is poor, sure the hotel needs upgrade and absolutely sure our shower leaves an awful lot to be desired; but it feels safe, has all we need in the room and there’s free grab and go breakfast! 

I’m sure you are all keen to know what moving forward beyond launch week will look like. I obviously won’t be able to keep up this week’s pace of posts... launch week has been focused on giving a taster from each of the 4 areas I’m focusing on, the plan now is to move to posting once a week on a Wednesday... which ironically, almost like it was planned, means tomorrow starts the normal schedule. There will obviously be times when I post more often, when something unplanned needs saying there and then, for instance I’m sure I’ll have something to say shortly about the back to school debate; always hard to form an opinion when caught between a rock and a hard place though and I am eagerly watching local developments…

As for you, ‘what can we do to keep supporting you and your cute red booted friend?’ I hear you say. Well, I am so glad you asked; I’d love you to all keep interacting with my social media pages and with the actual website, thank you to those who have realized you can comment below the blog post, if you haven’t realized yet go take a look! And if you haven’t already, please go like or follow my social media pages. I’d love it even more if you could share my website or Facebook page and encourage others to follow me with some witty intro. Huge, huge thanks to everyone who has already done that, through your shares I have 43 Facebook followers who are your friends, not mine! And I love and am hugely humbled that between us we are building a community!