Our RV Adventures

We didn’t do much of anything today except just lounge around the rig.

About 2pm I did go down to the Ranger Station to checkout / check back in. Of course we’ll be leaving for Santa Fe on Thursday so we’ll only be here for 4 more days. But if we were to be staying up here we’d almost certainly be doing our week out staying here under Passport  America.

As long as we’re in Texas we usually can get  the local Houston channels on our DirecTV spotlight, but it seems like we usually end up mostly watching the East Coast / West Coast network channels. And because of this we missed out on the fact that this weekend was the 2017 Wings over Houston Air Show at Ellington Field down in the Clear Lake area.

Before we started RV’ing in 2008 we went to the air show just about every year. With Jan being an Air Force brat, and my work for the DOD and NASA, we’re both really enjoy air shows. But due to not knowing when it was coming, and of course the fact that we were both under the weather this year, we missed out.

The last time we did make the Wings Over Houston Show was in October 2010 when we came home early due to Landon being being born. We got to see the Air Force Thunderbirds that year, who were also the Demonstration Team this year too.

Before that, the last air show we went to was at Eielson AFB near Fairbanks, AK in 2008 when we were up there. Since this was an Air Force show, of course we saw the Thunderbirds then too.

Of course over the years, we’ve also seen both the Navy Blue Angels and the Canadian Snowbirds.

Of course there’s always next year, I guess.

Concerning the Powerball drawing last night , (no I didn’t win. Nobody did.) several blog readers asked if I planned to live another 30 years since I would take the 30 annual payments as my payout. Well, actually, Yes. Yes I do.

I do plan to live a lot longer, if only based on genetics. My grandmother, my father’s mother, died at 89 after suffering a stroke while on a ladder painting her ceiling. My father died at 83 from a brain aneurysm caused by a known condition that I don’t have.

My mother died at 88 from an infection she got in the hospital after a hernia operation. All her brothers, her father and her mother, all lived to be in their late 80’s – early 90’s.

And Jan’s mother lived to be 86, so there’s long-livers on both our sides of the family.

But if I don’t quite make to the full 30 payments, it wouldn’t make any difference. If the winner dies before then, the rest of the money goes to a beneficiary or to the winner’s estate. So it still gets paid out.

Call me stubborn, but I plan to hang on until the very end.

The Word of the Day is: Perlocutionary

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Although still not quite up to snuff, Jan was getting rig fever, so about 5pm she and I headed out to have dinner at Jason’s Deli right down in Conroe.

Jan just wanted soup and sandwich, in this case a cup of Broccoli Cheese and a quarter Turkey Muffaletta.

I got my usual, a bowl of Southwest Chicken Chili and a small Reuben sandwich.

For a non-beef chili, this one is pretty much the best.

Coming home I stopped off at the Kroger’s for a Powerball lottery ticket. It’s up to $173 million, so I’ll spend a few bucks. I don’t smoke of drink, so I’ve got to waste my money on something. And there’s not a chance that smoking or drinking will make me a millionaire.

Unfortunately I always have to stand in line at the service desk because the machines don’t offer you a choice of  cash payout or annual payments, just cash payout.

So if I want annual payments, and I do, I have to get it at the desk. And the reason I want annual payments is that with cash payout I’m giving up $64 million. That’s the difference between the annual payment total of $173 million and the cash payout of $109 million.

And it gets worse as the jackpot rises. In January 2016 there was a Powerball Jackpot of $1.6 BILLION. If you took the cash payout you would only get about $1 billion, giving up 600 million just to get the cash up front.

In the case of tonight’s jackpot, if you won in Texas (no state income tax) and took the 30 annual payments, you would get almost $3.5 million a year after taxes.

While if you took the cash, you would get a one time payout of a little over $65 million after taxes. Now honestly, what can I really do with $65 million that I can’t do with the $3.5 million. Yeah, I could invest it, but then I’d have to worry about it. And more than likely I’d be investing a large part of the 3.5 anyway. I mean, what can I actually spend it on, anyway. Jan and I’ve already said we wouldn’t get a new rig, but just get Beauty a new paint job and spiff her up a bit. Including those new blue window awnings.

On the Mega-Millions front, it looks like they’re finally increasing the cost of a ticket to $2 to keep up with Powerball’s pot sizes. Powerball went to $2 in Oct. 2015 which, along with decreasing the odds of winning, greatly increased pot sizes, leading to the $1.6 billion one I mentioned earlier.

As I always say, “Let’s run the numbersâ€.

The Word of the Day is:  Kafkaesque

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