Luck of the lactose tolerant in Well now

On the way home from work this afternoon
I stopped at a convenience store to pick up this week’s lottery tickets.
Both the mega and the power ball are at insanely high levels,
but I’m treating it just like any other week.

I was invited to put in $20 for the communal buy at work, but I passed.
At the $5 a week I spend, it’s just a little throwaway money.
At $20 (for the third drawing in a row for my colleagues),
it’s getting to be a rather expensive gambling habit.

So I spend my usual $5 on the Idiot’s Trifecta
- one ticket each for the powerball (currently at $570million),
the megamillion (somewhere in the $400millions),
and the Louisiana lotto (now $450,000).

Why buy the lotto, you might ask, when it’s such a relatively smaller pay-out?
Well, two reasons actually.
First, the odds are much better I could win it.
I actually work with a man who did just that.
(It kills me. He pulled in $1.4million on the lotto, $740,000 after taxes.
That made the lottery real for me.)
Second, winning $450,000 would do me just fine.
At half of that amount after taxes, I could blow it all -
pay off my mortgage, all my outstanding debts,
put in new windows and insulation and siding
and then restart my financial life comfortably debt-free.
Oh, that’s one hell of a dream.
Fabulously rich would be lovely,
but to just become financially comfortable would be blessing enough.

As I entered the store I felt lucky, I tell you, insanely lucky.
I was absolutely certain I was about to purchase my winning ticket(s),
my life changer(s).
(Hey, if you’re going to dream a single lottery win, you might as well dream a triple.)

Oh, and I also remembered I needed milk.
Now I know what you’re thinking.
Nobody with a lick of sense buys milk at a convenience store,
but hey, I’m insanely lucky and just barely pre-obscenely-rich,
so I can easily afford to buy one gallon of overpriced milk.

I went home and put the lottery tickets and the milk away.
Content that my life was fixing to change,
I took myself a hard earned nap
with visions of calling work on Monday with the excuse of being too rich to care.

Smile.
Sigh.
Cuddle a semi-willing cat
and Snore.

When I awoke I thought, dinner, yep, that’s the plan.
I went into the kitchen to find a huge white milk lake in the middle of the dark wood floor and three very happy and totally unapologetic cats licking their whiskers innocently.
It seems that the bottom of the plastic milk jug had split
and the whole gallon had dripped through the faulty seal in the fridge door.

Hmmm.
I’m starting to feel just a tad less lucky.