I just realized that I never posted the answer to the September Contest for those of you who participated early on but then got stuck as the scavenger hunt got harder. If you’re interested in finding out who won and what the answers are, click the link below. Otherwise, nothing to see here, folks

First off, the winners! Adam was actually the first person to solve the entire puzzle, but he graciously declined the top prize, so the prize structure came out as….

1st place – pbchicknz
2nd place – shaynon
Wildcard – froggie2007

So congratulations to all the winners! And I want to thank everybody who participated this time around. I promise the October contest will be much easier to enter (alebit, a little harder to win )

Next are the questions and answers. Note, I didn’t include any of the hints I gave or comments I made about each question.

1. Who has the 2nd most posts on the forums? – mcpaladin
2. How many posts have I made on Hey, It’s Free! under the cleaning category? – 30
3. You know what? I just watched my childhood idol Brett Favre slice and dice the Chargers. WOOOO! I’m going crazy here. I’m in such a good mood, I’m just gonna make the next password “favre” in honor of the awesomeness that is Favre. – favre
4. On this stage, you had to find my private phone number and call it. My voicemail greeting would then tell you the password. – 864-641-3866 & monkey
5. So, HIF was recently “nominated” (by me ) for a best blog about hobbies. But what other category did I nominate HIF for, since I figured our awesome site was also “about” that too? – stuff
6. I always liked to pretend and daydream as a child, so why don’t you join me in doing so now! Let’s pretend you’re a girl and part of the royal ruling family of the Kingdom of HIF. There’s an unseasonably strange snowstorm brewing outside, so you decide to proclaim to all of your Hiffer citizens that in honor of the weather, you are going to make a special Club named after the phenomenon! And each member of this fan club is going to get a special treat that has a different flavor every month! So what’s September’s flavor? – cottoncandy
7. Hope you have a calendar handy! Start on Cinco de Mayo. Then subtract Christmas Day, add Independence Day, subtract Veteran’s Day, subtract National Aviation Day, add Loyalty Day, and subtract Leif Erikson Day. What healthy food did I mention in one of my posts on the main page of HIF on this day? – lettuce
8. I once posted a freebie that I said was, quote, “flavor free!” What flavor was the freebie actually supposed to be? – berry
9. You wake up one morning and suddenly discover that you hate to read. Hate it! Nothing can hold your attention anymore, from books to newspapers to the back of cereal boxes. As you start to slowly go insane over the weeks out of pure boredom, you have a dream one night. A dream about the promised land. Of reading material, that is. A strange voice tells you of a wonderful item that you’ll absolutely love, that will spark your interest for the printed word all over again. And yet when you wake up, you can’t quite remember what the heck it was called!

   You manage to rack your brain and remember that the title has two words in it. The first is an acronym for an organization and the second has something to do with little short people. Go to their website. At the very top, what is the first word that appears in purple lettering? – creating

10. We all like to brag about the cool freebies we’ve gotten. In fact, we do it here on the forums all the time in a special (and huge) thread! This summer, I got a free shirt from Coors and I immediately went to tell everybody about it! Who was the next person to post right after me? – champbronc2
11. So this past summer, I rolled out another feature on HIF where people were able to get daily freebie updates from our lovely site sent straight to them in their e-mail! What company owns the company I use to delivery our daily updates to your inbox? – google
12. HIF is so amazing, that we’ve sometimes been lucky enough to get a little media coverage. And in one of the articles written about HIF, I mentioned that I don’t look like what famous actor? – bradpitt
13. Let’s pretend you have a website. Anyways, you love HIF so much, you want to share it with all of your readers. So you decide to put all sorts of links to HIF up on your site. In fact, you use every single different link image I have!

    If you look at the file name of all the images I have, you’ll see some numbers. Add them all up. Then add my age. You’ve now got the password to the final stage! Don’t know how old I am? I’m pretty sure I told somebody in Hawaii once – 358

14. A) What ref/survey site did I make roughly $140 with in the past? (Just the site name. For instance if I made it through http://www.cnn.com, the answer would just be “cnn”).
    B) You’ve got some sleazy guy that you need to e-mail back and forth with, but you don’t want him to know your “real” e-mail account. So you want to use a disposable one. You also LOVE dogs. What site will you probably use? (again, password is in the form as the one above)
    C) And finally, the category on HIF with the FEWEST posts!

    Now, take all the answers you have for this stage. And place all the letters in alphabetical order. And then get rid of ALL the consonants. See that weird jumble of letters you have left over? That’s the final password – aeeeiiiioouy