Powerball & State Fair

The Powerball Jackpot once again is getting “up there”.....it'll be interesting to see where it ends up before tonight's drawing. It's interesting to watch how people get “Powerball Fever” once the jackpot gets higher than normal.

We occasionally like to play “what would we do with the money” if we would win the Powerball. I suppose it's harmless......dreaming is good for the soul sometimes, I think......and we know there's not a ghost of a chance of it happening! It usually starts with a new but unpretentious home, with room for my mom to live with us. We move on to setting up trusts for the grandkids, paying off mortgages and college loans for the kids, and possibly some new furniture for us.

Occasionally we will throw in trips to a few places we'd like to visit. Then, oddly, it usually stops. I don't know if I'm boring, or low maintenance. We would, of course, enjoy having spending money to buy small things – I occasionally think how nice it would be to have multiple pairs of glasses. But I really don't think we would be one of those couples who would blow through all the money and then be broke. We've both lived too much of our lives knowing how to live within our means.

In fact, we rarely buy Powerball tickets – especially since the cost has gone up. We frequently buy Missouri Lotto tickets, but they're only $1 each. As my uncle would say – a year from now we won't know where that money went anyway. It seems to us to be more manageable and less of a headache to win just a million or two, should we ever hit the right numbers!

The Missouri State Fair starts tomorrow. We ran by our local Orscheln store this morning and picked up discount admission tickets. We can go any day we want, but we'll likely head down next Wednesday. We'll doublecheck the daily activities, just in case there's another day we'd rather go. But Wednesday is Senior Citizen Day (did I really say that??!!!) and there's free bluegrass music all day at various locations. A friend has some of her photographs exhibited again this year. She's very good, I always enjoy seeing her work.

We enjoy attending the fair. I've enjoyed visiting other state fairs in Kansas, Oregon, and Iowa. I worked for our local Extension office for over nine years, and I got more interested in the Missouri State Fair when I had contact with the 4-H members sending their exhibits down. We enjoy going through that building to see what fun projects the kids have come up with. We enjoy the Fine Arts exhibits, Department of Conservation, and will sometimes catch the livestock exhibits. Last year, we also discovered the Missouri Wine Tent – it's fun to go in there, enjoy a glass of Missouri wine, and catch some of the informational talks on the Missouri Wine Industry.

I never had the opportunity to belong to 4-H when I was a kid. We lived too far from town for things like that to be feasible. We were ten miles from the town where I went to school, which is also where 4-H meetings were held. Ironically, hubby did belong to 4-H when he was growing up in Palo Alto. He did gardening projects. On my first trip to Palo Alto, his mom took me by the place where hubby planted his 4-H garden. It was on someone else's property......I think they were nice enough to let him use the space at no charge.

Maybe when we win the Powerball drawing, we can have a project of attending the State Fairs of all 50 states!