and the winner is....

ME!!!!

I am the proud new owner of $7! That's right....I have two $1 bills and one $5 that are perfectly crumpled and reeking of smoke. Ahhh, the smell of gambling in the morning.

Last night I stayed up until 11:15pm trying to figure out what channel the powerball numbers were being shown on. (the late bedtime would explain why I was 30 minutes late to work this morning. oh wait, no...i'm pretty much late every morning.) While we were waiting for the clock to strike 10:59pm, there some last minute negotiations on splitting the winnings. Josh decided he wanted $100 if I won more than $500. I told him that I would give him $250 if I won $500...but that was mostly because I was trying to put some good karma out to the world in the last 30 seconds before drawing happened. I actually had an internal monologue going on the whole time...."if I win $100 I'll keep it to myself, but man if I were entrusted with like $1000 or $5000 I'd give some away...and I'd give a ton away to poor people and orphans and puppies if I got like $100,000 or so...." The crazy part is that I thought this kind of internal moral argument/pleading with God would actually help me win the lottery.

We finally figured out what channel we needed to watch and we tried to read the cards. I started getting confused after about, oh 3.4 seconds or so and let Josh figure out how many millions of dollars I won. I had a bunch of numbers that were matching up, but there weren't enough of them to make a win. We were thinking that I'd won either $3 or $7 (seriously, the lottery is kind of difficult to figure out) but we were both secretly hoping that we'd win big when they scanned our cards in.

This morning the lady at the cash station scanned my cards and I waited, holding my breath, to see how much money I won. When the screen said "$7" and I took my money from the cashier, Josh said loudly, "Its ok Blair. Its like you won double. You won all those lottery tickets and now you won $7!" When we got outside I asked Josh why he had acted so awkward in front of the lottery lady. He said, "I just didn't want people to think we wasted $50 on lottery tickets and got excited about wining $7." That's right. My husband was worried we were being judged by the folks in the gas station....that were buying several cartons of cigarettes and beer.

So there it is folks. The story of my big big lottery win. And seriously, I guess $7 is a lot....to maybe people in Africa or my 3 year-old cousin. I think I'm going to go get a coffee drink later and tip big. After all, isn't that what the rich people do?