Pandemic Journal, Day 417

Frequent Flyer Magazine CoverBack in the late 1980s, I flew a lot and accumulated many frequent flyer miles. I never quite reached the point of taking a mileage run just to qualify for higher status the next year, but I was an avid reader of the copy of Frequent Flyer magazine that was included in our departmental subscription to the Official Airline Guide.

We were able to take advantage of those miles over the years to travel overseas for free and to upgrade almost at will.

But as the airlines gave us more and more ways to earn frequent flyer miles, they also made it harder and harder to redeem them – and they kept increasing the number of miles you needed for a trip. The glory days of getting 10 cents/mile ended a long time ago – these days, you’re lucky if you can get 2 cents/mile when you redeem, and even luckier if you can get a route that isn’t insane.

Today, we were lucky. We booked the Boston to San Jose leg of our upcoming trip on Delta and got better than 2 cents/mile in value. I didn’t have quite enough Delta miles to buy the tickets, but I was able to convert a few Amex points into Delta miles to close the gap.

Airline miles are a depreciating asset – the airlines can, and do, change the redemption rate any time they want, so it’s better to hold as few of them as possible – after today, I’m down to under 1000 Delta miles and under 100 United miles. Instead, I do most of my spending on cards that give me points that I can transfer to many different airlines or hotels, or even turn into gift cards or cash.

And these days, I use my Apple Card for most in-person purchases – it gives me back 2% in cash, which is easy to understand!

Pandemic Journal, Day 416

Today was surprisingly productive.

I’d been hearing odd sounds from one of the toilets for a couple of days, as though water was leaking, but they were very intermittent. Until this morning, when the toilet didn’t stop after filling the tank. I was afraid it meant that the fill valve or float had failed, but it turned out that the flapper valve wasn’t closing properly. A quick trip to Ace Hardware got me a universal genuine Toto flapper, and replacing it was easy, even for someone as ambi-sinister as me.

The spreadsheet I’d built to help the Toastmaster of the Day create and manage the agenda for our meetings had developed problems – today’s Toastmaster told me that there were cells that had #REF in them instead bringing in information from elsewhere on the spreadsheet. It turns out that deleting a cell in a Google spreadsheet (or in Excel) makes all references to that cell become undefined – any formula which used the cell has the cell address replaced by #REF. I’d been deleting the cells containing the member list whenever I had to download a new roster – and thereby destroyed pieces of the spreadsheet. I won’t do that again.

And Intuit finally fixed their TurboTax problem, so I was able to resubmit our taxes without having to fiddle any of the numbers – and both the IRS and the FTB accepted them today.

We even got good news about our planned trip to southern Africa later this year – AmaWaterways expects to be able to start operating their cruises in late July, well before we will be there. It’s not quite time for us to book tickets, but things are looking up!