So I spent, seriously, twenty hours this weekend making out with a random number generator, going through the blogs registered on nablopomo.com to find people who had updated their blogs thirty days in a row without fail so I could award them some pretty felt Christmas ornaments, or a Barnes & Noble gift certificate, or a lovely homemade scarf*. And despite the fact that I now need double-prescription reading glasses and a family-size bottle of Tylenol, the whole thing went pretty smoothly and was actually kind of fun. I'd been so wrapped up during the month of November that this weekend was my first chance to surf around and check out the blogs of people who were doing NaBlo. I am here to tell you that I have seen some of the most unreadable page layouts known to planet Earth; I have come away with a curious sense of appreciation for all the Christian bloggers who made the blogging promise and boy did they stick to it; I have bookmarked dozens of posts to go back and read later and steal all the links. Overall I'm just really impressed by the number of people who didn't think it was a dumb idea to pour more content into the Internet, and who made an effort to make sure that a lot of it was truly worth reading. I would have liked to have seen more cat pictures, though. Get on that, Internet!
*Right from the start I made a deal with myself that no matter how wrong the prize seemed for the person for whom fate had assigned it, I would give it to them, I would not assume that a brazenly childfree blogger would scoff at being awarded a baby sling because maybe they'd been looking for months for the perfect gift for their sister's grad-school roommate's pregnant girlfriend and who was I to interfere with the gushing rapids of unfettered prosperity? And thus a blogger named Joe ended up winning a hand-knitted purse.