Lucky Day

So Phil comes home from work and has dinner with all of us. We all finish, and he hands me a card, that of course makes me cry. Inside is a scratch-off lottery ticket.

Wait. Let me back up first.

He starts the story that he's walking to work from the train downtown. It's rather windy (you know, Windy City and all), and he sees a $5 land on top of his shoe. He looks around to see if anyone is frantically looking for their lost money. Nope.

So he picks it up, and finishes walking to work.

On the lower floor of his building is a convenience-type store. He used to buy scratch-off lottery tickets regularly, but then we just didn't have the budget for it. He figured with this new-found money, he'd purchase one. He normally gets the $3 crossword scratch-off for me--I enjoy a challenge and would rather have the game last longer than a quick rub with a coin. Anyway, he decided on the $5 crossword scratcher.

Work was very busy for him yesterday. He didn't even have a chance to eat until after 1. At that point he decided he wanted to play the ticket instead of giving it to me (which was my first complaint to him!).

And this is what was in the card he gave me:

The winning ticket.

In the fine print, it says that if you match 7 words on each crossword, you win $500. And that's what he did. He crossed off 7 words on each square for a grand total of $1,000! I couldn't believe it! Of course then I teased him and said that I thought he bought it for me. And that since he won all this money, all he bought me was a mushy card. But he knew I was kidding.

He went during lunch today to cash it--you have to go to a certain place since it's over $601. And of course Uncle Sam wants his part of the pie, so after taxes (look, we're stimulating the economy!), we took home $870. And yes, I said we. Now what to spend it on.....