Everybody else online is writing about 7-7-07 so I figure I will too. Apparently some folks pay a lot more attention to the calendar than I do when it comes to date patterns. The 7-7-7 date didn’t even occur to me until this morning. A quick internet search, though, showed me I was the last to know. (In case you’re right there with me, Saturday’s date, July 7, 2007, is 7-7-07.)

Big-name hotels and casinos are offering rooms with the number 7 on the 7th floor for $77, the penthouse suite for $777, and so on. The wedding web site theknot.com reports 38,000 couples have registered 7-7-07 as their wedding date (three times as many as usual for a weekend in July). There are small-town newspapers with features about couples celebrating their 70th anniversary and men and women celebrating 70th or 77th birthdays on Saturday. Even retailers like Wal-Mart and fast-food joints like Taco Bell and Papa Johns are in on it with special contests and promotions leading up to what’s being called “the luckiest day of the century.” One lucky person will win a $777 Papa Johns gift card and 777 lucky people will win a free pizza. (And a large, 1-topping Papa Johns pizza on Saturday is just $7.77.)

My husband says we’re lucky because we sometimes win prizes in the different contests and sweepstakes we enter. We don’t gamble or buy lottery tickets but we enter drawings from time to time or call in to radio contests.

Some of things we’ve won:

• We both won a free bucket of golf balls at the driving range. (I’m wondering if they gave a bucket of balls to everyone who entered.)
• I won a Jars of Clay vinyl album from a radio station in Alabama and a 12-pack of RC Cola from a radio station in Indiana.
• I won a spa basket (soaps, lotions, etc.) from a national magazine sweepstakes.
• I recently won a gardening bag/seat packed with gardening tools in a drawing at an Earth Day celebration.
• And most recently we were a local radio station’s anniversary winner, where you call in your anniversary and they draw a couple to win a chocolate gift basket.

There are other times we’ve won, but A) I can’t remember them all and B) I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging (too much).

My dad, being a preacher and all, always corrected us whenever we’d say “You got lucky” after one of us had good fortune. You’re not lucky, he’d say, you’re blessed. So have a lucky (or blessed) 7-7-7 day.