the passionate ailurophile

I need to win one of these huge jackpots, I don’t care if it’s the Powerball or the MegaMillions.  Either will do just fine, thank you very much!

Tomorrow’s MegaMillions drawing is up to $43 million, if we won it and took it in a lump sum payment, as we would…do YOU really trust the government…we’d end up with $28.3 million.  Uncle Sam and Deval Patrick would take about a third of that off the top, so we’d end up with a little under $20 million or so.

Saturday’s Powerball is up to $72 million, with a lump sum payment of  $38.6 million.  So after the Feds and good old Deval take their cuts, we would end up with about $25 million.  Not too shabby, considering that Mike thinks we could retire very nicely on just $2 million, assuming that we live like normal people, and do not aspire to live the lifestyle to which our pal LeBron James has become accustomed.

The first thing we’d do if we found ourselves with the golden ticket would be to hire an attorney to form a trust.  The attorney would represent the trust and claim the money for us.  This is because we would not want to be plastered all over TV and the interwebs; if that were to happen, too many people would be coming out of the woodwork with their grubby paws out, looking for handouts.  Surely we would help people in need, but only people that we could trust.  I do know a few people for whom a nice monetary gift would make their lives so much easier, and who are deserving.

Once we had access to the money, the next thing that would happen is Mike quitting his job.  I know he’ll enjoy sticking it to the bossman!

And after that…MOVING OUT OF THIS HELLHOLE!  Out of Massachusetts for sure, we’d go to either New Hampshire or Maine.  Find a nice, regular house in a regular neighborhood, pay cash for it, and buy all new furniture from a decent middle-of-the-road type store.  Very little of what we have now, I’d want to take with us.  We’d pack up the cats and anything we do want to keep, such as computers, books, DVDs, and such, and go.

What will give me HUGE pleasure is to tell the landladies to stick it where the sun don’t shine.  I’m not clearing out our unwanted junk or doing any heavy duty cleaning, why should we, when we can pay someone to do it?  In fact, I’ll let THEM deal with hiring the people to do the work, I don’t even want to bother with that.  I would simply have the aforementioned attorney draw up some papers, and present them with a generous check which would be more than enough to not only pay off whatever might be left on the lease, but money for them to hire whoever they wanted to clear out our unwanted crap, paint the place and do whatever else.  The condition would be that by cashing the check, they are never to attempt to locate us, to contact us, again.  The amount of money would be large enough where they’d have to agree.  We just get to walk away, STAT.

Then they can have fun trying to rent this place to someone else.  Good luck on getting anyone as good as we’ve been for the past 16 years or however the hell long it’s been.  They’ll probably be forced to rent it out under Section 8, because this neighborhood has gone down the shitter over the years, all the decent people have been moving away faster than a quick weight loss plan claims to melt off the pounds.  Then they will be VERY sorry they made me have that damned stove that I am hating more and more each day.

The law says that they have to provide a stove that works.  Nothing about how well it has to work.  I did some poking around, and apparently a stovetop that takes 45 minutes to cook a pound of pasta from start to finish is considered a “working” stove.  Srsly, this is how long it took!  I had the burner on as high as it would go, and started the boil with the hottest water from the sink.  It still took a good 20 minutes to come to the boil.  WITH THE LID ON.  After throwing in the pasta, it took another five minutes to return to the boil – WITH THE LID ON!  After that, it took another 20 minutes for it to get to an edible stage of al dente-ness.

The oven has been acting screwy, too.  If you use the timer that is built in, when the timer goes off, so does the oven.  I don’t think it’s supposed to do that, and it’s very annoying.  So no more using that timer.  We already feel we can’t use the self-cleaning feature, because a lot of the reviews on the Sears site reported issues with the computer inside the thing after they did use it.  Apparently, Sears is aware of this issue, but still won’t fix it at their expense.  If I had been shopping for a stove myself, no way would I have bought this one after those reviews.  But hey, it wasn’t my choice, it had already been ordered and a delivery time set up by the time they told me about it.

There also was absolutely nothing wrong with the old stove, which was en electric one with coils.  I  never breathed a word of complaint about it, except for the issue with the busted thermostat when we first got it.  It took forever to get it fixed, but finally it was fixed, I just had no oven for four months.  But once the thermostat was fixed, we never had any other issues with it.  I have no idea why they wasted money on a new one.

It LOOKS spiffy.  A review of glass top stoves in general that I read somewhere said that this is a very nice stove for people who don’t cook.  The landladies bought the exact same one for themselves, and if I complain about this one, they’ll say that theirs works fine, just as good as mine, after they come down to test it.

BUT THEY NEVER COOK ANYTHING!  Their trash and recycling contains pile and piles of boxes and wrappers from really bad takeout places.  That seems to be all they ever eat, and it shows, as they are both overweight and have health problems that make Mike’s look like the sniffles.  One of them was supposedly on Weight Watchers, so she told me.  But most of the fast food crap they eat contains enough points for a whole week!

So how would they know if the stove was any good or not?  I don’t think this is a defect in mine, I think that they are ALL like this.  The reviewers who liked it probably don’t cook much, and some said they only had it for a few weeks, maybe a month.  We’ve had this one for less than a year.  Sear probably would not honor the warranty because technically, it still works, it’s just the way they designed it to work that sucks.  Maybe the computer in it will crap out completely, maybe it won’t; I’m trying not to take any chances due to the reviewers who claimed that Sears didn’t come and fix it for free, as they should have.  Yes, if it becomes non-functional, the landladies will have to pay to get it fixed.  But we will have NO SAY in WHO comes to fix it.  They will call one of their skeevy down-on-their-luck relatives, who usually have good reason for being down on their luck.  The ones I’ve seen are lazy and seem like they are only licensed plumbers and electricians because they passed the licensing tests by the skin of their teeth.  They all smell bad and take numerous smoke breaks – IN THE APARTMENT, even after I ask them not to.

Can we just get rid of this thing and buy a new stove on our own dime?  Not sure, as the new lease says that we are now not allowed to purchase ANY major appliance without permission first.  WTF???  Last year, our old washer and dryer died, and we bought new ones, and they didn’t say anything about that.  And they definitely knew about this, because the laundry hookups are in the basement, a common area.

We may be needing a new fridge soon, because the old one is, well, old.  The only appliance they provided, BTW, was the stove.  We had to buy a fridge and a washer/dryer when we moved in.  But now, if I want to buy a new fridge, WITH OUR OWN MONEY, we need permission?  Why?  Do they get to pick which fridge we buy?

So I doubt that they will take to well to us wanting to replace a stove, even on our own dime, that is less than a year old, because they think it should be good enough.  I am hoping that the fridge will hold out until we can move, as I don’t want to be forced to buy some cheap piece of crap that they picked out.  Why?  This makes NO SENSE!  I want a really nice fridge this time, and dammit, I’m gonna have one!

Winning the golden ticket would make things so much nicer, don’t you think?