Crazy Aunt Purl

May 14, 2008

Wednesday Winner!

Congrats to Lucia in Boston -- you know I believe Lucia has been reading this here website since 2004 and never won a single thing and I am so happy to say, YOU WON! Also, go buy a lotto ticket tonight, lady. You're on a winning streak :)

ALSO -- did ya'll know Lucia has FREE knitting patterns on the innernets? Go see!

That is about all I can write today because OH MY GOD. Work is hard. Apparently I can not just sit here and daydream about Zappos all day while multitasking with coffee-drinking, I have to get proverbial butt in non-metaphorical high gear. Sad, I tell you what.

But yay Lucia! Also, new winner tomorrow! Read about the sweepstakes if you haven't already, and enter to win right here.

If you have already entered your name is still good to go for the next drawing. Except Suzi, who already won. And Lucia. And Zappos.

Posted by laurie at 11:38 AM | Comments (23)

May 13, 2008

Nature has a sense of humor.

Is zucchini a weed? In the past I have only had this level of gardening success with weeds -- I have grown weeds that would make you cry with joy (or pain.) But I have never successfully grown many useful things -- case in point: all of my watermelon plants have died. AGAIN.

You may be wondering how they could die AGAIN, but this is just another year in the long sad cycle of me and dead watermelon seedlings. I try every year and still they die. Every year.

Look how dead they are, there is not even a sign that something green used to be planted here:

Obviously... I am growing dirt.

So I had two big empty patches of dirt where the watermelon plants were supposed to be happily growing and waiting for their squareness to begin. But no luck. I decided to go out back to the Back 40 and look at my raised bed garden to see how the one lone zucchini outrider -- that I did not plant -- and my two pumpkin plants were faring. I expected the zuke to be alive and the pumpkins to be dead.

The good news: The pumpkin vines are still hanging on! The bad news: There are five more seedlings just sprouting from the barren ground and they are suspiciously zucchini-like. One can safely assume that nature thinks this is hilariously funny and wants me to be afraid of my backyard.

Just to recap:

1) Sometime last fall the gardeners got tired of looking at the scary huge-ass zucchini plants that were taking over the back backyard and while I was away they cleaned the whole thing out including about two inches of my organic dirt.

2) There was nothing in the raised bed garden all winter.

3) Just dirt and probably bug poop.

4) Then one day I noticed a green thing growing in there. It was a zucchini plant.

5) I did not plant this zucchini. I did not plant any zucchini seeds. I did not water, fertilize or even look at the back backyard.

6) Now there are MORE mystery seedings!! Popping up from the dustbowl of barrenness and despair!!

I am a little afraid, because I have never in my life had wild zucchini sprouting up here and there, it is not normal for plantlike things to flourish in my presence. I have already lost a thyme plant and a whole marjoram that was eaten in one night by a fat neon green worm. Later I thought it was kind of sad that I don't live in a worm-eating culture because he was probably really tasty, having been seasoned from the inside out with pure organic marjoram.

ANYWAY, this coming weekend I will move the two zucchini seedlings (or at least I suspect that is what they are, they could be body-snatching plants WHO KNOWS, time will tell) into the watermelon patch on the sunny side of the yard and another seedling over to the shadier side of the yard. What I am saying here is that I am going to have a houseful of zucchini again, I have just resigned myself to the idea that I will have to learn how to cook. Or better yet, I should learn how to make biodiesel out of squash and then learn how to single-handedly convert my Jeep to run off zukediesel insted of gas and then I could have a neverending zuke-based economy!!! Or, you know, I could learn to cook.

OR, maybe they make good wine!! That would be a self-sustaining economy right there. Zucchini wine!!!

Posted by laurie at 11:14 AM | Comments (93)

Tuesday winner!

Congratulations to Suzi in Fullerton, your package is in the mail ... tomorrow because I totally forgot to bring a book in today. I need an assistant! Named Julio, who is 18 and very tan....

New winner tomorrow! Read about the sweepstakes if you haven't already, and enter to win right here.

If you have already entered your name is still good to go for the next drawing. Except Suzi, who already won. And Julio.

Posted by laurie at 10:53 AM | Comments (17)

May 12, 2008

Put that in your bag and smoke it!

The cool people at Envirosax contacted me a few weeks ago (just after I extolled their mighty nylon virtues right here in a fit of earth-friendly happiness) and they offered to provide me with five sets of rockstar Envirosax to give away to my readers. Each set contains five bags from the Green Grocer collection:

And it was smart of them to offer up the Green Grocer bags, they're colorful but not printed with a pattern so that if you aren't a floral fan or mad about mod, you're still winning a great bag. The only nit is that the handy carrying cases for the set are backordered so the winners of this here sweepstakes will be carrycase-less. But still, winners will be five Envirosax richer!

So go over and enter the give-away today at crazyauntpurl.com/sweepstakes. There will be five winners and each winner will get a set of five cool Envirosax plus a signed copy of my book just because. The book has nothing to do with Envirosax but I like to give, and I only have three cats so ... books it is!

The rules are pretty simple:
• You get one entry per email address (the duplicates will be filtered out.)

• Any person from anywhere on planet earth is eligible to win.

• I will draw one winner at random starting tomorrow morning and do so for five days (math challenged? that means the final winner will be announced on Saturday morning.)

• All email entries from any day of the week are eligible for each drawing, meaning that if you enter today you will be eligible for all five drawings!

• As usual, I never re-purpose, re-sell or re-distribute your email address. I have enough issues with spam, I certainly wouldn't spam you!

So that's the big Monday goings on here at Chez Bagpipes, and each day this week I will draw a new winner's name from the pile and announce it here in between the normal goings on which tomorrow involve zucchini. Or at least I think they're zucchini. God only knows what is happening in my yard.

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Go enter to win! >>>

Posted by laurie at 08:43 AM | Comments (80)