A thousand reasons to blog

Today started as pretty much every Saturday starts, okay maybe not quite every Saturday, I was a bit slower getting things underway than usual, not leaving my place until 12:30pm or so, but then the schedule pretty much fell into form.  I first went to Gus Miller's, checked to see which instant tickets I needed, emptied the bill collectors, then went to Smithfield News.  Once there I repeated the process with our instant ticket machine, none of the tickets were empty so I just had to empty the bill collector.  I counted the money from both stores, then grabbed the tickets to refill the machines at Gus Miller's and hopped a bus back to reload the machine.  Good thing I did because between the time I was first there and me coming back one of the bill collectors jammed, so I had to fix the machine as well.



I got everything done, once again headed back to Smithfield, a trip that was more challenging because the Pitt students were also starting to make their way downtown for the upcoming Pitt - Notre Dame football game later at Heinz Field.  I did make it back though and proceeded to do the rest of the week's invoices, pull some stuff upstairs from the basement that needed to be on the floor, rearranged some freezers and put out new products, did my price changes and did the grocery order.

The fun part was when I headed out for the day, I bought a couple of scratch off tickets, truth be told I bought about $50 worth on the day, but my last paycheck had 123 hours on it, so I could afford to buy a few tickets, but it was the last two I bought that were important. I had gathered my stuff, grabbed a couple things to eat tonight and bought two $5 scratch off tickets.  One of the two happened to look like this

I was scratching it off as I was walking to the bus stop, so I was about a block from the store when I realized that I had just won $500, I walked back to see if I could cash it in, though I knew the chance we would have $500 in lottery sales on a Saturday wasn't very good.  I asked Brian anyway, but my thinking was correct, so I was about to leave when Ed came in, he was telling me that we could cash it, and we could have, we could have used the money I took from the machines earlier and put it back later, but it would have created a mess with paperwork, balancing lottery reports and what not, so I said not to bother, I could cash it on my way home.   There is a CVS right up the street from where I live, they sell lottery tickets and they also cash winners, so I figured I would just stop there on the way home.

I hop a bus to come home, the bus ride was somewhat unpleasant as it involved sharing transportation space with drunken college students, but that is just life in the big city I guess.  Anyway, I get to my stop, hop off the bus and go into CVS to cash the ticket.  They machine they have is all touch screen, so you actually scan your ticket and the machine then prints a voucher for the amount you won and then take the voucher up to the lottery terminal to be redeemed.  Well before I got a voucher, I used the $500 in credit I had and bought another $100 in tickets, 2 $20, 2 $10 and 8 $5 tickets.   That is when this happened

Yes, one of the $20 tickets also hit for $500.  I hit on a few of the $5 tickets too, so all told on the $100 investment I ended up winning $535.  I haven't cashed any of those yet, that will give me something to do tomorrow, perhaps I will do something cool with the money, I haven't decided yet.

I do know the first thing I will be doing though, my aunt and I are going to breakfast in the morning, so I better try and get a little bit of sleep before that happens.