At about 10:30 a.m. this morning I suddenly came to my senses: Why in the world was I considering making the next leg of my trip to Washington, D.C.?

Lately I’ve been a homemade yogurt snob. But free yogurt is even better.

A lot of people have strong feelings about the TLC reality series “Extreme Couponing.” My own impression of the show is secondhand, since I don’t own a television.

Technically I could see the next two episodes because the TLC publicist kindly gave me online access. Ultimately I decided not to watch. Based on what I’ve read and also on what my daughter told me and wrote about the show, I would just wind up depressed.

Back when the Earth was still cooling, we used to enter writing competitions sponsored by the Alaska Press Club and the Society of Professional Journalists. Every year we’d scissor up our articles (how quaint!) and paste them onto sheets of posterboard. I can still smell the rubber cement.

Which, come to think of it, may have been the best part of the application process: The giddy, lightheaded feeling you got from half an hour’s worth of glue fumes. Pretty soon everything you clipped looked absolutely stellar. Surely you’d win one of those certificates proclaiming your work the first, second or third best in the state/region that year. Or at least worth mentioning in an honorable way.

I bring this up because the Bloggers Choice Awards recently came to my attention and I wondered if I should nominate myself. My original thought was “no,” for several reasons:

• There doesn’t seem to be a truly suitable category for what I write. (Being hard to categorize is part of my mystique.)
• I don’t know if I could compete against folks with huge fan bases and the ability to use social media with skill and aplomb.
• It seemed, I don’t know, kind of braggy.

My current “Living With Less” column over at MSN Money introduced me to the fascinating world of “sweeping,” i.e., entering sweepstakes and contests. In the old days this required “the three Ps”: patience, persistence and postage. Nowadays you don’t need to buy a single stamp because tens of thousands of contests are available online.

In”How to win contests and sweepstakes,” some diehard sweepers shared their tips and strategies. Most important: Download a free copy of RoboForm, which makes entering a lot simpler. One of the people who told me that uses RoboForm to enter up to 500 contests a day, during down times on her graveyard-shift job — and every day she gets at least one prize delivered to her home or sent electronically. During the interview she checked her e-mail and found notices of free movie tickets and a remote-control Ferrari.

Michelle wins bigger-ticket items, too. She won $100,000 in a Hershey’s Kisses contest, which also got her onto a special segment of “Deal Or No Deal.” (If she’d picked the right two briefcases the first time, she would have won $100 million.) The next year she won $12,000 from Mastercard. In the past five years she’s won 10 trips (and turned down three), including a Hawaii vacation related to the TV show “Lost” (they got to meet the actors) and a trip to attend a “TV Guide’s Sexiest People” party in Los Angeles.

How can you get a piece of the action?