Jumbotron!

It's been a busy week and I haven't had time to post this, but last Saturday was quite a night! It was the PTO auction at Madeline's school. As an old special events person back during my political days, I was on the auction committee, so I was definitely going. After tagging along with me at last year's overly-crowded event, Kevin decided he didn't want to go -- he's not a party animal and the theme was country and western, which he cannot abide -- and stayed home with Madeline. Since he wasn't going, I decided to volunteer all evening, even though I paid for a ticket.

Early on, I bid on and won a session of day camp for Madeline. The laser tooth whitening and some of the jewelry and furniture looked awfully appealing, but I have to pay for camp anyway. For those of you who think that's oh-so-upper-class and indulgent, let me translate "summer camp" into working-class English: day care for school-age kids. The camp certificates were in one of the first sections of the auction to close. Since I'd paid well under face value for it and was feeling generous, I decided to participate in the wine bottle raffle and buy a $100 ticket, i.e., one chance.

For my hundred bucks, I got a raffle ticket and a bottle of wine that the auction committee had obtained from some generous merchant. Now, the wines they give away are hardly Petrus. Instead, they're in the Wine Spectator 85 to 90 range, wine that might sell for $15 or $20 a bottle. But if you enter the raffle, you have a good chance of getting more than an overpriced bottle of wine. They only sell 100 tickets in all, and they have 10 prizes, i.e., you have a 1 in 10 chance of winning something. A few times during the live auction, they stop and draw names out of the fishbowl. The grand prize gets drawn last.

I was sitting with my friends (mainly other kindergarten parents) during the live auction and about halfway through, it was time for me to go to do my job: running credit cards at the check-out station. So I left and went out to the foyer. As the live auction was ending, someone yelled across the room, "Hey, Edie, I think you just won something inside." I was in the middle of typing a transaction with a customer at my shoulder, so I ignored the person who sung out. A couple of minutes later, the auction chairman and the development director, who'd been running cards with me, but had suddenly disappeared without my having noticed she was gone, came marching up and told me I'd won the grand prize.

The grand prize is a 52" Sony LCD widescreen TV! My very own jumbotron! The auction co-chair, her husband and I managed to wrestle it into the minivan sometime after midnight when I left.

Kevin practically had a heart attack when I called him and told him what I was bringing home. I'm sure when the phone rang at 10:45, he thought I was calling to tell him there was some sort of emergency (I'd been in a wreck, couldn't get the van started, etc.), especially when my first words were, "Honey, are you sitting down?" When I told him, he was literally speechless on the other end of the line. He's really been wanting one, but it just hasn't been in the budget. Unbeknownst to him, I had been putting aside money to get a much smaller one (maybe 40") this summer as an anniversary present to him.

The TV is still sitting in its crate. Any day, however, FEDEX will deliver the lovely French Country stand I purchased this week from Home Decorators.com, and we will be livin' in Hi Def!