CLIVE — A Clear Lake housekeeper said it was hard to concentrate on work after she scratched off a $30,000 prize.
“I didn’t want to say anything to anyone quite yet because I kind of wanted to process it first,” Ivy Wilson said on Wednesday as she claimed her prize at the lottery’s Mason City regional office. “It was very distracting, that’s for sure. The adrenaline was definitely going all day long.”
Wilson, 27, won the 16th top prize in the Iowa Lottery’s “$30,000 Crossword” scratch game.
Her boyfriend purchased the winning ticket for her at Kwik Star, 3205 Willow Creek Court in Clear Lake, where he stopped to cash in a few other winning tickets she’d asked him to redeem for her.
“The next day before work, we were sitting there having coffee and I was scratching them and scanning them,” she said. “I thought that I had won on that one, but I didn’t think I won that much. I didn’t believe it, really.”
Wilson, a housekeeper, said she isn’t making any immediate plans to spend her winnings.
“I definitely want to take some time and think about it, because that’s an amount of money that can turn your life around,” she said. “It can definitely change the direction of your path, so I want to make sure I do smart things with it.”