I love this a lotto

I don't play the Lotto games personally, but I have often been in line at the Grab 'n' Go while lottery players shell out their hard-earned dollars in the effort to rack up a whole pile of dollars.

Ha'Sean Treshon "Ha Ha" Clinton-Dix

And some of them just let the computer pick their numbers, and some of them have a whole bunch o' numbers that they play - their birthday, their mother's birthday, their wife's birthday, the amount of ounces in a cup, Ha-Ha Clinton-Dix's uniform number. 

All right, I never heard anyone use the former Alabama great's #21 in their lotto combo, but I never miss a chance to type his name when I get one.

But let's hear it for Leah Alderman of Cumberland, Maryland, who stopped at the local Pit 'n' Go a couple of weeks back and bought a $3 lottery ticket in the Ruby Riches sweepstakes - because Ruby was the name of her late grandmother!

Her Grandma Ruby passed when Leah was still a teenager, and, at 34, Leah still misses her g-mom. The two lived close by, and Leah remembers lots of happy times they had together.

So she bought the scratcher to honor her grandma, and took it home. Later, while peeling potatoes for Thanksgiving dinner, she got the itch to scratch the scratcher, and wound up with a $30,000 winner. 

"I must have scanned it on my phone 15 times," Alderman said. "I thought it wasn't real."

And maybe this was g-ma's way of being present in the now, because Leah and her fiance have been working for a couple of years to fix up a house they bought, while scrimping for a nice wedding.  This will go a long way to make both of those dreams come true!

I once had a friend we all called Filthy Rich. I hung around with him, but did not become rich. Just filthy.