ANYWHERE RIGHT NOW

If I could be anywhere right now, I wouldn't mind being at this beach somewhere in Bermuda.
I do not know why my headline isn't appearing above the photograph.

LAST DAY FOR LUXURY LINK SWEEPS

That's today June 30 at 11:59 P.M. PDT.

Whatever PDT is.

To enter, click HERE.

Five days for two at one of the following five accommodations. This does NOT include airfare.

Summer Lodge Country House Hotel, Restaurant & Spa An esteemed Relais & Chateaux member in charming Dorset, England, Summer Lodge is an historic country house famed for its culinary excellence...
Treetops Estate & Lodge In a pristine New Zealand setting surrounded by ancient forests, Treetops Estate & Lodge indulges with lavish attention to detail...
Pimalai Resort & Spa On an unspoiled Thai island, Pimalai Resort & Spa reveals the secrets of saying farewell to stress and hello to divine relaxation…
Villa Michaela Set on 5an estate of pine forests and olive groves, Villa Michaela offers a refined lodging experience amid the pristine splendors of Tuscany...
Vila Joya An exclusive seaside retreat, Vila Joya brings a touch of the exotic to the sun-soaked shores of the Algarve...

HURRY! 24 HOURS LEFT TO ENTER!

Your chance to win a three-night stay in Los Cabos, Mexico.
Do NOT dally. This sweepstakes closes TOMORROW Friday June 30 at midnight.
I'm not clear on the airfare; it might only be from L.A.
But WHO CARES. I'd make a pitstop in L.A. and have a ball.
To enter, click HERE.
To dream, perchance to dream, this is where the winner will stay: THE WESTIN RESORT & SPA LOS CABOS. I'll keep my opinion about the architecture to myself.
I don't know why I've started using UPPER CASES for emphasis.
Upper case closed. Before and after.
My favorite category on The Wheel of Fortune.
From the Official Rules.

5. Winners will receive a trip for two to Los Cabos, Mexico. Prize includes 3-night double-occupancy at the Westin Resort & Spa Los Cabos and roundtrip coach airfare from the closest Aeromexico gateway city via Aero Mexico. Travel to and from the Aeromexico gateway city must be arranged and paid for by each winner. Approximate retail value of prize is $1,450 USD per person. Total prize value is $2900 USD. Prize based on availability and the following blackout dates apply: November 23, 24; December 24, 25, 31; January 1. Prize is valid from October 1, 2006 to October 1, 2007. US/Airport taxes, security charges, fuel surcharges and any other taxes that may apply. This offer may not be extended. The Sponsors make no warranties with regard to the prize. Prize is not transferable. No substitutions of prize allowed by winner. Sweepstakes winner and traveling companion must have all require travel documentation (including a valid passport). Prize is not redeemable by winner for cash value. Airfare to and from Los Angeles, ground transportation in U.S., insurance, and all other expenses and incidentals, including but not limited to in-room charges (e.g. telephone calls or movies) are not included.

SUMMER HOURS

I'm going to be keeping summer hours between now and Labor Day, posting sporadically as opposed to daily Monday through Friday. I'm swamped with deadlines, I'm visiting my mother in a few weeks, then I go to graduate school residency in August.

BOOKMARK THAT BARBECUE

Here’s one you can enter daily between now and September 29: Three nights at The Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, to attend BARBECUE UNIVERSITY in May of next year. This sweeps is sponsored by Crisco, for reasons I have yet to determine. I generally do not associate grilling with Crisco. I do associate Crisco with piemaking.

Speaking of which, I very much enjoyed Amanda Hesser’s piece in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine. She discusses a book called “Humble Pie” by a piemaker named Anne Dimock. The piece includes a recipe for rhubarb pie. Anne Dimock doesn’t use butter in her crust. She only uses shortening, and the only shortening I use is Crisco. I like to add a bit of butter, per a recipe from the November 1983 issue of Gourmet Magazine. Gee, now I feel like baking a pie.

You can enter this sweeps daily, so bookmark that sucker and go for it!

To enter, click HERE.

Barbecue University is the brainchild of Steven Raichlen, an enterprising writer-cook entrepreneur in the best sense of the term. I have his book on Florida cuisine, "Miami Spice," which includes a fabuloso recipe from The Fontainebleau Hotel for cheesecake. Fresh cheesecake is like fresh fruit or vegetables: immeasurably superior.

I’ve never been to THE GREENBRIER. I’m partial to THE HOMESTEAD, another mountain resort in that neck of the woods, the hot-spring-dotted Alleghenies along the Virginia-West Virginia border. I hope acknowledging that predisposition won't disqualify me. I know if I won I'd warm up to The Greenbrier mighty fast.

