Hi cousins, YIPPEE!!! HOORAYYY!!! WE DID IT!!! WE WON!!!! (clap, clap, clap, jumpa, jumpa, jumpa)!!! *much merriment and whistle-blowing here!* We did it, uh huh ... we won, uh huh ... we did it, uh huh ... we won ..., uh huh ... It was a close one this time, but we did it ... we actually pulled off the win! Whew! We came close to not, but the win is ours and we can now scream loudly ... **** WE ARE THE BEST!!!! **** (big smiles accompany this!) Okay, Colleen's making great effort and strides to calm down a little here ... YEAAAAYYYYYY!!!!! Our team effort pulled us through not one, not two, but THREE ... COUNT'EM ... THREE competitions against other sites!! Can you just believe this??? When you see our scores, I don't think YOU'RE going to believe it! I told you all that the judges were instructed to rate very harshly ... and we were ~ EXTREMELY HARD. We didn't sweep the fields this time, _tying_ for 2nd in content and taking 2nd in navigation. However, we did take a perfect ten on typos. But, our scores were much lower than we might have expected. You can all see everything for yourselves at <http://members.aol.com/whopbof2/2000yearly.html>. When looking at the page, you'll see 4 groups. The black and the blue groups were judged hardest; the purple and green a little easier because they are children's groups. I want to thank all of you so, so much for standing with me in this, helping, pushing and prodding me along, and especially for all the encouragement when I started wavering. I have many of you to thank for checking and double checking links and graphics...... Notice the perfect 10? This is in major part due to the abilities of our editor-in-chief, Lynne Ranieri <[email protected]>. She, in the last two hours before midnight EST on Monday, 4 September, was once again editing our home and sending me more messages. Did you notice that we had the quickest load time even though our Christmas pages are heavy with graphics? Thank Barbara Bower <[email protected]> for her astute artistic observations. I had so many revisions on some of those graphics that I was beginning to see double! :) After a first team swept through our home checking links, Molly <aka GrandMolly at [email protected]> spent two days checking every, single link on every, single page by herself and found that more links had broken. Getting the winning number of votes: Cousins were notifiying other lists; one cousin (she asked to remain anonymous) garnered us 163 votes by herself; many of us notified everyone in our address books ... and from there people were getting their friends, relatives and coworkers causing our single efforts to spider out ~ double and sometimes tripling our single efforts. The numbers of teams who went in all year long just after both moves and right before the competitions .... so many people .... A lot of cousins pulled this one off ... and we all did it together as one body, one team, one unified effort, one FAMILY. Frankly, I am in awe of us. We may not know each other on the street, but cousins, there is NO discussion group on the Web that can call itself a family more than we can. This year we truly made a mark and "strutted our stuff!" :) I have so much pride in all of you and in us as a family that if I had a loudspeaker connected to the Web I might blow people's monitors out! You are such an utterly amazing and fantastic group of people. But then, I've known it all along .... :) I take unbounded extreme pride in calling you cousins .... family. Thank you again, all of you. YIIIPPPPPPEEEEE!!!!! (jumpa, jumpa, jumpa) Colleen