Not feeling overly well today, but that’s my problem, not yours. For you, Best Beloved, I have yet another opportunity to win a FABULOUS PRIZE.

It’s Spring here, and I’m going to go ahead and pretend that last year we didn’t get snow again in May. It’s Spring, dammit. And that means that once again we can shed our reindeer furs, venture out of the igloo, and clean up our yard.

Which means raking leaves. As you no doubt remember, TJ won the leaf bag contest in the fall with his guess that we’d rake up 50 bags of leaves before the first snow. Since then and now, no army of lawn gnomes has disposed of the remaining leaves for us, so there are still plenty out there to be raked. Plus there are bushes to be trimmed back, dead plants to be yanked up, and so forth.

We’ve already started, in fact! I can’t tell you how many lawn bags we’ve filled so far, but you’d be impressed. Becky has done a lot of the work, but this weekend we were both out there tidying up. It’s so nice to get ugly, matted, dead leaves up off the lawn so that the tiny greenish-white weeds can finally poke their little leaves up and choke out what little feeble, sad grass we have.

Since there’s never any snow after April 1, this time we go until there’s no going anymore. All the leaves gotta come up, and some assorted other lawn detritus will join it. But so as not to be accused of throwing the contest, I’ll fix the end date at May 31. The contest will end then, even if our work doesn’t.

So: typical, Price-is-Right style. Person who guesses how many lawn bags full of yard waste we fill by May 31 wins a unique prize of incalculable value. Your only hint is this: we filled 50 bags in the fall, working only with the front and left side yards. And we didn’t even get those totally clean.

Stewart, please inform the bookmakers in Vegas that the contest is on.