• 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.

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!

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?

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!

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!

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

VOTE NOW

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!

• Photos should be sent to: christmas2005 (at) gerrod.com, and must be received no later than 25 Dec 2005, 12:00:00 -05:00 GMT.
• Anyone can enter!
• You are allowed to enter up to 2 photos in the competition, but they must be ranked (i.e. first favourite, second favourite). This is in case we get a heap of entries, in which case only everyone’s first photo will be shown.
• You can re-submit entries, but please make it clear which photos you want to be displayed.
• Each photo must be given a title.
• You are also encouraged to give a short description of the image, especially if you think it needs some explaining.
• Each photo must be your own original work (or at least, you must own the creative rights to the image). Basically this means, no downloading something off the net and submitting it as your own!
• Photos must be at least 800×600 pixels (900×600 if you have an SLR or widescreen camera). There is no maximum size that the photo can be.
• The photo can be of anything you want, but we reserve the right not to show it if we feel it’s not on theme or may offend.
• Photoshopping is not allowed, unless its subtle enough that we can’t tell you’ve done it .

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!