No, not the television show. The daydream.
When I was a kid and I daydreamed about winning the lottery, I daydreamed about all the stuff I’d buy.
As I got a little older, I daydreamed about the trips I’d take.
A little older than that, I daydreamed about just taking care of my family and friends (pay off their houses, that sort of thing).
A little older than that, our state got Powerball and I could then daydream about taking care of my family and friends and still having money left over to…
And I realized that my lottery daydreams had changed once again. I daydreamed of a staycation. Sleeping without an alarm clock. Reading. Looking forward to tomorrow where I knew that I would again be sleeping without an alarm clock. And then reading.
Anyway, Powerball is up to $60. Lump sum is $37.4 million. After taxes, that’s… what? $20 million?
You take care of your friends and family and now you have $15 million… What does your first year look like?
A battalion of full-time nannies, thus allowing me to sleep late on a regular basis.
Travel. Lots and lots and lots of travel.
And a kick-ass kitchen, library and wine cellar.
Oooh, staff. I think I’d have to have Powerball hit $100 million before I felt comfortable daydreaming about staff.
But I’d totally want someone to make breakfast.
Staff doesn’t have to be full time. A maid and a gardener who come once a week would be quite luxurious, IMO.
I could spend 20 hours a week cleaning my own house (I’m my father’s son).
I would definitely hire a cleaning service. Don’t need a gardener yet, though.
I’ll do my own cooking, and some of my own cleaning. But sleeping until 10 AM again whenever I wanted? Cheap at any price.
I’ve much time to drive to depositions and hearings and such, and much affinity for this daydream whilst thus driving. Important in the vision is finding a financial advisor to handle the surplus money — I lack the skill set necessary to handle large amounts of cash such that for-survival employment is never again a necessity.
After major debts are retired, the house gets improved. A prolonged vacation coincides with this so the work is done while The Wife and I are enjoying the first-class charms of the old world. Thereafter, there are periodic trips to purchase wine direct from the makers, cooking classes or maybe even cooking school, frequent dinner and cocktail parties for friends, professional supervision over an exercise and diet regimen to compensate for the physical effects of said parties, and full-time writing for pleasure with whatever sales resulting therefrom being gravy.
Some philanthropy. All the little children in the world join hands and singing a song, something like that.
Oh, I almost forgot! Revenge against my enemies.
Not the old world for me. The Ancient world! Rome! Greece! Palestine! Constantinople (Istanbul). I want to lay a flower at the base of Trajan’s collumn.
That accomplished I probably wouldn’t want to travel again, I’m not fond of it. I’d probably build the worlds most luxurious geek lair and live in comfort.
Istanbul is a city of restless ghosts.
(still fun to visit, though)
See and now I’m jealous, I’ve never left North America myself.
I’ve never been there (Mum went). Doesn’t mean it’s not a haven for haunts,though. 😉
Have been to four continents though.
… never having left is far, far better than “can never go, ever ever.” (note: which is different than “got kicked out”).
*snort* heard about a guy who can’t ever ever leave Japan — there’s travel, and then there’s detention.
Funny, have been feeling the same way. I used to love travelling, but now find a terrible, huge pain in the ass. I avoid it as much as I can. Although I’m very excited to hop into the car the next couple and drive to the West Coast see the redwoods, the Pacific, Mt. Whitney, and my very favorite place on earth, Death Valley. I absolutely love deserts. I drove through Death Valley once–in July–and the heat literally caused the transmission to melt. Rescued by a truck load of Indians–ended up drinking beer until the sun rose then passed out. Damn, no peyote buttons though I’d love to do that sometime. Hey, maybe I can even meet the enigma breaker, Tom van Dyke. The main reason I’m going is to pick up an ultra lite trike that I’m purchasing–I simply have to get up in the air and sense the feeling of flying like a bird–I’ve dreamt I could fly since I was about 3, and the longing has never left me. Unfortunately, it has also caused me to lose a fiance who thinks it’s idiotic and dangerously reckless. Oh, the League. I absolutely love it! All the characters, writers, posters, commenters, dissenters…such interesting and varied personalities—and this is coming from someone who is semi-ostracized, probably unread, more often than not, banned, collectively shunned, and shown the door at least a thousand times. Yeah, nonetheless, just love you guys-thanks putting up with Bozo The Imbecile, aka, Heidegger and a few thousand other aliases–this was done to avoid aerial combat from Elias who has been in hot pursuit and MIGs as you all know, are notoriously tenacious. And Jason, how you made me hilariously laugh today with your comments beginning with, “Mr. Bozo..” It’s been a great pleasure and honor to get to know and speak with yins. So gentlemen, thanks for the always interesting company and the many, many laughs!
