Powerball winner's wife: I'm glad he didn't listen to me

(UPI) -- Erlinda Mitchell used to tell her husband he was wasting his money purchasing lottery tickets. But Wednesday, with a giant Powerball check for $213 million in hand, she was singing a different tune.

"I'm glad he didn't listen to me," Mitchell, 66, said.

Carlo Mitchell, a retired nuclear medicine technician, became California's first Powerball winner when a ticket he purchased at a Fast 'N Easy store in east Fresno matched all six numbers drawn on October 23. He'll take home $123.4 million in a lump sum.

The couple held an impromptu news conference in their backyard Wednesday, still somewhat in shock at their new fortune.

"I needed to get a basis for what I was going to do with that kind of money," Carlo Mitchell, 68, said. "It takes time."

Just a month ago, Erlinda Mitchell, a retired nurse at Clovis Community Medical Center, told Carlo she was thinking of going back to work.

"Now I don't think I'm going back, not even as part time!" she said.

The couple said they don't intend to do much to change their lifestyle: They might buy a vacation home or two, and do more traveling, but they aren't planning on buying a bigger house or leaving Fresno. Some of the wealth they planned to give to their church and to close family and friends.

They insisted media at their backyard press conference not show their faces in pictures or video.

And Carlo Mitchell, who said he bought lottery tickets at the Fast 'N Easy twice a week, planned to keep playing, even with the same numbers.

"Hey," he said, "if I can set a new record, why not?"