I Typed Smugly With Glee When I Found Three Pennies and a $100 Lottery Winner in One Week...and Then I Met a Woman (In the Mirror) Who Found a $1000 Winner

Some of you seem to think I'm lucky. I THINK YOU'RE RIGHT!

Saturday, I bought a $1000 winning ticket! Never mind that I'd already found three pennies for the week, and bought a $100 winner on Thursday! Same kind of ticket, too. Here's a pic of the whole thing. You know, to prove it happened.

Because there's nothing people like to read about more than a winning lottery ticket they didn't find, unless it's the step-by-step details of not-their win, I will elaborate.

I scratch my tickets in order, left to right, top row to bottom row. I don't bother to uncover the prize unless I have a match. I was thrilled to have a winner on the last space. Even more thrilled that it was a 5X symbol. I was excited, because I knew I'd won $25. That's what I expected it to be.

I scratch off the prize from right to left. To see the zeros. I can tell by where they are if they're going to be a $5 prize, or maybe a $10, $15, $20, or $25 on the other side of the little zeros and the decimal. But this one had BIG ZEROS! So I took my picture right then. Prolonging my excitement. At that point, I was thinking I had another $100 winner, TIMES 5!

Imagine my SHOCK to find $200 for the prize! Everybody knows that 5 X $200 is $1000! Except Hick, who looked at it, and and said, "You won TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS?" He's still a little jealous that I had the $100 winner a couple days ago. Then he put aside his peeved-ness, looked closer, and said, "Does that mean five times? That's a THOUSAND! You won a THOUSAND dollars!"

Yes. Yes I did.

Let the record show that my buying schedule was off. I got this big winner at the Sis-Town Casey's. I'm usually there on Fridays, between 11:00 and noon. This week, I didn't go, because of the forecast of freezing rain that never materialized. So I needed to get to the bank, and stop for gas, on Saturday instead. I left home at the stroke of 11:00, to get my bank business done before it closed at noon.

Of course when you're on a schedule, stuff happens. The bridge was flooded again, so I had to go the longer way. A car in front of me stopped dead in the road. I don't know why. I'm don't follow too closely, so I didn't hit it. I just had to wait until it was ready to drive again. No idea what was going on. Lost, maybe, because of the flooding, and taking another route.

On the road in front of the bowling alley, a truck was stopped in the road. Seriously. I never encounter road-stoppers. But within two miles, I had two! That truck made a T-turn after I went by.

Since my plans had already been altered, I decided to pull into the cemetery on the way by. I hadn't made my weekly visit, and a few more minutes wouldn't hurt. On from there, I was in the home stretch for the bank. Less than a mile away. When I saw flashing lights up ahead.

They were the flashers on a little gray sedan. As I got closer, I saw that it was NOT stopped in the road, but was moving at about 10 mph. It was the follow-car for a guy driving a yellow forklift. I DON'T KNOW! It's the first forklift I've encountered in traffic. I don't know what makes them run, but it had something on the back that looked like a keg of beer. Surely not. Must have been fuel. I forgot to ask Hick about it.

Anyhoo...I got to the bank, but all the parking spots were full. By ALL, I mean the 10 spaces in their parking lot. So I went around back to the drive-thru, where each of the two open lanes had two cars already waiting. I made the right choice, which was the right lane. That car drove off in no time, and I put in my deposit for The Pony's account, $15.65 to replace money he'd used to pay his credit card. We make him use it for gas, and pay it off every month, to build credit.

Anyhoo...since I couldn't go inside, I couldn't break a twenty from my weekly allowance that I'd set aside for getting two fives, a roll of dimes, two rolls of nickels, and two rolls of pennies. They won't send out more than two coin rolls in the canister thingy. So...I decided I had enough change for the week, and that I'd use that twenty on scratchers.

I was conflicted on whether I wanted four $5 tickets, or a $10 ticket and two $5s. In fact, I was still debating as I walked inside to pay for T-Hoe's gas. Still deciding as I looked at the ticket case. I went with four of the $5 tickets. This BIG WINNER was my 3rd choice. I figured that since I'd already won $100 on that kind of ticket this week, my odds were low of another winner, even if it was from a different store. If I'd gotten a ten and two fives, I wouldn't have my BIG WINNER.

This ticket is one I've been buying for about six weeks. I looked on the molottery.com website for the December winners, and saw several $1000 winners on this ticket. I don't believe their winners are totally random, because every month, you'll see a cluster of big wins in different towns, and the same one or two tickets will be the winners. THAT'S why I'd been playing this ticket, not because of the second chance on the back, or just because I like the older tickets. Unfortunately, I'd had about a dozen of those tickets win NOTHING. But I kept buying them, and got my $100 winner to break the losing streak on them.

Not sure if I'll keep buying them now. Maybe until the end of the month, when I see a new winning pattern from January.

Yes. I know there's no way to tell if a ticket is going to be a winner, or where that winner will show up. Of course I DO buy a lot of tickets. But I seem to have more luck than anyone else I know.