I buy a couple of the other pieces of property that adjoin the father-in-law’s places in Montana. Have to contribute to the offsprings’ land holdings.
There’s enough projects involved with that and the current home that this would be plenty to get me started. Full restoration of the exterior of the house. Redo the driveway, and the front porch. Jack up the foundation and dig out a real cellar (there’s already a California basement, so this would only cost about 60 grand), some earthquake retrofitting. Redo the HVAC. Redo the garage. Install solar panels and a battery backup on the garage. $20k worth of ham equipment. Tell my boss I’m dropping to 20 hours a week (although I would not immediately quit my job, both for the sake of the people I work for and my coworker).
I’d probably quit at the end of this academic year from the job (assuming I’d found a credible replacement), take the kids and the wife and travel through the whole summer while all that planned work gets done on the house.
Next Fall I’d switch to being a mostly-full-time researcher until I completed the dissertation. Probably throw my hat in the ring for President of the neighborhood association and work at the local schools site council.
$15 million?
Drop in a bucket.
But as quite a few rabblerousers know, you can run an awful lot of fun out of a movie’s budget.
My first year looks like chaos. The sorts of things that would make half of you break out in a cold sweat (the rest’d be cheering, I wager).
A server here, a laptop there — links where they need to be. Pick a few things to support–and a few others to be moneysinks.
TVD asked me if I’d fight for this country… with 15million, I’d win or die trying.
No staff for me, and I’d probably still have to have a job (or at least somewhere to go every day), because I think the novelty of sleeping without an alarm clock and reading all day would wear off if these things weren’t the treat that they are now. But nothing that started before 1000!
I’d probably spend more time volunteering at the kid’s school, too, which is something I just can’t pull off now with this job thing.
Hmm…and I wonder how much it would cost to knock down my current house and start over. The location is good, but the house was built in ’71 and I’d love something with a more open floor plan like many modern houses have. And a kick-ass kitchen, library, and wine cellar.
And travel! I realized after reading y’all’s entries that I didn’t say anything about travel!
I “owe” my wife a trip to Japan, so that’d be on top of the list. To simplify things, we’ll just say that I’d like to go back to all the places I went when I was in the military and too young and dumb to appreciate them.
Lots of Europe, more of Ireland than just Dublin, Egypt, Russia, China, and…dare I say it…dropping about $400k on Roskosmos for two tickets to the ISS. Why the hell not? If I’m dreaming about $15 million in my pocket, might as well dream big, eh?
First, move to Oregon. Find the right small town just outside of Portland, close enough to go into the city for a nice dinner, far enough out to not be too urban. Second, buy a fixer upper to keep me busy (oops, my wife just vetoed this–she’s tired of half-done renovation projects)…buy a nice older home with a good size yard. Bonus if it has a barn.
Second, long trip to Europe, seeing everything from St. Pete to the Greek Isles, Ireland to Istanbul.
Third, create a foundation to support whatever odd little organizations I wanted to support.
Fourth, sit on my front porch drinking beer and planning my next trip.
Fifth, tell my boss I’m quitting.
The thing I love most about this, James, other than you would be my neighbor, is that you would plan on getting around telling your boss that you quit after you got back from a long world trip.
Yeah, I’d have you over for a few drinks first, and you could help me plan how I’d do it.
On first thoughts I’d like a butler, one second thoughts I suspect I’d probably end up like that baby on the eTrade commercials “In hindsight the omnipresent clown was a mistake.”
I’d establish a trust so one of my nieces, the younger nephew, my adopted nephew and Elby’s kids could go to college if they so desired. If they chose not to, they couldn’t touch the money until they held down a single job for more than 5 years and one of those years must be on their own.
