Category Archives: Happiness

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If I Had $55 Million

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Who remembers the hit song “If I Had A Million Dollars” by the Barenaked Ladies? When that song was released back in 1988, a million bucks was a lot of dough. One line says “If I had a million dollars, I’d buy you a house.”

Yep, not these days. You’d be lucky to get a 5th wheel for that now.

I seriously think the only way my children will ever be able to buy a house is if I win the lottery. Or if I die soon so they can have MY house. I do play the B.C. Lottery every now and then just for fun, but my pension will only stretch so far.

A lot of us dream of winning the lottery, like local Scott Gurney did recently. We think about what we’d buy, where we’d travel, who else we’d share it with. But I think reality might not quite live up to the dream. (Although I wouldn’t be adverse to testing that theory…just to be sure.)

I did win $90 once. And my husband won $900. But when you add up what we must have spent on tickets up to that point…well, I think the lottery corporation came out ahead.

I knew someone many years ago who won the lottery at the tender age of 19. $100,000 was a lot of money back then and he was pretty excited. Needless to say, he learned a lot from that experience.

All kinds of new “friends” came out of the word work. He was buying everyone dinner and drinks all the time, blowing all kinds of money on whatever came to mind. And he eventually ended up bankrupt.

Nineteen is too young an age to really understand what money is or does. It’s one thing to grow up financially privileged, another to suddenly become the richest kid on the block.

But age doesn’t even matter.

The fact is that a LOT of people who win the lottery end up in dire straits. In the U.S., for instance, one third of people who win lotteries end up bankrupt after 3 to 5 years. And many lottery winners struggle with depression and suicide, or end up divorced.

We just don’t know how to deal with a big stack of cash.

I’m convinced that coming into a lot of money all of a sudden does something to the brain. Not just yours, but everyone else you know too. Some of the people around you become needy or greedy. You have to learn to say “no”, and that’s not easy.

Not only that, but when you win the lottery, your face gets splashed all over the place, complete with the giant cheque and the confetti. Everyone finds out who you are, so there’s no way you can just take your winnings and quietly slip away somewhere.

So, out come the scammers. There have already been a number of fake Facebook accounts set up pretending to be Scott Gurney, trying to swindle people out of their money one way or another. It’s disgusting.

I do wish him well and hope that, for the most part, he’s able to enjoy his winnings.

I’ve decided that I don’t really need to win the lottery. It seems like a lot more trouble than it’s worth, and I’m doing just fine, thank you very much.

What’s money anyway? There are some things you really can’t put a price on, like family, good health, great friends. A sunny day. What more could a person possibly need?

I’m already a winner!

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Spring Is Coming!

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Sometimes on a dark, damp day in the middle of winter, I think about how wonderful it would be to live on a tropical island where you’d never have to face the doom and gloom of a west coast winter.

Even in other, colder Canadian cities, they seem to get more sunshine than we do. We just get a lot of grey and rain. And more grey. And more rain. This is why many of us refer to it as the “wetcoast”.

For people who move here from other parts of the world, the hardest thing to adjust to is the grey. And the rain. It’s depressing.

That’s why I like to imagine waking up to summer every morning, and living in shorts and t-shirts all year in a perpetual paradise.

But then again, if we didn’t have winter, I’d miss one of my favourite seasons: spring.

Spring means so many wonderful things: new life, new hope, a fresh start. It gets just a little warmer every day as spring approaches. The bees start to wake up, the birds begin to nest, and the air is fresh with new scents and warm feelings. It’s literally like coming alive.

When I was little, my mother used to note the date of the first crocus on our wall calendar every year. “Oh! It’s a day earlier this year!” She’d smile. And then she’d note the first daffodil and the first tulip.

On one of my walks the other day, I was so happy to see a bunch of little yellow crocuses blooming that I took a picture of it. A block or so later I bumped into someone I knew who said she had just sent a series of spring flower pictures to her relatives back east.

We “wet-coasters” love to do that, don’t we? Torture our friends and family back east with flower pictures, boasting of our early spring. We even have an official flower count here on the island, and we love to let the rest of the country know every daffodil-ic detail. Just to rub it in. This year the Greater Victoria Flower Count runs from March 9th to March 16th.

