Posted: 8^th January 2008

On Gardening Leave

Welcome back, everyone, and I hope you all had a tremendous Christmas and are set for a fantastic New Year. For my part, my festive break is only half-over. If you read the drivel I put at the top of The Post each issue, you'll probably be aware that I work all over the festive period, and my break usually starts when the guests go home on January 2^nd. This year, it was a full ten days, giving me ample time to catch up on some work from my other two jobs and have a bit of a lie down in between.

Unfortunately, I've spoken before about my incredible ability to find something else to do instead of getting on with things. So after a couple of days relaxing, I decided to try to design a hot air balloon, then turned my attention to an ambitious project to redesign my garden. When I say 'ambitious', I really do mean that; I've set myself a good fortnight's worth of work, which would never fit into the eight days I had left. And today, exactly halfway through the eight days of 'sorting things out' that I left myself, I started getting the phone calls and messages politely indicating that people would like to see some work at some point.

This is not good, because you'll note that I'm also currently four days through a fourteen-day gardening project – you can picture the state by imagining the worst state a garden could ever possibly be, then throwing a few hand grenades into it – and Lainey has the weekend off, which means I only really have two days. And I haven't got this balloon to fly yet, either.

Still, it's a New Year, and we have a wonderful issue in store for you. The results of our Christmas Competitions are in (see below) and we have new badges for Jhawkesby, Shagbark, TB Falsename and h5ringer. Additional congratulations to h5ringer, whose popular 'Musical Notes' column has become an official Regular this issue. We need you to get involved, too; Entry of the Month returns in this issue, so we need your votes, and the competitors in the new Stretcher competition are unveiled in this issue, too. We've also decided to turn the Acrostic Poems into a regular challenge, so if you're poetically minded don't miss the Acrostics in this issue.

Deadline for the next issue is 18^th January 2009 – 2009! – we'll see you then!

Skankyrich

Thank you so much to everyone who took part. The voting was extremely close in every section, and the sheer number of votes cast shows how much all your efforts were appreciated. Without further ado, here are the winners, to whom we extend our heartiest congratulations:

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  Poetry winner - PedanticBarSteward's 'Candle'
  

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  Prose winner - Icy North's 'Derek and Pauline's Round Robin'
  

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  Vogon poetry winner - Beatrice's 'Sickly Come Dancing'
  

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  The h2g2 Poem
  


'Happy New Year!' by The Thinker

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  The h2g2 Poem
  


'Happy New Year, Hootoo!', by MazingMadFiddler

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  The h2g2 Poem
  


'Bring in the New Year', by minichessemouse

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  The h2g2 Poem
  


'Too Late', by Still_WRD

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  The h2g2 Poem
  


'Poem In Orbit', by Shagbark

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  The Acrostic Poetry Challenge
  


B'Elana and PedanticBarSteward take on the word 'IDEAS'

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  Bertie and the Beast
  


Northward Ho! Part 3

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  Platypus Dancing
  


Meanwhile, somewhere over Colorado

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  Platypus Dancing
  


Meanwhile, Mummy has invested in earplugs...

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  Anarchy Gordon
  


Part six of dmitri and Mal's webcomic

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  Entry of the Month
  


The November winner and December's voting

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  Escape Pod Dreams
  


The Bad Novel Project Issue

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  Nigel's Gardening Hints and Tips
  


Dreary Winter Days

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  Websailor's Wacky Wildlife World
  


A Truly Wacky World!

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  24 Lies a Second
  


Woohoo! Awix is back!

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  Random Ramblings
  


B'Elana catches up after a busy festive season

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  Musical Notes
  


h5ringer redefines the superconductor

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  Babe Among the Stars
  


Galaxy Babe looks at the Astronomy Picture of the Day

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  Smudger Snippets
  


The Politically Correct Brigade

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  The Memoirs of Alsoran80
  


Remembering Helen Suzman

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  The Stretcher
  


Meet our brave contestants

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  The Post's Christmas Anagram Quiz 2008
  


The Solution

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  The Post Wordsearch 51
  


The Solution

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  A Caravan Tour of the United States
  


Part Two of Phred's journey

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  Announcements
  


Meets, sites, events etc

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  The Language Thing
  


Translations and Help

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  Classified Ads
  


Advertise your club here

• 
  The Post Page of Links
  


Links to all places h2g2 related