As for barbecue, I could wax rhapsodic over that peerless marinade until the cows came home. Instead, I have to check the snake, the parakeets and our summer guest, the turtle.

SUMMER "CAMP"

I won’t make excuses about my lackluster posting performance this week except to say that if I ever write an essay or a book about the neverending challenges of co-parenting, which is the culturally correct term for raising a child under the aegis of what used to be known as joint custody, the title can only be, “Out of Joint.”

That’s a circumscriptive way to telegraph that my son’s father and I are going through one of our rough spots. It's distracting. No, that's understating things. It's a major timesuck. It comes atop a spate of bad luck. I went into all sorts of details with my therapist this week. When I got to the part about my cockroach problem, which I thought the exterminator had solved several weeks ago, she laughed at the too muchness of it all. "Oh, it's like Job." Yes, my therapist laughed at my plight. Sadly, it kind of is like Job. And that was before my car konked out on me. And I never told her that my next-door neighbor, a woman with whom I share a critical wall, my home office on my side and her living room on hers, is having a baby any day now. Her boyfriend doesn't live with her, and when he's there they fight. She shouts. I mean, she can be a raving lunatic. (Not that I am always cool, calm and collected.) I never hear him. With my luck, the baby will have colic.

Of course, that's why I enter these sweeps. To try to improve the odds.

Despite all this, I'm actually feeling pretty upbeat these days. I just got some work, two big projects, and Isaac's in a good place right now. We had the funniest time of our lives last night. He did these routines about wrestling nuns and Santa's list of naughty boys and these adventures on a camel that involved going to a black market. I could not stop laughing.

Here’s the post I started writing earlier this week.

Susan Sontag codified the cult of “camp” in her 1964 essay, “Notes on Camp.” “To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a sympathy modified by revulsion,” she wrote in the introduction. To explicate this sensibility, Sontag compiled a list of observations or, as she modestly called them, “jottings,” rather than rely on the standard, linear essay form. Here’s her tenth “jotting:” “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a “lamp”; not a woman, but a “woman.” To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.”

I do believe I’ve found a sweeps that meets Sontag’s criteria of Camp. A trip for two to Las Vegas that includes a weekend at the Hilton Las Vegas, tickets to the show -- are you sitting down? – MENOPAUSE THE MUSICAL, tickets to a performance of – don’t get up yet – BARRY MANILOW in Manilow – Music and Passion … plus $1,000 IN CASH. I’m actually slightly more fixated on the idea of a musical about the change as “Camp” than I am about Barry Manilow as “Camp”, though he and his music certainly approach “Camp” on some levels. I never hear one of his songs without experiencing a heightened theatricality, an exaggeration of sentiments over the lyrics. As for the play, well, that should be self-evident. Of course, this is a superficial response, and now that I’m researching the musical a bit, I’m thinking the concept, four women at a Bloomingdale’s lingerie sale yammering away about hot flashes and sex and chocolate binges and sex and memory loss and sex and belting out “25 relyricized classic Baby Boomer hits” such as “I Heard It Thru The Grapevine; You No Longer See 39” and “Stayin’ Awake, Stayin’ Awake,” I’m thinking, cute, corny and ultimately “Camp." I am processing the requisite sympathy alright, though I can’t relate to the memory loss part: To the despair of certain individuals, i.e., my son’s father, my memory seems to be improving with age. In fact, I’m experiencing memory gain, not loss. As for the musical, the revulsion's there, too.

This sweeps closes June 30. To enter, click HERE.

THE ONLY WAY THESE ADS WILL WORK

Is if I write long, not long-long, but at least a few hundred words, and include a stock photograph to balance out the flamboyant visuals of these things. I just randomly chose this one, to see how it plays off whatever random ad happens to run above this post. Otherwise, I'm zonked. Au lit. A demain.

COMING SOON TO A COMPUTER NEAR YOU

Tomorrow I'm going to write about Las Vegas, Quebec and Arizona.

It's the first day of summer. Hooray for the change of seasons. Though summer's my least favorite. I only like hot weather when I have lots of leisure time on my hands. Not this summer.

I'm not sure about these ads. They'll be less vexing when I go back to writing longer posts.

EXCUSE OUR APPEARANCE

While management plays around with display ads.

HIATUS INTERRUPTUS

I'm having a hectic week but plan to post tomorrow.

WHAT ARE THE CHANCES?

