Lucky last day of work

Today was the last workday of the school year. After work, Jamie, Karina and I headed to Applebees for a celebratory drink and I was telling them a couple cool things that had happened today in which two grading dilemmas worked themselves out in amazing ways. Jamie was remarking on how my life just seemed to work out in such ways, and I should really play the lottery. This suggestion was reinforced when the total for my bill came to 7.77. The girls insisted I go buy a lottery ticket immediately.

I never play the lottery and I had no idea how to go about it and asked Jamie to go with me. We burst into the store, giddy as two girls who are officially out of school (even though we are teachers) and who have high expectations of winning the lottery. I remarked that I had just missed a call from my dad, to which Jamie replied, "Don't tell him you are gambling." Little did she know how accurate she was -- my father is staunchly opposed to playing the lottery, or even playing games at the fair because he considers it gambling. (I just consider it a donation to the tax base.) "Oh, yeah," I agreed with Jamie, hitting the button to play dad's voicemail. Because my phone, for some ungodly reason, defaults voicemails to speaker phone, dad's voice suddenly blared out into the store, "Hey, sweetheart!" I hastily clicked off the speaker, and looked just in time to see a man chuckling with laughter. He had apparently been listening to us from the moment we walked in.

Anyway, Jamie helped me pick the ticket and told me I had to pick the numbers to keep the good "mojo." We have all three planned for years now that when one of us wins, we will retire the other two. Karina wants to open a bakery, Jamie wants to open a bar, and I want to be a writer, but I wouldn't mind owning a bookstore. One of our other colleagues recently speculated on how much money we could make by running a brothel which a good many students we know would willingly staff. With our four businesses combined, we could call it "Bakery, Books, Boobs and Beer." But one-stop shops tend to lack a specific ambience. And I would rather stay at home and write anyway.

So I told Jamie what a bad influence she was on me, bought my ticket, and returned to my truck to find the front driver window was down and won't come back up. I thought about this all the way home as the wind whipped my hair and roared annoyingly in my ears. Today was supposed to be about GOOD mojo. So why did my window break right when I bought a ticket? I brushed aside my misgivings and played the song Perfect Day by Hoku.

I probably won't win the lottery tomorrow, but today it was fun pretending I will. Either way, I have to get my window fixed. But if you think about it, it broke on my last day of work, so I have plenty of time to get it fixed. That's pretty lucky.