After breakfast this morning, I grabbed my vacuum cleaner to get on with the first thing I wanted to accomplish... to clean the floor and reorganize the furniture on my front porch. I gingerly worked around bees going in and out of a beehive that we should have removed before it grew so large. It is neatly tucked next to a rafter underneath the tin roof. They have worked so hard. We're going to try to remove it intact and relocate the colony.
Next, I dug up an existing flower garden directly in front of the porch. It had been taken over with quack grass and Creeping Charlie... both very nasty invasive weeds. I had attempted to pull them out, but realized that a harsher tactic was needed and it was time for an updated look anyway. I left a patch of perennials that had, for the most part, been able to fend off the invading weeds. In the spring, I will plant the area in annuals.
A brief downpour halted my progress, so I slipped inside to check the status of a free laptop computer giveaway that I entered on September 4th via a cooking site I stumbled upon called thepioneerwoman.com and her spinoff tastykitchen.com, which is a site where you can share and search for endless recipes. The site's creator presented her idea to Windows and a collaboration formed to get all the technical stuff in place to make it happen. Additionally, Windows generously donated a Dell laptop computer to be given away in a one-day drawing. All that was required to enter the drawing was to share a recipe that I had tried from any site/blog on the Internet. That was easy so, at 4:42 p.m. on Friday, I submitted my entry... number 12,153 in a one-day drawing! Five minutes later at 4:47 p.m. the number of entries had increased to 12,197 and the drawing didn't close until midnight! And the winner is... entry #1648 Elisabeth! Congrats!! What an amazing prize!!!