Lucky Day

Yesterday was a pretty lucky/blessed day for me.  Perhaps some of you don't know it, but I live on a shoestring budget, if I can even call it that.  If there is anyone who knows how to stretch a penny, I'm the Stretch-a-Penny Queen.  I don't work outside my home for a number of reasons, number one would probably be, because I don't want to, close at second would be that I've become a recluse and don't think that I could deal with being around idiotic people just because I want to pay my bills, three would be, because I have to be on call when my child's school calls so that I can come mediate a situation that has occurred and fourth, if I'm sitting on someone elses clock, I might miss out on all the golden opportunities that await me out in the "free" world, waiting for me to discover them. 

So I choose to stretch the pennies that I receive through child support, my SMALL secretarial business and the money my boogie makes.  Collectively, they take care of our basic needs.  Any extra money is a surplus and I stretch that too.  Yesterday while hanging out with my mom, she purchased us some scratch offs.  Sometimes we win a few bucks, most times we don't.  It's a game of luck for sure and although there are a lot of lucky people out there, Lady Luck has only shown up a few times to give us anything worth talking about.  So she purchased herself two tickets and then gave me two dollars to purchase two for me.  I purchased the same two that she had purchased.  I get home with my house cleaning products and hand the tickets to my boogie.  He scratches them off, "Hey baby, we won eight dollars!" he exclaimed.  We were going out later that evening and the extra eight bucks would be used instead of going into our budgeted funds.  So we decide we're going to spend some of the money on a couple of personal beers for the party that we're about to attend; the rest was spent on another scratch off.  Lady Luck must have been in the area cause from a three dollar ticket, fifteen dollars was won.  I sit in the truck while my sweetie goes in to cash the tickets.  If Lady Luck was in the area, he figured that she might not be finished with us.  So he took five of the fifteen and bought a ticket labeled, Pure Gold.  Now let me tell you, we have bought so many one buck tickets that were losers, with our luck last night, we were just getting paid back. 

My sweetie sat scratching off the Pure Gold ticket and with the second number 36 scratched off, he knew we were going to be winners.  The number 25 appeared several times as well.  By the time he finished scratching off several more 36s and a few more 25s, our total winnings were $100 bucks.  We both went back into the store to claim OUR winnings.  After getting back into our truck, my baby turns to me and hands me $50 dollars.  He had a broad smile on his face.  Waiting for the spring season to start so that he can start his barbecue business has been draining on him.  Although he does odd jobs with a construction worker from time to time and helps the "Tree Man" when he calls, he does not have a steady income.  Not being able to provide on a consistent basis can take it's toll on a man's ego.  Handing me the $50 dollars and telling me to get me something nice, I'm sure made him feel like he had handed me a thousand dollars.  To me, it was a million dollars. 

I'll take the money and buy a nice outfit to wear to the Black History Month program, next week.  You know I've got to look snazzy because it's at Fourteen Year Old's school.  I can't be standing all in front of people looking like I'm not the mom of the school's star seventh grade football team.  I've got to represent, at least that's what Fourteen Year Old says.  Thanks to Lady Luck, I'll be able to buy something for myself and not feel guilty.  After all, it wasn't taken out of our shoestring budget, Lawd knows that budget's pennies are already stretched to the limit.  So thank you Lady Luck for gracing us with your presence yesterday, we look forward to you dropping a bigger load on us, in the near future.  Until next time..."Live your life by loving yourself."