Drumroll, please!

So, I know that I promised to post the winner of the give-away yesterday, but I do have a perfectly reasonable excuse; we had a power outage over night - again...
Apparently Kentucky was hit pretty hard by, what I would deem, a short-lived storm. We lost power about 10 yesterday night and it got back on about 11 this morning. That is not too bad. I remember one ice-storm a a few years back when we were without electricity for 11 days. Luckily, we had learned our lesson the hard way the time before that one, so we had already invested in a generator.

Well, before the power went out, we had a give-away draw at the house. I gathered up the notes from all participants, put a pressure on one of the birds to contribute to the blog work, and we got a winner.
We had 31 participants, even though I had 33 comments. My Littlest Sis pointed out that she would stay this one out so that the drawing wouldn't look too biased. Then she left a second comment telling me that her comment pass word code was fulamin, which translates to "ugly-face". LOL
Here are the comments, ready to go:

Rusty feels the pressure - he looks slightly nervous:

Plummeting in for the catch and ta-daah:

Congratulations to Sarah from Craftymoo!!!!

Sarah, please e-mail me your address and I'll send off the goodies to you this week!
To all of you, thanks so much for playing! I hope that you had as much fun as I did! I don't recall if I ever posted where to find the pattern wallet, but here are the two Etsy -stores I found them in; the bird-wallet is from the Slipped Stitch Studios and the mermaid-wallet (smaller) was found at Mad Bird.

Other than that, we are taking it easy. We decided to get up early and happened to start working in the front yard. It was easy; we got to bed pretty early thanks to the darkness, even though I managed to read a couple of chapters in the light of DH's work flash-light.
I did also get a chance to say hi and thanks to the people cutting down all the fallen tress from yesterday's storm and to the Kentucky Utilities people who got us our A/C back. The former crew did not speak English, so we did the nod-wave-and smile routine. The latter group seemed glad that I wasn't yelling at them, since apparently one of our neighbors had cursed them out in the middle of the night... (note to self - not a great idea, if you want help quickly next time you are in trouble...). Poor guys, they had been up all nigh working to get 30,000 households connected back in town and they told me that when everything had been resolved here, they were headed for Louisville, where 120,000 households were out of electricity. They had been driving and working hard; they come from a couple of towns east of us. Thanks guys!

So, this is what our front-yard looked like earlier today:

A lot of neighbors passed by and seemed very concerned. I finally figured out that most of them probably thought that this was caused by the storm. Little do they know that this is what happens when you give DH free hands with some clippers, a saw, and a ladder...

I gave one of our hanging Japanese cherry trees a serious bob (it used to look like Cousin It). Note how "my branches" magically disappeared. I believe that DH still believes in the clean-up fairy...

Hard work is really tiresome, especially if you are a tiny, still nameless, bunny:

I like Jo's suggestion to name the bunny after one of the characters in the book that I am currently reading. I will think about that. I am currently on a Marathon reading mission, reading all Terry Pratchett's disc-world books. One of the main characters in the book I am currently reading is Death, but I don't think that I'll pick that name...
The latest named baby-parrot was named Nibbler after the pet/alien in Futurama:

The name was picked both because it is, in my humble opinion, a super-cute name, but also because it fits very well. This is DH getting nibbled to death by tiny parrots:

Got your ear!

One last note, if you have time for a bit of more browsing today, please stop by and say hi to Beauty Bonnet of Beauty Bonnet's Stitch who is a brand new stitch-blogger. I know that she'll be thrilled to have you visit!

Take care, enjoy your Sunday and Happy Stitching,