We have a, um, winners!

We have two winners!

First, because Sarah is super-nice and never once rhymes-with-itched at me because I am behind on my mailings, I'm giving her the whole bonanza instead of just the one issue she won before. Kind of an upgrade, you know? And I actually really will send it out tomorrow. I have the mailer ready and everything. My husband is going by the post office because it's on his way home from work and I'm still queasy. TMI? Yes. But never TM SHM. At least I hope Sarah won't think so.

So Sarah won -- but I already made the decision to make her a winner when I saw her posting. So I counted how many other people entered, which was 9. And I went to a really cool site you probably already know about, since I'm always the last to hear about these things. It's called RANDOM.ORG -- really, they use all-caps. Their address is exactly what you'd figure.

RANDOM.ORG has a nifty little random number generator. You just type in your minimum and maximum numbers desired, push the "generate" button, wait with bated breath, and...

...if you're me, you get: a number 5! Which is the lovely Gina, keeper of guinea pigs!

Okay, Gina. Write to me privately with your address, okay? Deborah at 2ds dot org.

Thanks so much to everyone else for making my birthday even more fun. I got a lovely haul of books, including:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (yes, that's the title), by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith: a perfectly wonderful blend of the original text and a skillful weaving of new material, making this wonderful tale of romance and human fallibility a wonderful tale of romance, human fallibility, and random zombie attacks.

Who is Mark Twain? A collection of never-before-published short pieces by the American master himself, including some conversations with Satan and why Twain can't stand Jane Austen's writing (not the same essay).

An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, by Jane Collier, a writer who died twenty years before Austen was born. Here's an excerpt that may just make this book a must-read in your home as well:

"The practice of tormenting the body is not now, indeed, much allowed, except in some particular countries, where slavery and ignorance subsist: but let us not, my dear countrymen, regret the loss of that trifling branch of our power, since we are at full liberty to exercise ourselves in that much higher pleasure, the tormenting the mind."

I'm sorry, but that says "Happy Birthday" to me with a capital "Huh!"

Thanks again for all the lovely postings!