We wrote down all the names and put them in a bucket and pulled one out...
...and the winner is, Shelley from GiantsDanceFarm.
Not sure if she has a blog (would love to know the meaning behind your farm name, those always fascinate us).
Email your shipping info and we'll get the book out to you. Use the "EMAIL ME" button over on the sidebar.
And never fear faithful contest enterers (is that a word? ha), we'll do another one next week.
Do you know we got up to 90 degrees today? Now they say another front is coming, along with rain, and there is also a 40% chance of a tropical disturbance forming in the Southern Gulf of Mexico.
Never a dull weather moment around these parts, that's for sure.
Congratulations Shelley.
ReplyDeleteIt's been hot here too. It started raining last night and then finished up this morning. We needed this rain desperately. Right now it's cool and a little dry. This won't last though. It will get back into the high eighties or low nineties.
Congratulations Shelley on the win & enjoy your new cookbook.
ReplyDeleteCongrats to Shelley! Enjoy your cookbook.
ReplyDeleteYay! The front came through and it’s cooled down to 65 degrees and brought .7 inch of rain!
Sorry if this is a duplicate. I posted a comment from my phone while waiting for my hubby to finish a Dr's appt, but my phone has been funky since the most recent update. And I apologize for this being long, but what can I say. I'm verbose!
ReplyDeleteI'm so excited and grateful to have won the drawing! My husband and I are avid readers - like 250-300 books each every year. (anyone else here addicted to Goodreads.com?) We mostly borrow from the library, then if we like what we've read we try to find the book on sale somewhere - online, thrift stores, estate sales, auctions. Our home library is primarily reference books like cookbooks and gardening, sustainable living, crafting and such. We are converting the barn on our farm into our home, slowly but surely, and over half the upper story - picture the huge hayloft of a gambrel-roofed barn, over 20 feet tall at the peak - that's where our library will be.
As for "Giant's Dance Farm" bear with me, it's a longish explanation. It begins many years ago. I've dreamed of having a farm and my own horses literally all my life. I starting riding lessons when I was 10. I finally got my first horse, a Thoroughbred mare from the riding program I taught in, when I was 22. I boarded her at a small boarding facility where I was sort of adopted by the folks who owned the farm. I learned a ton there, not only expanding my horse care knowledge but how to grow, process, and put up hay. Over the next 16 years, I worked in IT as my career, but I also managed the farm where I boarded. I got another mare and bred a few foals. That second mare was from a famous line of racehorses sired by Northern Dancer. I registered all my foals with names which included references to Dance.
Fast forward a few years. Got a Clydesdale mare. Here's where the "giant" comes in. "Giant's Dance" is a common name for the standing stones in the UK and Europe - picture Stonehenge. Met my husband via an online group for folks who dream of someday writing and being published. One thing we have in common is a love of fantasy stories, dragons and such, especially the Arthurian legend. My husband grew up in the UK, has BEEN to many of the Giant's Dance sites.
So a few years after we bought our first farm, I had a serious reaction to a med I'd been taking for RA, became significantly disabled and as a result, lost my job. We were about to lose our farm because we couldn't make the mortgage without my income. My husband was 62 at this point so he retired, I applied for disability, we packed everything up, bought a MUCH larger farm (50 acres instead of 10) "up north" here in Michigan for a tiny fraction of what we were paying for our first farm, and despite only being able to pick away at getting the barn ready to live in while barely keeping the tiny house on the property from falling down around us, we're wonderfully happy. Three horses, various chickens, four big rescue dogs, gardens, fruit trees, trading the hay from our smallest hay field for beef from our neighbor. Beef that was fed OUR hay, raised organically as are our chickens. Our life is full and busy, as healthy as we can make it, and good.
No, we don't have a blog... YET... primarily because our satellite internet connection in the boonies is so... darn... slow... but I do have a Google photo album I need to update which I'd share if I can figure out how to do it privately. Anyone have any suggestions?
Congrats on reading this far!
Shelley
NE lower Michigan
Look at the palm of your right hand. That's lower Michigan. Now see where the tip of your index finger and you middle finger meet? That's where we live.