When you’ve been in a battle, be it personal, professional or otherwise, you can win the battle but the battle will take its toll on you. Maybe that’s why I avoid confrontations at all costs. I have very low energy and too much negativity and conflict drains me. That’s what happened to me the last couple of weeks.

I must admit, there is a part of doing battle that can be exhilirating. When your adrenalin is pumping and you’re all psyched to fight, your energy seems boundless. And when you’re still standing at the end of the siege, there is nothing like that triumphant high!

It’s the day after that sucks. You wake up from your victory celebration with a hangover for one, your muscles ache in places you didn’t even know you had muscles, and your body is bruised where you didn’t even realize you’ve been hit.

You look around you and that’s when it hits you. The battle has left on heap of a mess! And guess who’s left standing to clean it up?

That’s right, no other than…

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You have to buy a ticket to win the lotto. And since I don’t buy lotto tickets, you won’t ever see my name attached to a number with lots of zeros.

I do like freebies though, and the easiest way to get that is through online giveaways. I like hosting giveaways and I also like entering them. Most of the online giveaways pick their winners at random so even if there are thousands of entries, your chances of winning are still very good. I’ve won some awesome prizes from giveaways but I have also entered giveaways where I never saw the prize even after repeated emails to the host. But, that doesn’t happen often; only once or twice since I started signing up for these things.

I ran two giveaways on my food blog in the past month and the thing about hosting giveaways is that you end up running into other blogs who are doing the same thing! So as the old cliche’ goes, one thing leads to another and before you know it, you’ve entered a ton of giveaways! Well maybe not a ton, but quite a few.

I just learned this week that I won two of the Halloween Trick r Treat giveaways that I entered! The first win was from Blessed Elements, where I won a leaf making kit. The second win which I was just notified of this morning is from Maryland Momma’s Rambles and Reviews where I won a Mommy and Me gift pack. Now I’m crossing my fingers that more luck is coming my way

I will have another cool giveaway next week, so stay tuned. In the meantime, check out the two blogs I won prizes from this past week. They host giveaways way more than I do and some of them have pretty awesome prizes.

Do you like entering giveaways? Which sites are your favorite? Let me know!

OH, by the way… the new trend among giveaway hosts, I’ve noticed is Rafflecopter! I makes doing all the additional entries so much easier. I’ll start using it on my next giveaway, so stay tuned!

Good Monday morning to you! Maybe you didn’t even notice, maybe you missed me. Whatever. I’ve been busy the last couple of weeks and I haven’t done much blogging. Then this weekend, I was really going to buckle down and do some writing. That didn’t happen either. What happened was, my attention was diverted much like the mouse by the cookie.

I signed on to blog, and realized that I hadn’t updated WordPress in a while. I thought I was up to version 2.9 when I realized that I was still on 2.6! Well I figured, it should be easy enough to click that button that says update all my blogs, right? Right. It was easy alright. Done in a minute!

Except that when I went to a couple of my blogs I realized that some things have gone terribly wrong. This blog, for instance, was not showing any posts at all! On the backend, some menu options have either disappeared or not working at all. It turns out, some of my themes were not quite compatible with the new WP. So I got down to tweaking and hacking.

So I tweaked one thing, which led to another, to another, and so on… you know the drill. Before I knew it, the whole weekend had just about gone and I hadn’t written a thing on the blogs. The good thing is, I got all of them upgraded and they are now all working again!

Once I fixed all the bugs, I was able to appreciate more the brand spanking new Wordpress 3.1 and all its added features. I’m loving it! I love that plugins can now be added on without having to download files and upload them again to your server. You can do it all right here! Pretty cool, huh? Yeah, yea, I know it’s been out a while and you’ve probably been on it since it came out. For me, it’s all new. I afterall just came from the bowels of 2.6 to 3.1.

Another good thing about being forced to do some of this backend maintenance, it keeps this idle brain of mine going. I had forgotten how to do some of the simplest stuff and was at a lost for a while at all the new coding, but I muddled through. I felt quite accomplished for having figured some things out without having to call tech support!

On one of my blogs, I even managed to revamp the theme and added one on those cool image sliders on top! I’ve been wanting one of those for the longest time and I finally managed to get it done thanks to free WP theme designers who incorporated it into their design and pretty much made everything automated. I’ll be implementing this on my food blog soon. It’s in desperate need of a makeover but I have been to afraid to tinker with it.

So to celebrate this accomplishment, the girls and I treated ourselves to some good eats at the Asian Market. It was a good weekend!

I just de-spammed a bunch of comments that had inadvertently been caught by Akismet. I like getting comments on my blogs! Really! That’s why all my blogs are set to Do-Follow. So please do keep leaving comments.

HOWEVER, I cannot in good conscience publish comments that were obviously left just for the benefit of the link and the comment itself is not even related to the post. Take a minute to read what I’m really saying and leave a meaningful or at least relevant comment. And please don’t tell me again that a loan of any kind will make my life easier. LOL! That’s how I got in hot water in the first place!

With that said, let’s keep blogging and commenting!

P.S. as soon as I have some time I’ll add the Comment Luv Plug-in. I love that thing!