I'm a Winner! YAY!!!

It's all in the way you look at things. But there's also the day when you get an email or a letter telling you that you're a winner. So what if somebody in SD won that $222 million dollar PowerBall lottery prize, right? I'm a winner!

A couple of weeks ago we were all feeling pretty low here in the House of All Sports, All the Time because The Sports Fan is laden with casts to help his body heal and that the worst of his injuries cannot be put into a cast and because our beloved little car is no more. We've had enough from this year. First our Chance got sick, then The Senior Sports Fan died, then Chance died, Chicster had to move back home, and I didn't even dare to think about what else could go wrong because fate is clearly a really creative bastard. Then I got the call from The Sports Fan that he'd been in a car accident and was going to the hospital. He'd call when he knew which one.

So Nana and I got ready to leave the house when we got the call. I knew it couldn't be less than a half hour so I decided to get some things on my to-do list taken care of. C&T Publishing was having a monthly challenge. All I had to do was to submit some of my work in a certain theme to be eligible to win. I had the work done and I already had photos. So I wrote an email and put in links to the work in question that were already on my Flickr page. Then the hospital called and we were off, the contest and everything else forgotten while we went to see how badly The Sports Fan was injured.

These are pages from Keri's Pet Project, 101 Uses for a Dog, starring Tia and Bailey.

To my surprise, the very next day I got an email from one of C&T's editors suggesting that I upload those photos to their Flickr group for the challenge. I did it right away because once again, I was waiting for something to happen so that I could go see my Sports Fan in the hospital. That waiting on contingencies is what I really hate. So it's important to me to find stuff to do.

The next day, another email came. I'd won their random drawing and could I send my snail mail address and a better JPG of the winner.

The winning photo is my page from JoAnn White's book, featuring her cat, Punky.

6 ATCs for a swap on TreasureArtTrends, featuring Keri's Tia and Bailey, and Tammy's Clarice. The outlines were traced to make them easy to reproduce then each line was gone over with a fine Pitt pen and colored in with watercolor.

Then two weeks later, I got an ominous-looking letter in the mail. It looked like it was from a lawyer's office! It turned out to be from a marketing firm that was running a contest for Safeway. I'd won 3rd prize in a contest and would receive a $100 gift card for Safeway!

Oh sure, it isn't the $222 million from Wednesday's Powerball Lottery. But when it comes to feeling like a winner, all you need is to be TOLD that you're a winner to feel like 222 million bucks!