This morning I'm reminded that I am not a "winner"

Oh, it's a sad start to Monday morning. It's my own fault, I suppose. Have I mentioned that I love Pioneer Woman? She's funny, she's compassionate, she posts lots of no-fail recipes, and she's an Oklahoma gal. What's not to love? Oh, and she has giveaways. A lot of GOOD giveaways. Which I do enter, but I never win. First of all because she can have 10-20,000 people enter any one giveaway. Secondly because I'm A LOSER! And I don't say that with a shred of self-contempt. I just never win anything. It's okay. I've (basically) accepted my place in the world.

Some of her giveaways involve quizzes on individual subjects. This past week she's posted a couple vocabularly quizzes, and she always tells her readers exactly what time these quizzes will take place. The first person to answer correctly wins the first place prize, and then more winners are randomly chosen to receive a lesser prize. Far fewer people enter these types of contests, too--closer to 4,000--so the odds are better. I entered the first quiz, but I didn't make an effort to be the first commenter. My theory is that it's easier to be a random winner than the first place winner. Some of those people are fast! At any rate, nothing came of that quiz. But PW posted a second quiz, and this time I enlisted Justin as my accomplice. We got online as soon as the quiz was posted and answered the questions together as fast as we accurately could. (And yes, this did involve Google. Who wants to know? Did I mention that first prize was a Kindle and the "lesser" prizes were something like $75 to Amazon? Exactly.) Fourteen minutes later, we posted our answers.

And now we come to the sad part. Sad because I am not enough of a skeptic. During the quiz all comments are hidden until the winners are announced. So last night before bed we checked to see if the winners had been posted. They hadn't just yet, but comments were slowly being revealed. I looked at the comments, and...wait for it...my comment was the very first one! And it seemed that the only comments that had been posted thus far were the ones that had all the correct answers. So hope was born. False hope. And I went to sleep.

At five o'clock this morning I woke up and my brain demanded answers. I got online. All 3500+ comments were up. Mine was number 557. Commenter #4 had been announced as the winner. Reality laughed in my face. The natural order has been restored once again.

If you're a "winner," you should definitely check out some of Pioneer Woman's giveaways. If you can't beat 'em, delight in someone else's success. Why not one of you?