I was tidying up my bookmarks this afternoon when I decided to click on an old link, for the Audi Q7 Streets of Tomorrow sweeps that closed last month, to see if 1.) I could access the darn thing; in the final ten days of the sweeps, I had been unable to get the old gal humming, so, after weeks of entering every single day, I was mighty frustrated that I wasn't able to enter for the last stretch; and 2.) if I could access the site, whether they’d announced the winners. No word on the winners, but the folks at Audi have posted an informative little SWEEPS SUMMARY.

A total of 22,000 people registered for the sweeps (all those zeros make me nervous about the accuracy of the tabulations – are they sure it wasn’t more like 22,002?). There was a grand total of 67,756 entries. I’m thinking I entered at least 40 times. That means my chances of winning are, well, are what? I don’t believe I’ve ever done math in public before. I don’t know if this is the best time to start, because I’m not perfectly sure how to calculate my chances here. I’m feeling a wave of diffidence looming on the horizon. I think the correct answer is 1 in 1,694, because that’s what 67,756 divided by 40 equals, mas o menos.

If this is correct, those are darn good odds. If it’s not correct, I’m a loser at math. Which doesn’t necessarily mean I won’t be a winner at something else. Also, not to go and be an a priori sore loser or anything, but if I had been able to access the site in the final stretch before the sweeps closed, my odds of winning would have increased to 1 in 1,355. If my math is correct, that is.

P.S. The preferred car of the SONNENALP RESORT is still the Lexus, NOT an Audi. So much for sponsor loyalty.

PUTTING ON THE RITZ

Home Depots ’s newish retail arm, 10 CRESCENT LANE, is sponsoring a quickie sweeps with a prize of airfare and six nights at any RITZ CARLTON in the world (subject to the usual availability).

The contest closes on June 18. To enter, click HERE.

To indulge in a little winner fantasizing, saunter over to Ritz Carlton’s worldwide locations HERE. I'm thinking Madrid would be fabuloso.

LONDON CALLING: BRILLIANT

I love how the Brits use the word “brilliant” to denote praise and approval. We otherwise rakish folk here on the other side of the pond reserve the accolade for more esteemed occasions and descriptor moments. We might say: He has a brilliant mind. They might say: Peter’s going to the pub with Scott after the match. Brilliant!

Well, this morning I entered a newish British Airways sweeps: Brilliant! The prize includes four nights at a four-star London hotel (The Saint James – is that only a four-star hotel?), airfare (business), West End theatre tickets and, last but not least, tickets to the men’s and women’s finals at Wimbledon on July 8 and July 9. What fun this would be.

To enter, click HERE.

COVER GIRL COVERED BY COVER LINE

I don't know where yesterday went. So much so that I don't know where my recollection of the sweeps I entered went. I believe it was sponsored by Cover Girl, a trip to the Bahamas. I meant to TinyURL and blog it, but I got distracted. (Update: I was correct on both counts, Cover Girl and the Bahamas. To enter, click HERE.)

True story: I was a cover girl once. I was in a group shot for the cover of Washingtonian Magazine. My friend was the photo editor at the time, and they wanted about six regular people to surround the the two professional models they were using for a cover story on, gee, in keeping with the amnesia theme here, I can't remember what. Of course I was one of the regular people. We went to an impressive photographer's studio in Georgetown and spent a good few hours posing and smiling.

When the magazine came out, I recognized the regular people I'd posed with, and the two models, who were spectacular specimens of photogeneticity, if that's the noun, another hole in the language, but I was nowhere to be seen. Rather, I was to be seen, but not in toto. I could see my limbs and my skirt and some of my hair, but my face, my one shot at Cover Girl status, was covered by the cover line, by one large letter, I forget which, maybe an H. End of story.

ENTRANTS' EXAMS

There's a THREAD over at the Flyer Talk Contests and Sweepstakes forum that might be of interest to sweepsters and travel contesters. Someone asked if anyone who bothered to enter these things had even won anything, and the answers range to some trinkety prizes, on the level of a party favor, to some swell trips. My stars, I haven't entered a sweeps since Friday. I'll go find one, and duly report my selection on the morrow.

FLORIDA'S GULF COAST

Six nights with airfare. Two nights each in Tampa/Ybor City, St. Petersburg and Sarasota.

To enter, click HERE.

Deadline: June 30.

Funny story: Isaac’s first piano teacher, a charming man named Vladimir, used to commute from St. Petersburg, Florida, to Washington, D.C., to teach at a community music school. Vladimir was originally from St. Petersburg, Russia. We thought this was amusing, one of those little slice-of-life details that makes you laugh. At the conservatory in St. Petersburg, Vladimir had studied with someone who’d studied with Prokofiev or Prokofiev’s teacher. At least that’s how I remember it; there was a once-removed connection to Prokofiev, one of the greats. Naturally, that made us feel closer to musical history.

