Shelley and I have gotten rather frustrated trying to redeem our United Mileage Plus frequent flier miles for our summer travel. All the seats reserved for such things disappeared the second week in January, the United rep said, so we couldn't use the miles for our over-ocean flights.

As an alternative, we thought maybe we could use miles to get across the US, then pay for the transoceanic part, but no... all those seats are already gone too, although we could use about double miles to get some kind of other reserve seats and a premium rate. What a scam.

What's the point of accumulating all these miles if we cannot use them when we want?

None.

So time to change credit cards. Anyone got any recommendations for decent rewards programs? Maybe we'll go to the Amazon card that we used for a while, and still technically have open.

United card, into the shredder with you. And good riddence.


Which reminds me -- we upgraded our paper shredder the other day to one that takes 12 pages at one pass, as well as staples, credit cards, and even paper clips. This, so we don't even have to bother opening up all the paper spam we get. Just drop it into the shredder and away it all goes, frustrating any would-be identity thieves who lurk around most every corner.

(If you want our other 4-page strip shredder, just send word.)