Somebody’s going to win about half a billion dollars tonight on that Mega Millions blicky. If all goes as planned, it’ll be a 50/50 split with us and the cousins, which after tax should put each couple on roughly $100 million. RACKS ON RACKS ON RACKS LAWYA.
The plan, obviously, is that the ticket goes in a safe deposit box while we line up our attorneys, accountants, private bankers and make security arrangements, and set up the health insurance we’ll need when we quit work. Then, we go public, do the required appearance, and go straight from there to the airport, where we throw cash on first-class tickets and go directly out of the country. From there, it should be pretty easy to stay out of sight for about six months. No coming back to this country until the furore has died down (and honestly I might just wait until the elections are over).
So what to spend money on?
I suppose once I’m out of the country, I’ll need to splash out on my own laptop (MacBook Air 11!) and a beefy external hard drive (Thunderbolt!) to handle the media content that currently lives on the home machine. And let’s be honest – I need to hire some nerd to clean up my massive cluster of an iTunes folder with my music and that of the wife, because it’s a mess and there are dupes and what the shit, I can afford to hook some kid with $300 to make it go away. And then we go straight iCloud, son. Other than that, I don’t really have that much to buy. Probably get an unlocked iPhone 4S immediately in the new place, obviously, and a nice wallet of local SIMs for different countries. Depending on the weather, I’m sure I’ll buy a new jacket because hell, I’d do that anyway.
But when I’m back in the US…that’s a tough one. I think we should move our legal residence to an apartment in Nashville – partly because Tennessee has no state income tax (not that it’ll make a big difference) and partly because I’ll need some place to crash before/after Vanderbilt games (oh yeah, buying tickets, good ones). We should probably also buy something in San Francisco because we’re going to want to live there. Everywhere else, probably just get a room. Owning a rack of houses is bad arithmetic.
I’ll tell you what I want, though: I’m done with driving. Never mind a limo: I just want a London black cab and somebody to drive me around. Actually probably better make it two somebodies – preferably big burly ex-SAS types with shaved heads and sunglasses and an unsightly bulge under each arm. After all, somebody’s got to hustle you into the car while the other person returns fire. I’ve seen the Secret Service in movies.
Really, though, it points up that I don’t need money for stuff. I need money to do things…