Sometimes people give lottery tickets to their friends for Christmas presents.
Sometimes, they win. Laura Bower got such a gift, but in all the holiday hubbub, she misplaced it.
It wasn't particularly lost, just in her house somewhere she couldn't remember. She wasn't urgently looking for it because hey, who really wins the Lotto 6/49 Extra anyway, right? Right?
Her roommate - daughter of the gift-giving friend - finally found the misplaced ticket during the first week of January. Bower was thankful but the numbers had already been drawn and the roommate had her own tickets to check, so Bower's roomie dialed up the information on her smartphone.
The results made the young roommate gasp. According to the unofficial phone notification, Bowers' ticket was a match for the Extra - the odds of getting all four numbers is one in 3.8 million. She insisted Bower get in the car right then and there, head to nearest lotto vendor and get verification.
"I had two, and I gave (the vendor) the first one, it wasn't a winner, and then I handed in the second one. I don't even know where the scream came from. It was getting checked, and I didn't even know where the screen was to follow along, but this 'winner' music started playing and (my roommate) was throwing her arms around me and I'm still looking around trying to figure out what's going on. I thought it was $10 or $20 but then I finally spotted the screen and I saw all these zeros. I started to breath hard and feel strange and my eyes started tearing up."
The Extra win was $500,000. Bower has had a roller coaster ride in her professional life. It's not the first time her bank account has had several decimal places to it, but she has also seen times when friends had to step in to help get her through. She has been part of business startups, but has also worked conventional office jobs. She's currently an employee of the Environmental Protection Division of the Ministry of Environment, and she hopes that will continue. Her win allows for some giggly shopping, for some financial stress to be finally relieved, but it also represents a need to be cautious with her winnings.
"I'll have some fun," she confirmed. "My luck has always been about learning life lessons, sometimes getting a re-do, and it might sound silly but I think that was preparing me for the responsibility I now have to be careful with my money."
Her favourite time of year has always been New Year's, she said. It's when life gets seen with renewal in mind, fresh starts, new goals, transitions are at the forefront of our thinking. She had just had a conversation with some co-workers about how 2017 was going to be better for her, she was focused on some goals she'd set for years and now was the time to check them off her life-list. "And I remember saying that worst case scenario was I'd win the lottery."
She said she had recently been feeling her life folding up like a flower at night, and she was allowing some big dreams to go to sleep. "Now I feel the flower suddenly burst open. My dreams are awake again."
