I am not, at heart, a gambler. (I am also not a diarist, as this is my first.) And while this may be my last diary, I don't think I've gambled my last. My corner drug store started a Game of Life(TM) contest the end of January in which you could win prizes ranging from $20.00 to $250,000.00. As I'm on disability from aortic stenosis (leaky aortic valve) and bi-polar disorder, extra money is always something I can use and I decided to win some. (Well, $250.000.00)
Please follow to see if I won or lost.
To play, you must first get a little game board that has pictures of various items on it. You then get game "tickets" that are about an inch and a half wide and an inch long. When you open the ticket, on the right are four perforated segments with parts of pictures and numbers on them. On the left is either a prize or money off products sold at the store.
So on the first day I get my game board and two tickets. You can get tickets by purchasing products or medicine from the store. If you buy just anybody's old toilet paper, you get one ticket. If you purchase the store's brand, you get two tickets. I have never bought so many Rite Aid products in my life.
I get home and go to my office. It's actually a part of our garage when my brother-in-law and I go to smoke. (I'm not a GUSer yet.) I sit down with my game board to check out the prizes before excitedly opening my first two tickets. The prizes are: a $20.00 gift card from Rite Aid or $20.00. The same for fifty dollars. Then there's $100.00 and $250.00 prizes. There's a Wii system my seven year old grandson wants. He and his mother, my thirty-four year old daughter, are living with us at the moment while her husband is in training to go to Afghanistan. Then there are prizes of $1,000.00, $5,000.00, $10,000.00, $25,000.00 and the above-mentioned $250,000.00. There is also a 2010 G37 Infiniti convertible, which I could really use as I have no car.
Okay, so now I go to open my game tickets and of course, I've got four matches already from the right-hand side of the ticket. My slate is no longer clean and I'm closer to winning $250,000.00 dollars. Well, not really as I don't have any pictures and numbers for that prize, but I'm closer to winning something. On the left hand side of the ticket is printed, "25 cents" off Scott Paper Towels, Six Pack Only. Well, I can't afford those, so I throw the left-hand side away. My next tickets has me adding four new pictures and numbers and gives me another 25 cents off some other product. I'm through for today, but tomorrow will come soon enough.
And there ensued many days of running to Rite Aid, grabbing my tickets and running home to my office to smoke another cigarette and see if I won anything. I got close to being close. And then I open a ticket and on the left is, "Instant Winner! of $5.00." I think I'm already ahead of the game.
If it sounds as if all I did was run to the store and open tickets, I will tell you I did more. I live with my sister who is seventy-five and is in kidney failure and her eighty-three year old husband who is disabled from the end stages of emphysema and is blind and has other disabilities from flying over a hundred missions in and living in Vietnam. He is also of the age he was able to fly at the end of the second World War and Korea, but supposedly nothing happened in those wars like Agent Orange to cause disabilities. We're a motley crew, as my daughter who lives here has a brain tumor and we're all on disability, and we're a happy lot and this game is making me even happier. Even though I take care of everyone, I still did in between opening tickets.
After about three weeks into the game the cashiers at the store started giving me loads of tickets as it seems people didn't want them. I'd come home with a pocket full and spend hours opening them and sticking them on my game board. In the end I won Kendall gauze, which came in handy because my sister just had knee surgery and we needed them. My light went out on my computer desk just after I won a $6.39 energy saver light bulb. I won a Conair curling iron which my daughter can surely use, a box of Ritz crackers, Ocean Spray Cranberry Juice and was just one away from winning every prize and they began giving me more than a pocket full of tickets, they were throwing tickets in sacks and giving them to me. And then the day came I won a $20.00 gift card from Rite Aid. In all I won that and $19.00 and all the other prizes I mentioned. And I sure became a gambler. The last day of the contest, I devised a quick way to open tickets and was madly going at it when I sent my daughter to the store to get some medicine for my sister and more tickets. And that was how it ended. Not with a bang, but with no more tickets left. And I withdrew. I had spent a month opening tickets as fast as I could get them and now there were no more tickets. And wthdrawal wasn't very nice. I actually snapped at people, and like I said, we're a pretty happy little crew.
And I found out if I'm not careful, I could really be a gambler. You won't see me flying to Las Vegas or anything, but I sure hope somebody soon has another contest.