Powerball Is $174 Million Tonight!

Quite honestly, let's just be real here, no one really wants to have to work our entire lives for a living, and while there are a multitude of ways to get that done, for most of us the daily grind is just going to be a fact of life no matter how we slice it.

But hey, look on the bright side. The Powerball drawing is tonight! And as I always say about the lottery...

No matter how shitty the odds my friends...SOMEBODY HAS TO WIN IT!

Tonight's drawing is for a whopping $174 million. That's a lot of loot. Taking the cash option I would estimate the take away would be somewhere around $52.2 million after taxes. My math is simple calculation of roughly half of the total, and accounting for keeping about 60% of that after taxes.

Granted, that's a really rough estimate. I mean, at the end of the day, even if the math is not exactly correct, who cares? It's close enough. I can figure out the details when I win, right?

Of course, I play the lottery very frequently and have been doing so for years, and of course I have been writing about various aspects of the lottery for years. Here's something I wrote a while back which is a bit of a tongue in cheek—okay a LOT tongue in cheek. Winning The Lottery: The Dream of the Big Win.

Do you have your ticket yet for tonight's drawing? If not all I can ask is WHY? Come on, it's only $2 to play, and you never know...you might just be the lucky one who takes home the big prize.

Just for fun, here is a set of numbers you might want to try out. Now, I am not playing these numbers so of course if these numbers hit I'd be pissed. But of course, I'd also be pissed if I had to share with the millions of readers who come here...

Okay, all TEN of you. Who's counting?

22  36  51  56  59  PB:  32

Ooh, That Makes Me Mad

Look, I love playing the lottery. Hell, I never win anything to write home about. It's just the chance at millions of dollars that keeps me playing, even if I know that realistically I have no chance in hell of winning a dime.

So, I get a dollar here, and two dollars there. Sometimes I MIGHT get lucky enough to win $5 or sometimes a bit more. It's never enough to write home about, none of it is life changing, and when I consider how much I play I have never come close to getting my money back.

Not hardly.

Well, the other day I went to check some tickets. You know, they have those scanners you can run your tickets under to check to see if they are winners or not. I scanned 15 of my tickets and came up with two that each won a dollar.

Woohoo! $2. 

I also had one winning scratch off ticket worth $2, and another one worth $5. So, all said I was going to cash in a whopping $9 worth of winnings.

I stepped up to the counter and told the cashier, "I'd like to cash these in and I will be getting a couple more."

Fair and well, nuff said.

I bought a new Illinois Lotto ticket, and my wife picked out 2 one dollar scratch offs. She likes playing the scratch offs. I am really only interested in the Lucky Day, the Lotto, the Powerball, and the Megamillions.

I'm in it for the big dough!

So, I had $9 to play with. I spent three. The cashier handed me my tickets and $3 cash. I folded up my money and my ticket and put those into my pocket and my wife and I set off to do our errands we had planned.

And then it dawned on me...

I only got $3 in cash back after I accounted for my $3 worth of new tickets. I was shorted $3 of winnings.

I could have went back. But to what end I figured. Was it really all that worth it to go back for my money? I mean, most of the time I am all about the pennies, so $3 is $3 and that still has value...

But I thought it just wasn't worth it and so I simply sucked it up.

Still, it makes me mad. I don't like to lose money—despite my playing the lottery in the first place. I keep thinking somewhere in the back of my mind, maybe that was my little contribution for the millions I am about to take command of.

We shall see.