It’s been a rather eventful week.

Monday, Labor Day, I woke up with a sore throat, scratchy eyes and a pounding headache. My husband teased me that I had the H1N1 disease. I mumbled something derogatory at him and crawled back into bed. I proceeded to sleep for the next 6 hours. I must have needed it.

Whatever it was, i wasn’t a flu or a cold. I am convinced it is allergies since it never got any worse. Sadly, it hasn’t gotten any better either. I spent the whole week in varying states of discomfort. Fall has arrived for me, even if it’s still a few weeks away on the calendar.

Tuesday was very expensive, but a great deal of fun.

It started out with me heading off to my first physical therapy session. I was at the appointment for nearly two hours. I am pretty weak according to the therapist, however, she says that given the extent of my injury and the amount of time I was laid up, I am making a remarkable recovery. The only muscle in my body that was strong enough to resist her push tests was my left side thigh. All my other muscles are pathetic. My words, not hers.

She gave me a half dozen different exercises to strengthen my core muscle groups, especially the back and shoulder muscles that were cut to repair my injury. I am also to see her once a week until someone decides that I should stop. Hopefully, it will be the therapist before the insurance company! She said I have a great attitude and she’d be surprised if I need to see her for more the 6-8 weeks. That sounds fine to me.

The first day of exercises left me with ow in my shoulders. I have kept at it though and the ow has gone away. Now I get to use the harder rubber strap, since the soft one is now easy to pull. The exercises aren’t really that hard and take only a few minutes, so I am able to do them quickly first thing in the morning. It feels good to be doing something I know will strengthen the injured area of my body. Yeah!

On the way to the appointment, I over shot the turn and passed the Tandy Leather Factory. It was fate! I went there directly after the appointment. (Stopped for a quick bite first, I was starved.) I bought mask weight leather. A whole skin! And 3 skins of purple suede leather that caught my eye. I plan to make pirate pants (and a matching vest with the scraps.) Credit cards are evil. But I had a ton of fun picking out the leather. So far I have made the shapes for 5 masks. I will paint them next week and post photos after they are good and dry.

After that I went to the yarn shop and snagged some ribbon yarn. Lucky for me, it was on sale. It still was more expensive than I liked, but it seems that ribbon yarn is now a past trend and only available in limited colors. Nor any longer to be had at the big box or bargain shops. I think these skeins will be the last I purchase. I started making more fairy crowns last night. I got 2 done before I ran out of energy and my wrists strated to ache from the tight twisting I do to produce them. (I reiterate credit cards are evil.)

My email was made of win this week. For the last few months, half of my communications have gone AWOL. Either they never arrived at their appointed recipients or they had arrived and the replies never found their way back home. It’s frustrating to never know if something I sent ever got to where it was supposed to or if it did, if someone thinks I am ignoring them by not replying to something they emailed to me. But I digress.

First off, I got the revised text for my next picture book. I start on character sketches and page thumbnails this weekend. I am so excited. The book is slated for release about a year from now and I will tell you more as soon as I get the go-ahead from my publisher!

Next, I heard back from the agent considering a picture book I wrote and plan to illustrate. She’s still considering it which I see as a good thing since she didn’t dismiss it out of hand as unworthy.

There are several more good news emails, but I have blathered on enough. Time to hop to work and come up with a wonderful main character for the upcoming book. Ta!

The Graphic Artists Guild joined several other visual arts rights holders’ trade groups and prominent individual photographers in filing objections to the $125 million class action settlement with Google Books for copyright infringement. The papers filed with the New York District Court last Wednesday seek to deny approval of the settlement, throw out an earlier complaint that excluded artists from settlement terms and request a new legal counsel and class representative be appointed to represent the interests of those filing the objections in the matter.

“After hearing the particulars of this settlement at the intellectual property conference where the agreement was announced,” Guild President John Schmelzer said, “I asked the Authors Guild’s attorney whose pocket the visual artists share would be coming out of — the writers’ and publishers’, or Google’s, and which of the parties would we have to sue to get that share. The answer appears to be that there was no consideration given to the visual components of the copied material in the settlement. All parties should be ashamed.”

The settlement provides $45 million for the establishment of a Book Rights Registry that will collect and pay revenues for the use of work of those included in the agreement. Classes not named in the settlement, such as artists and photographers, would not be eligible for this compensation mechanism.

For more information and the full release, visit http://www.graphicartistsguild.org/theguild/advocacy/legal-alerts/.