DEVASTATION

Good Friday was not so good for my family. We had to go check out the damage that a fire caused at my dad's farm the night before......he is devastated!

Although he didn't live on the farm, my grandparents house was there & the barn that my grandpa had built was there. They are both now gone. Totally gutted!! Nothing salvageable.

The good news is that all of the cattle are safe!! A neighbor was able to get them to a different pasture. The water pump was burned so my dad will have to find another water source for them ASAP. The gates, corrals, cattle chute were all saved!! Another good piece of news! There is one line of fencing that will need to be replaced, but my dad had planned on doing that anyway. So all in all, God was good! No one was hurt!! But the pain of seeing my grandparents hard work in ashes will stay with us for a long time!

Here is my Dad, my son, Jeremy, my brother-in-law, Gid, & my cousin, Tyler making sure the cattle had something to eat.

It was so weird! The cab of the tractor was totally destroyed, but the John Deere green paint wasn't touched!

They are looking for hot spots. There were a few that they had to put out.

My son, Jeremy, sitting on the steps of the house. I have a picture of him & his brother & cousin sitting on this porch when they were little.

This is a miracle!! My grandpa's faithful companion, Sam (a beautiful German Shepard) is buried under this stand of trees. If you'll look closely, it was not touched!! There is a ring around the trees where the fire stopped!

We are all sad for the loss of those possessions, but we are also thankful that God spared so much!

I am.....

I am a consultant with a scrapbooking company called Close To My Heart. I have never really been into scrapbooking, but I LOVE to create things with paper! I have so much paper & I feel RICH when I look at it all! I make cards, collages,.....whatever I can think of.

Anyway, Close To My Heart (CTMH) has a "Constant Campaign" each month & for April, they have a new kit that I got to try out. I kinda like it! Here is my version of their kit. I was trying for "artsy" feel......hmmmmm.

Here are the individual pages. I found the most amazing photo place online. It's called Picnik.com. You can do some fabulous things with your photos!!

I hope you have a wonderful, blessed day, my friends!!

Pages - Things I Love

This page means a lot to me. It expresses the most important things in life to me. I took pieces of material & sort of "quilted" them together with a rustic style stitch. The color is not very good, but all of the material pieces are green or have have green in them. I've also added some beads & other embellishments to the material pieces.





The back of the "quilt" says "to strive for perfection is idiotic. Who wants to be perfect?" Some people might say they want to be perfect. But in my eyes, only God is perfect. And that's the way it should be.

Pages & a little WW

This is my Poppy Page. It is in honor of my artist friend, Linda. She adores poppies & Celia Thaxter had poppies all in her garden! The green cloth that I used was Linda's mother's. I've cross-stitched for many years & I thought this would be perfect for one of my pages.

This is the back of the Poppy Page. It says "sunshine", "flowers", "fresh", & "green". This really means a lot to me since I worked for Linda as a floral designer for 6 years. Working with fresh flowers every day was such a pleasure, but hard on the feet! I learned so much from her! She is such an amazing person!

This is a close-up of the front of the page. The cut-outs of the poppies were actually a photo I took at Celia's garden when I visited Star Island in 2005.

As a side note, as of Monday night, I've lost 26 lbs.!!!! I am so excited!!! I've already talked to my WW leader & told her that when I meet goal, I want to become a leader! I will meet goal!

Sandy, DQ & the cemetary

What a day! We had to take Sandy, our precious doggy, to the vet this morning. She has a lump in her groin area. They stuck a needle in it & drew some cells. They will send those off to Washington to be tested to see if it's cancerous. I covet your prayers! I can't stand the thought of something bad happening to this precious little soul.

As a treat, we then took Sandy to the next town & went to have lunch at Dairy Queen!! She so loves to go bye-bye! We sat out in the truck & had hamburgers & french fries! (yes, I stayed up with my points. Doing great!)

Then on the way home, we stopped by the cemetary where my mother & grandparents are buried. It's been a while since I've been there, but it was a lovely day to stop. There were some iris plants in bloom & the birds were singing. I sure miss my mommy! It was pretty neat, though. My brother's new brother-in-law has been researching our family history. I found a couple of my family's graves while I was there. Cemetaries are not so scary. A lot of history & love buried there.

It's been a good day, all in all. Hopefully, we'll know about Sandy next week.

Pages 3 & RAIN!

Good morning, friends!!!! I am sitting in my computer room/Christmas tree room/just look outside at the birds room!!!! It has been raining for the last 4 days & I LOVE IT!!!! Everything is all wet & shiny & ready for the sun to come out so it can pop out of the ground! Our potatoes & radishes are loving this!

Here is the 3rd installment of Pages. The tags are copper-ish metal tags that I found at our local book store. They are "hanging" off of a twig I took out of our back yard. I kinda like it!

Pages 2

Well, here is the next page in the Pages journey. At the time I did my pages, I thought I only had a couple of months to work with. And knowing the calliber of my friends' artwork, I was in a panic to do something as equally AWESOME. I don't consider my work awesome by any means, but as I started doing each one, I felt more comfortable in that I was doing what made me happy & not what they would think of it. Some of these pages are not as WOW as I'd like them, but I'm pleased with the end results.

Isn't that what it's all about?

Close-up Self Image page.

Back view of Self Image page. It says, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder".