A winner, and some reminiscing

Thank you all for participating in the Valentine giveaway! I had a great time, and it was fun to hear from so many people in the comments. I just wish I knew how to write responses so they appear under specific comments!

I went ahead and plugged the number of comments into the random number generator and came up with the easy-to-count-backwards-to result of 83. (I figured if I got one, I'd disregard numbers that gave me deleted or duplicate posts.) So the winner is Heather Abounader! Heather, if you'll email me privately with your address, I'll send this guy out to you.

I was also going to share some photos. One of the comments yesterday was from "Dr B", probably better known to most of you as Kim Bjorgo (now Bjorgo-Thorne). She mentioned sharing biohazards for breakfast, so I thought I would share a photo I just happened to run across the day before she posted. I was looking for photos of Rosinante, my first custom glaze, because 2008 marks my tenth year making little shiny horses. I didn't find them, but I did find pictures from the second annual Carolina All-Mini Live Show held at my house that same year.



That's Kim there with my husband, Alan, holding our breakfast in - yes! - a biohazard bag. The show was still small and informal then, so it was held in our home. (We would move to the pretty Waterfront Hall the next year.) Since we had folks traveling from as far away as Florida, we decided to make it a combination show and pajama party. Kim had promised to bring fish so my husband could cook the lowcountry breakfast "grits-and-grunts" for everyone. The fish were part of a study Kim had just finished at Clemson University. She assured us that the fish she would be bringing were her control group. But she did bring them in that biohazard bag, which she claimed was "all that she could find" to put them in. I can say it's not the best way to get people enthused about eating fish for breakfast!

Here's another picture from that same show.



That's me looking rather skeptical standing beside Alli Willis. I'm not sure what was responding to with that expression (maybe someone said "palomino Arabians"!), but Alan swears it must have been him because he sees that look a lot. Poor guy. The baby Alli is holding is my oldest son, Brandon. Just barely visible in the foreground is Anthea Smith Peacock, and in the background is Gretchen Waldo.

I really need to pull out some of my archived photos and go through them and post a few. Then I can make other people feel old, too!