Lucky Me...

I am going to share something with you I don't talk about a lot... I am a very "lucky" person, and here's the crazy part... I inherited it from my father and Allison inherited it from me!!

I know a lot of you are shaking your heads right now and wondering what I could possibly mean by that, so I will explain. First of all, on one level I don't really understand it and my faith dictates that "luck" doesn't really exist since everything that happens is part of God's plan. Yet, I am very lucky in a few specific ways.

The one primary way I am "lucky" is in drawings of all kinds... Door prize, raffle, you name it... If it is something you put your name in for, I win an extraordinary amount of the time. A few years ago Paul kept track for one year and I won 69% of the time in drawings of all kinds! I entered every drawing and raffle we came across except the obvious "scam" drawings. (You know the ones, they have a motorcycle or 4-wheeler in the mall and/or movie theater and you enter then get called for carpet cleaning, etc...) Door prize style drawing I did the best at 83% wins... Larger raffles were 54% and 50/50 drawings were only 8%...

We also decided to test my abilities for the lottery... We decided about the third week of January of that year to do this and I bought a "quick pick mega bucks" ticket and won $2. I used it to buy another ticket and a $1 scratch ticket. I lost the lottery that week but won $5 on the scratch ticket. I bought one more lottery ticket and 4 more scratch tickets. I lost on all of the scratch tickets but won $150 that week on the lottery. We decided to hang onto $47 of that to buy lottery tickets for the remaining 47 weeks of the year. We put $50 towards scratch tickets and went out to dinner on the rest... That week we tried to let Paul pick half the scratch tickets and I picked the other half. I scratched them all... The ones I picked had a much higher "win" ratio then the ones he picked. (We didn't do the math on that for some reason.) Anyhow we kept the scratch ticket streak going until September when I thought I won $80 but actually won $800 and decided we were feeling uncomfortable with it so we quit the whole "lottery" experiment. You see, we had both been feeling uncomfortable with it for sometime... We were less and less thrilled with the up weeks and the down weeks left a bad taste in out mouth. I never invested anymore then that initial $1 in the experiment but sometimes it just "felt" wrong. We "won" enough that year to have to claim it on our taxes but never won "big" depending on your definition. We decided that we are okay with small drawings and raffles but the lottery wasn't for us.

I have won big prizes and small prizes... I won an entire cow one time, quilts THREE times, a scooter, 50 lbs of lobster, lifetime car washes, weekend getaways, gym memberships, a small BBQ grill, new dishes, a stereo and countless other items big and small.

Here is the thing... My father was the same way. People used to be amazed at how much he would win. His best friend told me years after he passed that if my father put his name in for a drawing he didn't bother because my dad would win. I don't know if he ever played the lottery but I know he had the same "lucky" experiences I do... AND Allison has the same "Luck". (Interestingly my brother isn't "lucky" like this and neither is Katy.) Allison goes with me to vendor fairs for Mary & Martha and they have raffles at all of them... We used to enter them but we were winning so much and so often it was getting embarrassing. Seriously, imagine that they are raffling off 25 items and Allison & I each put in four-ten tickets each (depending on how many you get for a few bucks) and win 2-4 prizes each... An average of  FOUR prizes per show at the first several shows we did... We now are very strategic about what we enter and how many tickets we put in...
Here is our winning from one vendor fair last fall...

Plus a Starbucks gift card that did not make it to back to the motel that night for it's photo op! We each bought the four tickets for $1 option... We both put our names on our own tickets but I let Allison decide what to enter for... She is sure she didn't enter for the necklace so we don't know how we won that. (It made a good "white elephant" gift at Christmas time!)

I do not know what "luck" is and why it seems to be hereditary... I don't pretend to understand any of this... You know how people say they "never win anything"... Well, I would guess that is because some of us win almost everything! So today I do not wish you the "Luck of the Irish" since looking at their history I am not sure they are all that lucky... Plus my father's family is mostly Scottish so today I wish you the "Luck of my family"!!


Thanks for listening,