So close and yet

Here I am at work, so obviously we did not win the MegaMillions drawing on Friday night. Granted, even if we had won I would have transitioned to the lifestyle of the idle rich very slowly and rationally, and would not have quit my job instantaneously, but I might very well have been tempted to take a sick day just for today, since I have the leave time for it and would no longer need to save up paid time off for the family vacation in August (surely I’d be out of the rat race by then). But, no, in the five lines of numbers I had the machine auto-pick for me, none had the correct Megaball, one line had two numbers from the winning set, another had one, and the other three were total 0-fers, all of which combined netted me a total of zero prize dollars.


But not all is doom and gloom, despite being denied the opportunity to retire early atop a virtually too-big-to-squander-in-ten-lifetimes nest egg. This past weekend was pretty good all in all: I got some yardwork done, my wife got some indoor spring organizing done, and there was much high-quality pop culture consumption (which I will dwell on at length over the next few posts as the week goes along). On the job front, things are still reliably humdrum but there have been recent rumors that we will be getting new desktop towers at our workstations in the near future, which made me so positively giddy with optimism that I even went so far as to e-mail my government supervisor in order to outline how woefully behind-the-times our current software profiles are, and if we’re getting new boxes might it not also be an opportune time to get, say for example just off the top of my head, internet browser programs that are fewer than three full iterations behind the rest of the world? My boss said she would take it under advisement, and really without a Pentagon-issued mandate that’s the best scenario I could reasonably expect, so we shall see.

And of course baseball season gets well and truly underway later this week! I hope you all enjoyed the brief post-Superbowl/pre-ceremonial-first-pitch interregnum during which I wasn’t talking much about sports because that’s pretty close to over now. And maybe just as well, because barring the truly unforeseen, I may have to come up with some other go-to topic for Mondays besides “work”, because despite the fact that apparently destiny has it in mind for me to continue on in the salt mines for a good long while yet, as I’ve been alluding to more and more lately there’s very little in the way of noteworthy developments on this front. Which is not exactly a complaint, and if that means a weird new direction for week-opening salvos hereabouts, hey, so be it.