Alas, when Vladimir decided to stop commuting to D.C. from St. Petersburg, Isaac was crestfallen. Be careful what you wish for, I told Isaac. Before Vladimir's told us his news, Isaac had been asking to quit. He called practice “torture.”

“You mean I will never see Vladimir again?” he asked.

“Probably not,” I answered.

If I won this trip, I would look up Vladimir. Maybe we could meet at the pier. (That's the photo herewith.)

As for Isaac’s piano study, he worked with two teachers over the next two years. Then the decision was made to stop piano study. It was becoming too negative an experience for him. I hope he finds his way back to music one day.

LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO FRIGHT

My good friend Bethanne Patrick mentioned this jaw-dropping sweepstakes on her AOL BOOK MAVEN BLOG today: A two-night stay at the WATER'S EDGE HOTEL in Tiburon, California, and a one-day GREAT WHITE SHARK WATCHING CRUISE out to the Farallon Islands. I put this in all caps because I’m linking it to Incredible Adventures, the outfitter that runs the shark cruise and, gulp, cage dives, and also to underscore that 1.) I had no idea people went on shark-watching cruises and 2.) I did not even know there was such a thing as a shark season. Silly me. Tiburon means SHARK in Spanish. But SHARK CRUISES? Those darn whales get all the glory.

This year, shark season runs from September 22 through November 12, which is the stretch when the winner must take the trip. The prize includes airfare. For my near total ignorance of white sharks, the hook for this sweeps is a book by a woman on the opposite end of the white-shark spectrum: Susan Casey. Her “The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Gret White Sharks” was recently released in paperback. Bethanne calls Casey “a mesmerizing stylist” in her POST about this sweepstakes.

For her part, Bethanne posts with her usual wit and pith.

To enter the sweepstakes, click HERE.

As for the photo, will you look at that mug? It’s the anti-dolphin!

WHERE ARE YOU?

And who are you? If you're reading this, I'd love to get a sense of where you're from and how often you visit and whether you enter the contests I mention and whether there's anything you'd like to see on the site. At some point I'll be unveiling a custom-designed website, though I highly advise you not to hold your breath on that. To post comments here, you can register with Blogger and post anonymously if you like.

Otherwise, today's the old blog's three-month anniversary. To celebrate, I entered a sweeps sponsored by Tidy Cat, the kitty litter folks. Why not? I've got two cats, Torpedo and Tarzan. And goodness knows they've used their share of kitty litter over the years. To enter, go to Tidy Cat's HOMEPAGE; you'll see the icon for the entry screen at the lower righthand side of the screen. The prize is a nine-day trip to either London, Athens, Costa Rica or the Virgin Islands. For details, here are the OFFICIAL RULES.

Other than that, I'm thinking of starting another blog, one about buying a lottery ticket every day. Wouldn't that be riveting.

SHORT AND SWEET

Eros, the God of Love, and I have not crossed paths recently. If we did, I would recognize him not for his countenance but for the effect he had on me and other passersby. Anything but indifferent, I would think.

I fancied a spa fantasy this morning, and knew I’d find one on Julie Register’s Discover Spas website. She keeps a running list of SPA CONTESTS that’s worth checking out if you’re spa-inclined. I entered one for a six-night stay at LOS ALTOS DE EROS in Tamarindo, Costa Rica. The prize does not include airfare, but comes with breakfast and lunch, as well as a number of treatments and classes.

It's not clear is whether Eros is included in the package, or guests have to bring their own.

To enter, click HERE.

LUXURY LINK

Another busy day. Here's the LINK to Luxury Link's quarterly contest. I blogged about it at some point. The winner gets to choose from five top international resorts. I try to enter daily.

WIN A TRIP TO MARS

That’s what I felt like entering this evening, a sweeps for a trip to Mars, a real getaway. It’s been a hectic few days, with school meetings on top of the usual. I Googled as much, and found a trip to Ecuador, but it had expired. Drats. Then I found some martian-themed gaming SITE, as well as a 1938 Flash Gorden’s Trip to Mars FLICK. Then I remembered it was the first of the month, and Frommer’s would have a new Hot Spot contest posted. Denver. (To enter, click HERE.) Okay, Denver’s not high on my list, but why not. It's high. I came, I saw, I entered. And I love drinking beer at high altitudes. Bottom’s up.