Fix up this house, convert the garage into a serious man cave with a studio apartment in its attic. Buy something cheap in Manitou Springs and live there for eight months out of the year avoiding summer and humidity in New Jersey. I’d have internet, a beater car, a radio, an 8 inch telescope out in Colorado. All I would do is write and visit with dear friends when they called me up since I don’t want to impose. As always I’d drive back and forth between NJ and Colorado but take my time.
Beyond that I’d adopt a pit bull who’s deathly afraid of cats and play videogames. Maybe drive to the Pacific coast and see the other twentysomething states on my itinerary.
Oh yes, a parcel of land out in Park County so I ain’t traipsin’ when I’m stargazing.
For a couple of weeks, my answer to the “what if you’d win” question was “buy some acreage, spend the next month putting up signs that said ‘tresspassers will be shot’.”
Is that no longer part of the answer?
Maribou told me to stop telling it to people and then staring them down.
Mine say, “Trespassers will be Flayed”.
I think it’s important to bring back the old ways in some things.
Mine add: “Survivors will be shot again”
I am thorough about these things.
Heh, I tell my students they’re welcome to come visit me out west after I retire, but they’d better yell out their names at the end of the driveway ’cause I’ll be sitting on my porch with a glass of bourbon, a cigar, and a shotgun.
Reminiscent of the two old guys in “Secondhand Lions”
Let me first say that I have two Powerball tickets in my wallet from three or four weeks ago when the jackpot was something like $120M and I still haven’t checked the numbers, which ought to tell you enough about how much thought I’ve given this sort of thing.
I really think I’m going to sit down and think of exactly what kind of business I’ve always wanted to run and start building. Long term idleness at this age doesn’t appeal to me.
The point of buying the tickets is not to win.
It’s to have daydreams that are somewhat more credible.
Why are you dissing my daydreams??
I ain’t! I’m saying that there’s nothing strange about not looking at the tickets! Looking at the tickets isn’t the point!
(As a matter of fact, it’s kind of depressing.)
Then you might as well just buy silver.
I received an ounce of silver as a present back in 1992-1993 when silver cost five bucks.
The associated daydreams were not quite as interesting as you might think.
Barring the usual, job quitting, house payoffs, big trip to X, etc. I would look to open a Table Tennis Center. Big, bunches of tables and let the clubs in town play from there. In the end I know I would have to do something or go stir crazy. I think that would be a good start.
I’d like to endow myself a chair at a university or research station in a nice area (I’m looking at you, Mote Marine Laboratory) where I could do research on whatever happens to interest me without the administrative hassles, onerous committee work, and teaching requirements of academic life.
Why not just run your own place and avoid the hassle?
Running your own place sometimes is a bigger hassle than putting up with someone else’s running of said place.
Just so – I don’t want to run the place, just want to be left to do my own thing and have enough institutional clout (=$$) to not be annoyed
If you win the Nobel, you get to ignore a lot of the rules, too, I imagine.
😛
No politics.
If you’re talking about the Nobel winners, you’re talking about gods.
So, properly, you should say, “No religion”.
No religion.
I don’t want to run the place, just want to be left to do my own thing and have enough institutional clout (=$$) to not be annoyed
Oh, you want to be Joe Paterno? 😉
Good heavens no – running a football program must mean having all sorts of staff and underlings and players and alumni and fans to deal with. And I have no inclination to be iconic. I’m far too misanthropic to want to be like Paterno.
Let’s get the obvious things out of the way first: House with a nice big garage (level concrete pad, thicker than it needs to be). Metal shop and four-post lift in the garage. Something nice to put on the four-post lift, maybe an FD RX-7 or an E36 M3. Old cars like that tend to need a lot of work; that’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
That leaves me with about fourteen mil, which will run an indie game studio long enough for me to skill up in fabrication, bodywork, and CFD/FEA/CNC/LMNOP sufficiently to get people to pay me to work on interesting cars.
First year, resolve various issues. Probably play a number of video games. Maybe take a cruise. (People have told me that I should.) Financial and tax planning for second year and beyond.
Second year and beyond: Solar Panels for poor people. This is the charity that I’ve mentioned before that I’d run. The short of it is that I would be installing solar panels on the homes of the poorest homeowners. The goals would be to give them a financial boost (Not having to pay the power and heating bills would give a lot of families the chance to get their head above water. Even if that didn’t work and they still lost their home, they could sell it for a little more) as well as to do my bit for the planet.