Earthquakes … and winners!!!!

Well folks, this has been quite the exciting day!

First, I had a very real life experience of being 18 floors above the ground during a 5.0 earthquake.  YIKES!!  If you hadn’t heard, we in Ottawa were quite close to the epicentre of an earthquake centered in western Quebec (A on the map below). 

As I was working away at my day job in IT, about halfway up a 27 storey office building in downtown Ottawa, the floor began to shake, then shake a little more, then the walls and pictures began to visibly shake.  It lasted only a few seconds but was certainly scary!  Having only experienced earthquakes from the first floor of my little bungalow years ago, this was certainly a new aspect to earthquakes – not one I’d like to relive thank you very much!!!

I quickly tried to check in with hubby and daughters one and two, but land and wireless lines were either down or overloaded.  It is interesting to note though, that Twitter carried the news at record speed – I even tweeted my experience (@donnahargrove) and checked in with my many twitter pals to make sure they were OK.  Eventually, contact was made with family and all was OK – phew!!!  And when we arrived home everything was as it should be and the pups were safe and sound.

And then after all of my daytime excitement, tonight I get to draw the winner of my very first blog giveaway!  I was so lucky to have connected with Jane from The Earring Lady on Etsy to put this giveaway together.  If you missed the giveaway, please give Jane’s Etsy shop a gander – she does beautiful work!  Thank you so much Jane!!!

And now I know you are wondering about who the lucky winner is, aren’t you? Patience my friends, patience…

In order to randomly select the winner, I printed out the comments and numbered them as seen here:

Then I went to www.random.org to use their true random number generator.  I entered from 1 to 44 and clicked on “Generate” to select the lucky winner.

Drum roll please…………………………………  

And our winner is…..

Nancy of Marcus Designs!!!  Congratulations Nancy!  From Nancy’s previous comment she selected the Turquoise Briolettes as her favourites.  Aren’t they gorgeous?  Great choice Nancy!

Congratulations again Nancy – I know you will love these beauties!

Thank you to everyone who took the time to enter the giveaway!  Hosting my first giveaway was fun and I will definitely do it again, so stay tuned!!!