We have a winner! “Stevie” was the first one to correctly guess all the purchases:

• Julian bought the millionaire caramel slice and the biscuit men, totally blowing the budget in the process;
• Gerrod came home with the Ben and Jerry’s ice-cream, and the Mars Duo bar, smack on £2.50;
• Kristy is the jelly crystal and peanuts lover, and surprisingly was under budget (those peanuts were cheap!); and
• Shelley purchased the cheats guide to brownies and the caramel wafers, and also came in bang on £2.50!

Thanks to everyone who had a stab at it! Had it not been for the credit crunch I would have happily sent you all a prize, but tough times call for tough measures. So Generous Steve (we know who you really are), keep an eye on the post-box, something will soon be coming that will hopefully fulfil all your prize wishing goodness.

We had to go shopping for groceries yesterday. Not content to have an ordinary shopping trip (who ever is?), I set the house a challange! The rules were pretty simple – everyone had to buy something for at least £2.00, but no more than £2.50. And, it had to be something mysterious – no influencing other people’s choices!

So, here’s what we came up with:

But the question is – who bought what? In fact – it’s a competition! The first person who correctly names, (a) which person bought which item, and (b) who went over-budget (> £2.50), who went under-budget (< £2.00), and who spent exactly the £2.50 (two of us), will win a prize!

To help out, here’s a description of what the items were, clockwise from the top-left:

• Millionaire caramel slice, and cinnamon and chocolate men
• Raspberry jelly crystals, and a giant jar of salted peanuts
• Betty Crocker Chocolate Fudge brownie mix, and a four pack of caramel wafer biscuits
• Ben & Jerry’s Cookie Dough ice cream, and a Mars Duo bar

Submit your entries by leaving a comment!

Just when you think you’ve seen it all (not that I really think that). I’ve discovered a Thanksgiving treat that I have never heard of before… what would you guess that a product called Turducken is?

Don’t ruin the fun by looking it up – have a guess! The answer will follow shortly.

Turducken aint your average thanksgiving turkey.No siree.

This baby is actually a boned all-natural turkey stuffed with a boned free-range duck, which is stuffed with a boned antibiotic-free chicken, and padded with cranberry stuffing.

But the question is: how do they get the turkey to eat the duck?

Thanks to everyone who had a guess in our competition! The most entertaining thing was the reasoning and explanations – we loved that Dad (in true Dad fashion) had a formula to work out how much was in there (and he was pretty close!). Also loved Jason’s reasoning that “there must be at least $15 in there to make it worthwhile”, and Westy’s justification that “you should be able to buy at least 3-4 cupcakes”! (Westy: Cupcakes are only $1.75 each!)

But in the end, it was a late vote from Tim that came the closest, at $25.46. So congratulations Tim – your prize will be in the mail shortly! (As soon as you e-mail your address to me .

For those of you who are into that sort of thing, here’s the statistics from the competition – interesting that the average wasn’t even half of the value of the bag!

• Number of guesses: 19
• Lowest guesses: $4.21
• Highest guesses: $32
• Average guess: $13.10

Kristy and I headed to our “local” Coinstar on Sunday, to cash in all of the stupid small change (get rid of the penny already!) that we’ve been collecting for the past goodness-knows-how-long. I say “local” because our closest one is on 8th Avenue, which is about 20 minutes walk. Anyway – Kristy came up with the brilliant idea of making a competition out of it; so, here goes!

How much money do you think is in this bag? Note that the bag is mainly pennies (1c), nickels (5c) and dimes (10c); we save our quarters for the washing machines. Oh, and there was one rogue $1 coin in there as well (the gold one, if you can spot it).

The winner will be the person who guesses the closest value, without going over. Oh, and you only get 1 guess! To enter, send me an e-mail or post a comment with your guess.

Entries close at 8AM EST, August 28th 2006 (that’s this Monday). ‘ave a go ya mug!

Many thanks to everyone who entered our photo competition, and also a big thanks to those that took the time to vote. It was a very close competition, with 5 photos proving especially popular with the voting public.

And, much as I’d like to give everyone a prize, the budget just doesn’t stretch that far – so congratulations to Brendan and Michelle for their winning entry, The Australian Fireplace.

Brendan and Michelle – please send us your postal address and we’ll post you out your prize!

Thanks again to everyone that entered the Christmas Photo Competition for 2005. We’ve compiled all the entries, so now it’s time for you to vote!

Voting is open until 16th January, 2006. So don’t delay!

VOTE NOW

As Racey so kindly pointed out, nothing further has been mentioned of the Christmas Photo competition. This is because we don’t have enough entries yet! I’ve decided there are a few possible reasons for this:

• Heaps of people are on holidays at the moment, hence not reading blogs, hence not entering competitions on blogs;
• Most people took their best Christmas photos on Christmas day, but didn’t have time to submit them;
• We’ve earned a reputation for distributing horrible prizes;
• Far fewer people have a digital camera than I had initally estimated;
• Nobody loves us since we moved to New York.

To counter the first two points, we’ve decided to extend the submission deadline until the 4th of January – that’s next Wednesday. To counter the third point, let me assure you that we’re giving out a great prize (well we think so, at least!).

As for point number four, well I guess there’s not much I can do about that, except recommend that if you don’t have a digital camera, do yourself a favour and go and get one! I’d highly recommend the Canon PowerShot SDxx0 range in compact cameras, or the Canon EOS range of digital SLR cameras.

Not much I can do about the last point, but I sure hope that’s not the problem!

You read it right folks, it’s competition time again! This year we’re hosing a “Christmas Photo Competition”, and if its successful we’re going to make it an annual event.

Fancy yourself as rather the happy snapper? Think you can take a decent photo of something on theme? Do you like puppies? If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, then you need to enter! Basically we want you to send us a photo or two which best describes “Christmas” for you. It can be anything at all – wide-eyed kids at Toys’R'Us, a snow covered Christmas tree, your dog wearing a santa hat, etc – whatever you want, but it has to be at least vaguely Christmas related.

Entries must be recieved by midday on Christmas Day, EST (that’s “New York” time). Voting will be open for a week, and the winner will be announced on New Year’s Day, 2006.

Make sure you check out all of the rules below before entering. Happy snapping!

Continue reading →

Well, voting for the art competition has been finalised – so of course thanks to everyone who voted – it was very close! And everyone is a winner… but to put it more accurately, Katie is the winner with her entry “Happy Sheep with Big Teeth”. Congratulations Katie! Here’s the final scores:

And for all you curious folk out there, here’s the artists behind the other images:

• A day at the beach – Bender
• Beachside Stripes – Louisa
• Le Sticks – Wayne
• Revolutionary – Bailey
• Rock Inferno – burger
• Warm Colours – Sarah
• Workplace M&M Binge – Jazmine

Thanks again for all the entries and votes, everyone. Katie – please e-mail us your address, and a prize will be in the post soon!