I just win stuff.

No, really, it's true. I just won something else...and it started when I was a kid.

But I digress. Cory turned me on to a site devoted to various authors (mostly authoresses, actually), one of whom is one of her most favorites, and I recently signed up for a contest that they had at Halloween to win one of a number of novels for free.

Two days later, the authoress of the book I'd won emailed to let me know I'd won "A Virgin River Christmas," by her (Robyn Carr), and she was putting it in the mail. I got it today. It just made the NY Times Bestseller list. And Robyn's interested in my opinion once I finish it. Awesome.

But that's not the first time something like this has happened.

When I was quite young, my folks had taken us to Disneyland and they had this big promotion going on stretching from the teacups to Small World with all these "fair" games. You had to pay to play them, kinda like over in CA Adventure now, but my parents didn't want to fork over the cash. I begged and begged and begged, and they tried to explain that it was akin to betting, and that I wouldn't win...we'd just be out the few bucks to play. I begged and begged some more, and they decided to teach me a lesson. They relented, handed over the cash, and I chose the ring-around-the-bottle tossing game while they sat bag smugly, waiting for me to lose.

On the first toss I ringed one of those puppies. And what was my reward? A puppy. A giant stuffed dog that was quite literally as big as I was. In fact, I had to sit by myself on the Matterhorn and belt my enormous puppy in in front of me. And because it was so huge, my dad had to carry it out of the park for me. Heehee.

But that was a fluke, right? We moved on to another game because my sister wanted a turn. It was a frog-to-the-lilypad sort of game where you bounce a hammer on a lever and a frog flies off to try to land it on a lilypad cycling through the big pool of water in the middle of the tent. My sister had a few tries, and when she got to her last try and hadn't won, she asked me to do it. And I did. It. I won. Nothing quite as spectacular as the dog, mind you, but it was a stuffed frog of considerable size, and my sister was thrilled. So much for teaching me not to gamble!

A few years back I entered a contest on a radio station in Utah to reveal my most embarrassing moment. It must have been pretty embarrassing because I won...a $100 gift certificate to a local electronics super-store. I used it to buy our first DVD player shortly after we got married.

Some time after that, Jason and I were at Thanksgiving Point for something-or-other, and I ran around the place trying to enter a contest at the last minute, which I did successfully.

Now, you see, I can feel whether or not I'm going to win things. I don't know how I know, but I know. And I wanted to win the IMAX tickets for the T-Point movie theater...but I didn't feel it. I knew I was going to win something, but it wasn't those tickets. They were the 3rd place prize. Then the 2nd place prize was given away. There was a family sitting nearby who were holding hands and crossing their fingers for 1st place, but I leaned over to Jay and said, "Too bad I'm gonna win this one...and I don't even want it." Then they announced that Jessica Bradshaw had won the first place cast iron dutch oven prize. Huh. I didn't even know what a dutch oven was until Jason introduced me to the miracle of dutch oven cooking, and we used that puppy at least a dozen times before we moved away from Utah...maybe more. We brought it here, forgot about it, and it sat on our porch during a rainstorm, rusted like crazy, and we dumped it...but that was maybe my favorite prize of all.

A few months back I entered Ana Winegar's name (anyone heard from her lately???) into a radio contest to win her and her family some Disney tickets before he shipped out again to Iraq, and they won...but so did we. We got a set of Disney tickets too for having been the ones to nominate her. We sold some of them on ebay and made a couple hundred bucks to pay for our family vacation, so we REALLY scored, and it was overall an awesome thing.

I don't know, people...maybe the heavens have been kind to me with my winning luck because most everything else goes so ridiculously badly, or maybe they've smiled on me with my luck to shut me up and keep me from whining about things going ridiculously badly. (Not that my life is going ridiculously badly...I just whine a lot.) Either way, I have a new novel to read, and I'm going to start on it asap...as soon as I finish Brisingr. Anyone else reading the new Eragon book?

Either way, I just win stuff. Not a bad talent, eh? Talent? No, what is it? Not a bad...thing. Eh. What do I know? I just win stuff.