The Announcement

Good morning!

It’s a beautiful day in the Ozarks:

Spring is officially here, and Easter is just around the corner!

(No, the picture was not touched up or taken last month–this is actually what it looks like outside my window, today, March 22, 2013.)

I know everybody is anxious to hear who won our HUGE Spring Break BOOK GIVEAWAY.  But first, a word about our methodology.

In some of our past giveaways, we asked for book recommendations or favorite this-or-that (and why), and chose among the answers we liked best.  But since we anticipated a large participation for this one, it seemed best to just throw all the names together and draw them out.  Good choice, as we received a total of 96 entries, choosing qualities among which would give us a collective migraine.

But how to actually, like, do this?  I decided to go to our comments page on the dashboard and print out all the comments pertaining to the giveaway . . . .

and then I cut them into strips . . . .

and folded all the strips so they’d be a little more “springy.”

Here they are all together in the bucket:

Now, for the drawing.  Just to certify that the process was completely impartial, I’ll let you see it:

And the winners are . . . .

pending on notification.  I’m emailing them right now, so if you don’t receive an email, you probably didn’t win.  But check back to see who got what.  And check back thereafter, because we have other giveaways planned!

Oh yes, we’ve got plans . . .

UPDATE: Tonya Roth is our Grand Prize winner!  She chose these five titles:

• Shadow on the Mountain
• The Boston Tea Party
• Bear Wants More, plus Bear Snores On
• The House on Pooh Corner
• The house in the Night

 UPDATE 2: Sarah Jent wins First Place!  She’s getting

• The Education of Nicholas Benedict
• The Story Shell
• Starry River of the Sky
• Hokey-Pokey

 UPDATE 3:  All accounted for!  David Rainey picked

• Unseduced and Unshaken
• Anna Reed’s Life of Washington, plus Washington and Israel
• If We Survive

And our third-place winner, Julia Anderson, gets

• Why Easter?
• What’s in the Garden?
• Noisy Bug Singalong

Thanks again for entering, everyone.  It was fun!