What would you do with R140million?

3 August 2018
I think just about every country has at least one lottery competition.
South Africa as well. And South Africa has a Lotto and a PowerBall competition. I don’t really play PowerBall. I like SportStake (a competition where a person can bet as little as R2 on 13 soccer match results; and I like to follow soccer).
Today the possible PowerBall pay-out is apparently a guaranteed R140million. So I bought myself two tickets. For R10 each. I’m not saying I am going to win anything.
I thought I will ask the question anyway… What would you do with R140million? What would I do with R140million?
I have heard that it is clever to not say anything about winning (or getting) a large amount of money at once.
I will do my best to stay silent about winning the money.
I have, however thought about sharing money like that with some people before. I will for sure give the first R40million to my nearest family members and some of my other near family members and friends. I will, of course, make them promise not to say where they got the money. At least for six months.
I will find a place to deposit the money somewhere where I can get a good interest rate. I am guessing a good interest rate is about 5% per year (it could be more; hopefully not less). At 5% per year, you could get about R215000 per month (if taxes are to be deducted).
If that is true, I could travel the world, work almost anywhere for no salary, and share a lot of money with many people.
I have never really dreamed of living in a R10million mansion. But I might buy that FerrariF40 I always dreamed about. A nice little R2million house won’t be too bad.
I also have a small business. At the moments it is more like a registered hobby. I would like to use that money to help build the business. I also have this dream to build this business into something that can help to other people jobs.
I would also like to use some of the money to travel a little. Firstly, I would like to travel in South Africa. I would also like to travel around the world. I always wanted to see places like New York City, Scotland, Ireland, Barcelona and Egypt. In South Africa, I have seen Table Mountain, but I won’t mind to actually stand on Table Mountain one day. And I would like to travel through Namakwaland when it is the flower season, as well as to go somewhere during snow-season, while it is snowing.
That is about as far as I can think to spend R140million.
If I do not win PowerBall tonight, and you were the winner, what would you do with that money? How will you spend of save it?

Where is our power? Where is Eskom?

1 August 2018

In South Africa, we have a power supplier that struggles to supply power. The name of the company is Eskom

Eskom logo

Yesterday Eskom started load shedding again.
Load shedding is all about switching some parts of a cities’ or towns’ off so that power is saved. People are basically forced to save power. Sounds a little crazy, right? In South Africa, we are so used to this, that we don’t find it strange at all any more. It is become a “normal” part of our lives.
The schedule is usually for three hours at a time. At least in the area where I live.
BUT. In the area I live in, we do not only suffer power outages during load shedding times. We lose power for more or less any reason. Sometimes when the wind blows hard or five drops of rain fall, we have a power outage. When this happens, we can be without power for at least 3-4 hours at a time. We have these power outages at least two times in a month. Our municipality also seems unable to fix whatever causes these outages.
This is day one of my “one post a day” experiment. I did not really want to moan about something on my first post. Unfortunately it had to start this way. I hope I will not be complaining about some kind of lack of service provision for the rest of this month.

Blog a day in August

31 July 2018
I tried this before. In fact, I tried to do this just two months ago. I wanted to write one blog post every day, and publish these posts as soon as possible.
August is my favourite month of the year. I will write about the reason for that soon. That is why I am going to try to write one blog post every day for a month. Again.
I can write a post every day. I will be writing about any kind of topic that I think of. Sometimes I read a meme and it triggers an idea. I hope that happens throughout this coming month. Sometimes I hear a song and it triggers an idea, or I see a news story, and that triggers an idea to write about. I don’t have fixed topic I write about, although I do have some pet loves that I write about more than others. Those readers who have been following me for a while – if there are any – would have notices a long time ago that I do not have a fixed topic that I write about. I am all over the place when it comes to topics, really.
I do not, however, have reliable and available wifi spots. I use these, because my only alternative is mobile data, and that is to expensive. So I can’t publish my posts every day.
In any case. Join me on this ride of daily writing. Please follow me, comment on my posts, and share it if you want to and/or if you enjoy the writing.

31 July 2018: Introduction to August 2018 in my blogging evolution [Or: Blog a day in August]
01 August 2018: Where is our power? Where is Eskom?
02 August 2018: Talking about prayer