In Case You're Interested

Here's how the magic happens at contest HQ.

As nominations come in, the name of the nominee and the nominator(s) go onto an index card.  Since I gave him away as one of my entrants the other day, here's an example:

Yes, that's a coloring book underneath.  You relax your way, and I'll relax mine.

This is the stack for this year.  Eighty-two entries!

Each name is then transferred to a slip of paper, folded, and placed in a bowl,  

First, the seeds are placed in the bracket.  Then, a blind draw gets one slip of paper out at a time, and the rest of the names are put in.  I usually just move up and down and back and forth, to make things truly random.  This year, with so many entries, the bracket took two pages:

This necessitated moving the operation from my desk to the kitchen table.

Once the brackets are filled, I go back to the cards

to make sure no one's picks are matched up in the first round.

The process becomes highly secretive at this point.  Tap makes a periodic sweep of the perimeter here to be sure there are no spies afoot.  He got really excited about a squirrel in the front yard a few minutes ago; it took a while to convince him that Squirrels' Companion is a completely different deal and that we're okay.

Voting starts tomorrow!