Christine the Curmudgeon

So Powerball is up to $200 million, the next drawing is Saturday.  Christine the Curmudgeon has no issue with buying a few tickets, and she and Mr. C will probably go up to New Hamster on Saturday to get some.  Because you never know, we might get lucky.  Or not.

We never spend more than $5.00 per drawing on the lottery.  It’s a proven fact that people who can least afford to buy lottery tickets are thew ones who spend the most money on it.  They honestly consider it to be an “investment”.  Really…people who can afford nice cars, homes, clothes, and vacations to which they take their Rimowa luggage don’t bother so much with it. But then you see single mothers, barely scraping by, spending hundreds on lottery tickets.

I will never forget the time I was in Salem, NH, and I went into the state liquor store to buy a few Powerball tickets.  In front of me in line was this very skeevy woman with two very skeevy looking little kids.  The kids were dressed in rags, their canvas shoes were outgrown, they had holes in the toes.  All three of them smelled like they hadn’t bathed in quite some time.

Yet this woman dropped over a hundred bucks on Powerball tickets!  Insane!  She could have taken that money, gone up the road to WalMart or Target, and bought her kids some decent clothes and shoes.  I swear, some people have no shame.

It bothers me when I see trashy people like this winning a big jackpot.  They usually end up pissing away the money on unnecessary crap, going through it so fast that they are broke within a few years.  And then their kids will be filthy and wearing rags again.

If we won a big jackpot, the first thing we’d do is buy a house up in Portland, Maine…paying cash.  Mike would then retire, and we’d take the Curmudgeon Cats and move up there.  The rest of the money would be put in safe places, no risky investments, and only $100,000 per bank account, because that is all they are insured for should a bank go belly-up.

It would not be a fancy house, just a regular house.  As long as I can have my own craft/computer room, and Mr. C had a nice area to play with his toy trains, we’d be happy.  Annual big splurges would be stuff like memberships in Gritty McDuff’s Mug Club, and season tickets to the Portland Sea Dogs.  We’d be careful with the money, to be sure we could live the rest of our lives without having to work again.  Oh, and we’d give to charity, too.  But not to just anyone who comes a-knocking, just to organizations that we like.

But we know that chances are good that this will never happen, which is why we don’t go crazy with it.  If we did go crazy with it, we’d not be able to afford to have fun doing other stuff!

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