Hi cousins, The WHOPBOF site fight has begun, starting at 12:01 a.m. today and will run until Saturday at midnight. In case you missed yesterday's message, there are 17 judges, 13 sites total being judged and we are going up directly against just 3 other sites in our category. Voting for ourselves is tomorrow, December 6th. These votes consist of half the Homestead's score. Taking the top number of votes will garner us 10 points. The judges take on the rest of the points. Here are the voting guidelines I've been given. You'll want to read all of them to make sure your vote gets counted: 1.) **IMPORTANT ~~ IMPORTANT ** _Please_ DO NOT cast any votes until Wednesday 12:01 a.m. U.S. EST. Voting stops at 11:59 U.S. EST. Anything before or after those hours WILL NOT COUNT. 2.) On the voting page you'll fill out a short form. Below that form is a counter. You'll need the counter number (that shows below the form) when completing the form. You might want to go to the URL today to see what I'm talking about so you'll know what to do tomorrow. Also, one of the site fight owners had an emergency in his family this past weekend. He hasn't returned home yet (as of this message) so the voting page may not be updated with this competition's sites. Don't be concerned if you don't see the Bower Family Homestead listed on the page. Go ahead and place your vote for the Bower Family Homestead (it must say that in the box) along with the current counter number showing on the page and your full email address. The promoters will still get it. 3.) You can vote from any server, so if you also use a web-based email [Hotmail, Netscape, etc.] please be sure to vote for the Homestead from that email addy as well -- even the ones you use at work [if you can, that is]. Please be sure to hit REFRESH (or reset) to get a new counter number for each screen name or your votes will not count. 4.) AOL users can only vote one time per screen name [I have no reason why; that's just what the rules say]. 5.) The voting page is at <http://members.aol.com/whopbof2/vote.html>. I've set a banner up at the Homestead's front page just in case any surfers want to vote for us or you want to spring to the WHOPBOF voting page from there. 6.) There is an alternative way to vote in case the submit button does not work when voting. You'll find instructions near the bottom of the vote page to how to do this should you get errors when trying to submit a vote. 7.) Please get your friends, relatives and coworkers who have email addresses to vote for us as well! If they have multiple email addresses, they can vote multiple times as long as they remember to REFRESH THE PAGE to get a new counter number. So no one would get confused, I did a little research for all of us. You'll have to use your fingers [and maybe your toes] to take it from here to get yourself ahead or back to U.S. EST time ~~ At 10:00 a.m. U.S. EST on Tuesday, 5 December it is: 07:00 a.m. in U.S. PST and in Canada [BC] 08:00 a.m. in U.S. MST and in Canada [MT & AB] 09:00 a.m. in U.S. CST and in Canada [SK & MB] 11:00 a.m. in Canada [NS] 11:30 a.m. in Canada [NF] - don't ask; it's just what the world time converter says it is :) 03:00 p.m. in England, Wales and Scotland 04:00 p.m. in Germany and Switzerland 05:00 p.m. in South Africa 02:00 a.m. in Sydney, Australia on Wednesday, 6 December 04:00 a.m. in New Zealand on Wednesday, 6 December I _think_ that covers everyone in the family! The idea here is to gear your time to anywhere from 12:01 a.m. to 11:59 p.m. 6 December in the U.S. eastern time zone for this voting. Okay cousins....let's do ourselves proud and see if we can win this! I hope you're all having a terrific Tuesday, and -- for those of you 'down under', will have a wonderful Wednesday once you wake up! See you all at the voting page! I'll be online all day tomorrow if any of you have any questions. Please begin arranging with your friends and relatives to cast their votes for us tomorrow. This voting is critical to our scores since bringing in the full 10 points will save our final score if the judges hit us too badly on one or more areas. It's that final score that will determine our placement in the standings. In the meantime, I have (our online) family Christmas gifts to wrap... :) Colleen