Hucky Puck!

Have I ever told you I am considered to be a lucky person? I don't consider it "luck" because things happen way too frequently to make it a chance occurrence but I have this habit of more often than not winning things. Weird?

Just in the last two weeks I have attended two functions that have have lucky door prizes or raffles. Now I don't usually win things in raffles, after years of buying tickets in them I had resigned myself to the fact that if I had to pay to enter a draw then my karma driven rewards just didn't come to me.

Anyway a week or so ago was Atomic Live05. Apart from having a lucky door prize for those people that stayed right to the end there was also a booth that had an entry box for filling out a small form. You could enter as many times as you liked and many people did. I entered once.

Come the awards ceremony (which was hosted by one of my heroes Dr Karl ) _Haunt_ says the magic words to me "so what are you going to win today?" He's said this many times to me and I always seem to reply "it's not like that!" But he has the ultimate confidence that yes I will win something, I on the other hand feel that winning is some spiritual thing that occurs because I have my senses totally opened to possibilities, or maybe it is because ...look I don't really know. It just happens, and too often for it to be chance (though _Haunt_ will argue that!).

So yeah the names start being called for the prizes and I win a new graphics card(which I will now need to build a whole PC around as I didn't have a PCI Express compatible motherboard yay!). One entry in 100's and I snag a prize. I got to kiss my hero!

Then they draw the lucky door prizes and I win a double pass to the after party (free booze and food) and as I was already going I was able to make 2 people happier by giving them the tickets.

Fast forward to last night and the NSW Astronomical Society's Christmas dinner. I have a bit of a history of winning things from the astronomical society. _HaunT_ and I's first 'date' was to go to their long weekend star party. I won second prize in the lucky door draw, a telescope mount. The next year I won first prize, $3000+ of telescope (mind you last year I won nothing :)

As the function was in a small country club and there wasn't much to do and I haven't played the poker machines in many years, I dragged _HaunT_ ( a bit of a pokie hater) in for a go. We walked out to dinner $125 richer. Sitting at our table we bumped into people we were sitting with the year before and got chatting. _HaunT_ had already asked me what I was going to win, and I had explained again that as the raffle tickets for the night were bought then I wouldn't win anything. I had bought 6 tickets (@3 for $20) because we had won on the pokies and could afford to buy 3 more than I was going to originally.

First prize was a telescope and no I did not win that (nor did I expect to because of my prior track record). Second prize was a pair of German binoculars and bingo! Up came one of our ticket numbers. Yay! Then third prize was drawn which was the choice of one of two beautifully framed star pictures and yep, you guessed it, me again. I chose the picture of the trifid galaxy (see below!) but the picture is much nice than what you see here.

I don't know why it happens, this winning thing, it just does. I have been buying Boystown Art Union tickets for over 6 years now and not won a cracker. I saw that as one of my charitable donations because I never won anything where you had to buy into it. But maybe now things have changed...!