Most of us on the island know about it, but if you’ve never heard of or participated in the flower count, well, it’s exactly what it sounds like. You go outside and count flowers and then you send your numbers in. There were 65+ billion blooms counted last year. On their website, they even have a count down to the flower count.

It feels like a count down to spring, really. When I last looked, there were 29 days, 22 hours, 7 minutes and 53 seconds to go. Sigh.

Of course, real spring starts on March 20th, but sometimes it does show up a little early just to tease us. It can even show up for a few days in February sometimes. Our last couple of weeks have shown us a few lovely sunsets and sunnier days.

But then, all of a sudden, snow can rear its chilly head too…

I don’t know about you, but I need spring really badly this year. Like many out there, my family have experienced some great losses over the past few months, on top of all of the negative news that’s happening in the world right now.

And what with more and more people coming down with COVID, it has been like living in a bad dream. I now know many people who’ve been infected with COVID since the Omicron variant has taken over. Sadly, I even know one person who has died from it. It’s been another very cruel winter.

So how about it spring? Why not show up a little earlier this year just to perk us up a bit? Bring on the daffodils and tulips, the nests full of tiny chirpers, the sun and the new buds. Let’s get back to golf and picnics and…spring cleaning?

Okay, wait…

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Happy 2022?

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I remember getting my first “real” job at the Vancouver Public Library just around the time of my 18th birthday. I had interviewed for a couple of positions there, and ended up working in the Sociology Department as a Library Assistant.

Once I got the job, I was invited up to the H.R. office to sign a bunch of papers. Since I was technically working for the City Of Vancouver, I was lucky to receive medical and dental benefits and also something called superannuation, which I’d never heard of before. The idea of a pension was a first for me, but something I really didn’t concern myself too much with at the tender age of 18.

I remember looking at that paper and seeing the year that I would be able to retire. It was 2022.

At the time, it felt like something out of Star Trek. The OLD Star Trek show, I mean. Any of you who watched it might remember how they often started with “Captain’s Log, Star date…”. Well Star Date 2022 seemed like a strange, futuristic time that I could not wrap my head around.

Would we all be flying around on jetpacks by then? Would we be living on Mars? And most importantly, would I be RICH?

Now suddenly here we are in the first few days of 2022. I have no idea how that happened.

So what will this new year bring us all? I almost hate to ask. Not new COVID variants, I hope.

A couple of polls I saw recently showed that most people (well, the people who responded to the polls anyway) don’t do New Year’s resolutions anymore. I get that. If you’ve ever made one, you know that it’s hard to keep resolutions, even at the best of times. Never mind the worst of times.

I tried to make the same New Year’s resolution the last few years, remembering to be grateful for what I have. An Attitude of Gratitude, I called it. But it’s been difficult to stay positive about anything lately, so I’ve decided to join the rest and ditch the resolution. EVERYTHING is TOO HARD.

With Omicron raging on and getting worse, it’s really difficult to feel positive or hopeful about anything. I’ve now had two friends and several family members (none of which I’ve had any close contact with) who’ve gone through this wretched virus. They are all okay. But the experts are now telling us that we’ll all get COVID eventually??

Well, I don’t want it!

I think I might consider holding off on any new year celebrations until Chinese New Year comes around. This year it’s on February 1st. Maybe Omicron will have peaked by then.

According to the Chinese calendar, this year will be the year of the Tiger. That sounds good to me. I’m not a Tiger, I’m a Rooster.

One of my family members keeps telling me that, technically, I’m a chicken. Roosters are male, he says. But I don’t like what being a chicken implies, so I’m sticking with Rooster.

In my excitement, I’ve been Googling “Year of the Tiger” to see what we might expect. One website says “it won’t be a dull year.” Okay, what does that mean?

Another one says “The year of the Tiger 2022 is under the influence of the water element, which means that it will be a year in which we must make all kinds of changes in our lives.” Oh, oh. Another says “Tiger years such as 2022 are all about going big or going home.”

Yeah, I’m not sure I’m liking this yet.

Ah, but here’s one. According to this website, “In the Year of the Tiger, Rooster people are destined to enjoy a smooth life and good luck in making money in 2022.”

You see? I WILL be rich!

So to all of you, whenever you celebrate it, Happy 2022!