I cashed in my winning lottery ticket. I am $8.00 richer.
The ticket was from a drawing eight weeks ago. That I hadn’t checked my numbers in eight weeks without a doubt says something about my lack of confidence in winning.
Also, I had no idea how the cashing in process worked. It also says something about my lack of confidence in winning that I hadn’t even asked how the cashing-in process worked.
It is so simple. The clerk at PLC put it in the machine and up popped the amount I had won. It was amazing to me how wonderful it felt when she laid that 5-dollar bill and three 1-dollar bills in my hand. Delicious is the closest word I can come up with. The feel of those bills in my hand, the emotional charge of winning, was delicious.
I still haven’t decided what to do with my windfall, so I had to decide where to put the money while I dealt with this decision. If I put it in the can with my losing lottery tickets it would just be spent on the next tickets. If I put it in my regular account it would disappear on things like milk and hamburgers and the electric bill.
It absolutely says something about my lack of confidence in winning that I had no plan for what to physically do with the physical cash. I ended up writing “Winnings” on a plain white envelope, putting the money in it and slipping it in an old hymn book at the hymn “Count Your Blessings.” Here’s hoping God has a sense of humor. I’m pretty sure God does. After all this is the god that created the duck-billed platypus. Anyway, I am going to put any other winnings in the same place until this whole blog series is complete and then decide what to do.
Of the many things I have learned about myself during this whole lottery blog thing, the most humbling is that I put off decision making. I put off making decisions for a ridiculous long time.
But here is one decision I am making right now: this is the end of this blog post.