400th Posting - Madonna and Child Giveaway Winner - She Dreams Big!

And the winner is.......

Connie from She Dreams Big!

Thank you for the overwhelming response to my give away in celebration of my 400th Blog.  I am already working on my giveaway to celebrate the BIG 500 coming up later this year.

Your praise, encouragement and well wishes are so welcome - it has been my deepest pleasure to create this reliquary and then send it off to a new home.  I like to think that this little piece of me will be around for hundreds of years....and that this reliqary will bring pleasure, hope, strength and courage to whoever holds it in their hands and gazes inside to see the Holy Mother and Child within.  That just makes me happy thinking about it - and isn't that what art is all about....creating something soulful and then sharing it with the world.

Visit Connie
She Dreams Big - a blog filled with arty inspiration.

Now I want to share a little bit of my world with you from the weekend.....

We had 12 inches of snow at the farm over the weekend!  The little cowbirds were flocking to the feeder for seed and didn't mind being photographed in the process.  The bird on the railing is a woodpecker that visits the feeder each day.  He wasn't thrilled to see the cowbirds invade his feeder - poor little guy.

The daffodils were rescued from the garden before the snow covered them and they brought sunshines into the kitchen for the weekend and the fragrance is one of my favorites.

We were having a barn cleaning party at the farm over the weekend - well it wasn't much of a party with the 12" of snow to plow through as we hauled away junk from the barn.  We purchased the farm two years ago and have been working on it ever since.  We replaced the roof this year and now the next phase was removing all the "junk" left from the four previous owners...what a mess!  We still have one horse stall filled with metal that will have to be hauled away in a few weeks.

We still haven't decided what we will do with the huge groundhog that has taken up residence in one of the horse stalls - underground of course.  As the barn improvements continue I think he will probably move his den to a more quiet location.  I imagine him as being a grumpy sort of fellow, who gets all huffy when we visit and mess around "his" barn disturbing his otherwise peaceful existence.  I have seen him when we drive up to the house and he is the largest groundhog I have seen.  He stands on his back legs - prairie dog style and then scampers under the barn doors and then his head pops back out from underneath the door one last time to see if we are still there and then he disappears into his den.

My sweet sis in law, Laurie and her sweet husband, Bobby came down to lend a hand and what a mess it was...everyone was filthy by the time the last load left the barn.  We joked that Bobby and Laurie would probably never come back again...which is really not far from the truth.  We try to offset the hard manual labor with good eats.  We do feed our guests and farm hands well - we had biscuits and gravy for breakfast and a grilled steak dinner... everyone seemed to have a good appetite after all that hard work and fresh country air.  We were all rosy cheeked and happy sitting in front of the fireplace at the end of the day swapping barn stories from the day and marvelling at the heavy snow fall on the first day of Spring!

To me there's nothing better than working outside in the fresh country air and the feeling of calm bliss at the end of the day as you sit in front of a blazing fire with a warm cup of coffee in your hands....heaven....

What's your personal "heaven" like?