If I had a $1,000,000 (If I had a $1,000,000) I’d buy you an exotic pet(like a llama or an emu)
Bare Naked Ladies
For the past ten years or so, The Wife has been investing something like twenty dollars a week in the varied and sundry Lotto Games to be found around the country-including the Mega Millions Lotto. I have, from time to time, been tempted myself to buy a handful of Lotto tickets and I won about a hundred dollars one time. The Wife also won a couple of hundred dollars, but for the most part, she never wins anything. We have not won Mega Millions, or even mega thousands.
Now it is easy to think, well, if you had put that twenty dollars a week to work somewhere, you would have some money. Over ten years twenty dollars a week is a bit over ten thousand dollars. But really, ten grand is not a lot of money-$270 Millions Dollars in the Mega Millions Lotto is a lot of money.
I was in Atlanta when the PowerBall was up to around $350 Million dollars. The Wife and I bought tickets and went to work spending the money. We talk about it for the two or three days before the drawing. We joked about buying our own 747 Jumbo Jet. We talked about all the places we would go, the houses we would buy, the new cars, new clothes, and all the odds and ends that we have always wanted but knew we would not have until we Won The Lottery. Then we didn’t win the lottery. There was a great gnashing of teeth and ripping of hair. We were really, really bummed out by this.
Since then, I have not been too excited about the whole Mega Millions thing. The Lotto, even when it is up around $270 Million Dollars, does not tempt me as it once did. Common sense says that you will not win the lottery. The odds of winning the Mega Millions Lotto are in the realm of 1 in 175 million. But if you don’t buy a ticket, the odds are 100% that you will not win. Unless you are Earl and the ticket blows into your hand.
I’m in Oklahoma at the moment and there is talk about Privatizing the Lotto here. Since the whole selling point of the Lotto is that State Governments are so poor they can’t fund schools and build roads without the added income of morally questionable things like gambling-is handing it over to outsiders really going to help? Where’s Bugsy Siegel when you need him?
I’m sure the Wife has her tickets with her lucky numbers-just waiting for the night when the right ping pong balls bounce into place. I’m sure there is some way to get the right numbers using The Law of Attraction-but I guess my desire in not in a pure enough place yet. Wouldn’t it be nice to win the Mega Millions $270 Million dollars jackpot? Wouldn’t it be nice to have all the money I need to do all the things I want.
Of course, there’s always another big lotto jackpot just down the road-if not the Mega Millions, then the Powerball-hope spring eternal.
