Thanks to my awesome readers!

A bloom from last year’s garden

Congratulations to Julie James for winning last night’s heated race in Round 2, Set 3 of the DA BWAHA, which I believe stands for Dear Author Bitchery Writing Award for Hella Authors. Awesome name.

I just wanted to thank all of you who voted and posted and tweeted and corralled other readers, your friends, your family, strangers in the subway on behalf of Naked Edge. We lost by 280 votes — a respectable amount given how many votes were cast in that race. It’s all in good fun, and it was great to be included this year.

Julie James is one classy woman. She’s giving away two copies of Naked Edge on her Facebook fan page today. As far as I know, she and I fought our way through that bracket with zero trash-talking.

I have to say some of your tweets were hilarious! As I said in a Facebook post, I have the most awesome readers. I just adore you all.

When I wasn’t hitting the “refresh” button yesterday, tweeting or posting on Facebook, I was outside with Benjamin getting our early garden planted. I really believe in the concept of the victory garden or urban homesteading, whatever you want to call it. So we always have a vegetable garden, and we’re become better urban farmers.

Yesterday we planted: onion sets, spinach, arugula, radishes, carrots, romaine lettuce and Swiss chard. Those are all basics for us. I’ve got broccoli ready to go in, as well. Then when we’re past any frost danger — mid-April to early May — I’ll get dinosaur kale, cucumbers, tomatoes, green beans, and a few kinds of squash planted (acorn, zucchini, summer squash and delicata). And we’ll be ready for summer.

Last year, I ate broccoli, green beans and chard out of our garden until fall. In fact, I had fresh broccoli through the first week of November. That was nuts! Of course, other people had to take care of the garden last year because of my neck surgery. But this year should be better, though I have been having some problems again and may be seeing the surgeon soon.

We also got our roses pruned. Those of you who’ve been following me for a while know we have a big rose garden. Benjy got it all pruned and ready for spring. I was afraid the bushes would have died back to the ground due to our extreme low temps this past winter, but most seemed to have pull through just fine. The miracles of mulching.

Benjy leaves for the second half of his spring semester today. It’s always terribly hard for me to make that drive to the airport and watch him walk away. He doesn’t like leaving either, but that’s part of him growing up. Empty nest just sucks.

But I wanted to pop in early and thank you all and wish you a peaceful, lovely Sunday!