{"id":6501,"date":"2016-01-13T21:48:23","date_gmt":"2016-01-14T02:48:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/?p=6501"},"modified":"2019-05-15T13:50:06","modified_gmt":"2019-05-15T17:50:06","slug":"how-i-won-the-lottery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/?p=6501","title":{"rendered":"How I won the lottery"},"content":{"rendered":"

I almost didn’t buy a lottery ticket for the $1.5 billion Powerball. Good thing I changed my mind!<\/p>\n

Normally I don’t buy lottery tickets. Why should I?<\/p>\n

Didn’t need it. As I’ve often told people, I won the lottery already.<\/p>\n

At birth.<\/p>\n

I was born healthy, with two loving healthy parents and three loving healthy sisters.<\/p>\n

Our house was warm in the winter and cool in the summer and it had indoor plumbing and safe water.<\/p>\n

I grew up in a green, quiet, peaceful neighborhood, with pure clean air. I explored freely in the woods and creek without any worries.<\/p>\n

There were no land mines in the yard or down the street.<\/p>\n

I was born into a free country with all basic human rights guaranteed to me and well-established by law and jury.<\/p>\n

I went to school every day and got a solid foundation in reading, writing, math, science, social studies, and morality. No one tried to bully me, hurt me, or make me drop out of school.<\/p>\n

I didn’t have to work until I was a teenager.\u00a0My parents expected me to go to college, and they taught me to save money from the time I was five years old.<\/p>\n

I was allowed to pursue whatever interested me. I was taken on road trips and saw most of the states in America before I was 12.<\/p>\n

I don’t know how to calculate the likelihood that a person born on this planet in 1959 would have all those advantages, but it must be pretty slim.<\/p>\n

All of those things were handed to me.\u00a0I was born, I got my ticket, and I had all of that life of opportunity just waiting for me to spend.<\/p>\n

So normally, I don’t buy lottery tickets. It seemed like pushing my luck.<\/p>\n

This week, I was thinking about the odds of surviving \u00a0a ruptured brain aneurysm, alone at home in a remote rural area. Also very lucky.<\/p>\n

That’s why I bought the winning ticket for tonight’s Powerball drawing.<\/p>\n

Even though I don’t have a business plan for it, I know that when I win that Powerball, I’ll spend the money in ways nobody’s seen before.<\/p>\n

I’ll do things with it that would make a lot more people lucky\u00a0– in places where nobody has ever been lucky.<\/p>\n

Today’s penny is a 1976. That’s the year Dad won the Ohio lottery – $100,000.<\/p>\n

Luck runs in families.<\/p>\n

\"1976<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I almost didn’t buy a lottery ticket for the $1.5 billion Powerball. Good thing I changed my mind! Normally I don’t buy lottery tickets. Why should I? Didn’t need it. As I’ve often told people, I won the lottery already. At birth. I was born healthy, with two loving healthy parents and three loving healthy … read more How I won the lottery<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6504,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[319],"tags":[418,555,95,558,556,557],"class_list":["post-6501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inheritance","tag-418","tag-lottery","tag-luck","tag-lucky","tag-winner","tag-winning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6501"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6508,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6501\/revisions\/6508"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}