And The Winner Is...

Drumroll please! The winner of my first blog giveaway is....

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you this very important message.
(You didn't really think I was just gonna blurt it out, did you? Silly goose.)

I wanted to clue you all in a little on why I did the giveaway and how I selected a winner. I know you probably don't care, but I'm telling you anyway.

The first and most obvious reason is that I'd hoped to get more followers for my blog. Shameless, right? But it actually did work. I went from having one follower to having six. And I didn't even make following my blog a requirement for entry into the giveaway, as so many other bloggers do. Ok, sure, I may lose five of you after I make the announcement of who won the Starbucks Gift Card, but I appreciate you stopping in, nonetheless.

The second reason I did it was... well, there really wasn't a second reason. Driving traffic to the site was about it. Pitiful? Yes. Effective? Somewhat.

Now, as to how I selected a winner, there was only one way to be fair, since many of the entrants were friends of mine.

A huge shout out to all of you, by the way, for putting up with my constant tweets and status updates about the giveaway; so glad none of you unfriended me, though I sure would understand if you'd blocked me from your news feed for a few days. It's okay to turn my news feed back on now. Really. I promise. Please?

Back to how I picked a winner (and how all winners of future giveaways will be selected!)

Each comment was assigned a number in sequential order as it was posted and provided it was within the timeframe specified. Once I had all the entries, I headed over to RANDOM.ORG and used their awesome Random Number Generator. You just put in your starting and ending numbers and it will pick a random number for you.

In this case, it selected number 13. Yes, lucky number 13.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming

Making the winner of the $25 Starbucks Gift Card...

The envelope please....

AztecConsulting! Congratulations!
I will be contacting you shortly for information on how to collect your winnings.

To the rest of you who didn't win this time, be not discouraged, there will be more giveaways.

Thank you so much for participating, and for sharing your awesome Starbucks drinks with me; I will definitely be ordering some, ok, most, of these at some point in my future.

Here's to a caffeinated weekend!

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On Track... So Far

It's officially the middle of January and so far, thankfully, I'm on track to meet at least one of my fitness goals: I ran my first 5K of 2010 last week.

Not a huge deal, I know. Except for the fact that it was 19 degrees outside! I am still surprised I actually made it out to this race, the appropriately named "Snowman Shuffle". It certainly felt like I was shuffling.

Running in that kind of cold is a new experience for me. Who are we kidding, running in general is pretty new to me, as are most experiences involving running. But the cold, well, the hardest thing to cope with was sucking in all that cold air. Only halfway into the run my back started tightening up; since I'd never experienced this before, I figure it was probably just the cold air intake.

Nonetheless, I finished. Official race times indicated I finished about 43 seconds slower than my last race in December. I was disappointed, but hey, I'm blaming the cold for the slower run time. Well, that and the new shoes! :)

Here's hoping my February race is warmer and faster!