I have long wondered about what I would do with the millions I got from a lottery win, which I do play regularly. Here's a place I can collect all of the ideas of what I would hope to accomplish with that, if my turn at bat ever arrives.

• Volunteer Fire Departments in Texas
  • I would like to be able to give a decent sum to volunteer fire departments to help upgrade or maintain their equipment, in smaller towns where budgets are so much tighter. I'm guessing I would need to probably give it directly to the town leadership, with it being earmarked for specifically VFD funding needs, unless there is some other kind of regulatory body that oversees them. More radios, additional engines/ pumps/ tanks/ breathers/ etc. Maybe a sponsored training course out of town with a bigger city to the VFD leadership.

• Small-town Newspaper Life Support
  • I like subscribing to or picking up a rack issue of a small-town newspaper when I travel by road, and it would be cool to help some of those papers stay in business if there were some kind of key investment that would save them from breaking, like if their single source for printing issues was going under, or couldn't hire a writer with competitive-enough wage to keep the rag afloat.

• One-year university scholarships for arts degrees for abstract painters and graphic artists
  • With the chance to re-apply based on proven diligence so far. There is an anonymous abstract painting at my local university that I am a huge fan of, and I've loved seeing it freely open in the hallways for 30 odd years now.

• Open-air weather-enduring art walk gallery
  • I'm not sure if it would require too much insurance and upkeep, but I have always really liked open-air 24h sculpture art in metalworking, where people can stroll at their leisure to admire the investment it took to make such pieces.

• Graffiti-encouraged wall
  • I love graffiti, especially on train cars. I would love to erect a large, wide wall, that encourages tagging and retagging, for anyone in the open public to experiment on. It would regularly get re-covered with a fresh coat of base layer, but not without heavy public photography of what was there before re-coating.

• Roadside landmarks
  • One of the better parts of the drive over long distances, is seeing weird roadside attractions along the away. I want there to be a section of a road, or periodic elements of roads all over Texas (for starters) with weird optical illusions to see as you drive past it, or a big pyramid off in the distance to inspire wonder of what could be inside, or strange sculptures that make for interesting landmarks as being so-many miles until the next whatever.

• A huge field of evenly spaced tall, broad-leaf trees
  • a public place for a picnic, or a wedding proposal, or just exploring, and a full time (if necessary) horticulturist who tends them, with free leaves for composting. spaced far enough apart to deter wildfires.

• Surprise big-dono to small-timer Twitch streamers
  • I am one of those who likes giving bits to Twitch streamers, particularly the smaller streamers who haven't quite gotten their footing just yet. I would love to be able to surprise them on a burner account that drops a big donation, that could end up actually paying their rent or something during a month they're really struggling, or be one of their first subs to encourage their journey along.

• Coat Tops & Coat Bottoms
  • Make a huge warehouse where I produce(?)/order and then hoard coat tops and coat bottoms for distribution to homeless in area, high quality/durability. Worn/soiled coats can be traded out for new ones, for olds to be laundered and recycled back out into rotation.

• K-9 Unit Body Armor
  • Make sure all K-9 units in Texas, and then neighboring states at least, if not all the US, have great body armor for their work out in the field.

• Evaporative Cooling Building Walls Study
  • One of the Rolex Awards For Enterprise award recipients invented a method of keeping perishables cooled in arid climates, with the invention of a large pottery jar with had an inner layer of sand and a smaller pottery jar within that layer, which, when the inner jar was sealed and the sand layer was wetted in an arid environment, the evaporation of the sand cooled the contents of the inner jar. I have long wondered if it would be possible to make a house structure, like with cinderblocks and sand, much the same way, for arid regions to have a cooled room from this evaporative concept, and want to experiment with different kinds of wall casing materials, sand types, etc, to find more efficient methods if it did work.

• Large Empty Building for Friends of the Library
  • Our local “Friends of the Library” non-profit is currently squished into a too-small building with lofty rent. I'd like to either build or buy them an existing building that would work better, because this group is important to me, and put away a fund that would pay their utilities.

• Tourism Spot Of Paintable Old Cars
  • A big parcel of land with old cars spaced out on it like a car show, except none of them work and are moored to the ground, for the public to come and view and paint on them freely. Could employ one or two staff to manage access, if necessary.