Southwest Status Now a Tap-In

At start of June I observed that I was already more than halfway to requalifying on Southwest for A-List Preferred and Companion Pass elite statuses. Now, 10 or 11 weeks later I've got them pretty much in the bag.

For A-List Preferred I'm just 500 qualifying points shy of the 70,000 required. I've got a plan to hit the target— and it doens't even require flying. I can get there with a credit card bonus I'll easily hit later this year.

For Companion Pass I'm almost 20,000 qualifying points short of the 135,000 required. As with A+ I've got a plan. Actually I have two plans, either of which gets me there— and neither requires any more flights. And also as with A+, they're both powered by credit card bonuses I can easily hit. I may even finish the year with nearly 160k qualifying points for companion pass vs. the 135k required. Too bad there's no rollover to next year!

Update, Aug 28: A quick, last-minute business trip on Southwest today put me over the 70k mark to renew A+ status. And with the addition of another business trip in early October I now have three ways to renew CP.

Cost-Effectiveness of Digital Photography

Recently I saw a post on DPReview.com that reminded me of the calculations I was making back in 2000 about whether and when to buy my first digital camera.

"In 2000, I went to Greece with 22 rolls of 36 exposures, came home and had them developed and put onto CDs at the cost of US$440. Today with digital, I could have bought a lens with what I spent on film and developing on that trip.”

This author nails one of the underappreciated aspects of the digital photograph revolution: It's cheaper.

Of course, we had to go out and buy new cameras. That cost money up front. And there was a new piece of gear we needed: memory cards. Those were pretty darn expensive when I bought my first digital camera in 2001. I believe I paid about $650 for a 3 Megapixel Sony camera and another $120 for two Sony Memory Sticks that each held approximately 40 pictures.

On my first trip with a digital camera, two days in Yosemite, I more than filled those cards plus the tiny 8MB card that came in the box with the camera. ..."More" than filled, meaning on the first night I went through and pruned pics that weren't keepers so I'd have room to take pictures the next day.

The guy above boasting about saving $440 on those 792 shots? He'd have spent a lot of that on memory cards and/or a laptop to transfer pictures to every day. Though it would've been a one-time cost (per camera). And thankfully the cost of storage has come down exponentially. Now I have a card that stores about 1,000 pics from my 24MP camera, it cost less than $30, and I've never come close to filling it.

I've got to say, though, while cheaper was definitely one of the calculations I made in deciding to go digital years ago, it was not the #1 objective. The #1 objective was fast feedback. With a digital camera the picture is right there, ready to look at, the moment you take it. That enables me to review it with a critical eye right away, checking things like composition, lighting, and focus. I didn't have to wait until days after the trip was over to see how good my photography was. Having that immediate feedback meant I could improve my photography faster, and really that was my main goal.

Sitting Shiva for Del. Different Traditions of Grieving.

After my friend, Del, died on Tuesday his family has been sitting shiva. Shiva is a Jewish tradition of mourning the loss of a loved one. Del wasn't Jewish, but his husband and husband's family are. Shiva is part of their grieving process. Hawk and I joined them on Tuesday afternoon/evening and again this evening.

It's interesting to me, as a person raised in the Catholic faith, to learn about the traditions of other faiths. One thing interesting and different to me is that the Jewish practice is very prescriptive. In Catholic tradition, there's a funeral service and then there's a wake— though the wake is secular, not religious. Before and after that there's... nothing in the proverbial script.

With shiva there's seven days of mourning. Shiva literally means "seven" in Hebrew. The family gathers in a house during this time, and the house is considered a house of morning. Depending on how devoted the family are to traditions, pictures of the departed are turned face-down, mirrors are covered, and people may even not shower or wear cosmetics. The motive of these traditions is that you're not supposed to do things that are pleasurable, and caring about your appearance is considered pleasure... traditionally.

Every day during shiva there's a recitation of the Mourners' Kaddish, a prayer of remembrance for the dead. Along with the prayers there's an "open floor" for anyone present to share a fond memory of the deceased. It's welcome but not required. Tuesday night I think everyone was still surprised; Del had passed just 12 hours earlier, and nobody was really ready to share. Tonight everyone present, eight of us, shared a memory.

Compared to Catholic traditions, having these regular prayers for 7 days is intense. But it strikes me as helping people get out all their feelings. We get together, we get our feelings out, and we're better prepared after 7 days to move on. ...Not that everyone will move on after 7 days, or even that tradition demands it. Beyond shiva there's shloshim: a period of 30 days (un-coincidentally shloshim means "thirty") from the loss during which mourners resume their regular activities like going to work but are prohibited from pleasurable activities like going to parties or watching movies.

One thing that is very similar between Jewish and Catholic traditions is food. Everyone brings food to the house of mourning. With shiva this is part of the script. And it's done for all seven days. In Catholic tradition it's... just something that people do because it's practical. It's helpful to bring food to the bereaved so they don't have to worry about shopping and cooking in the depths of their grief. As well, extra food in the house feeds well-wishers who stop by. When my father died years ago, my sister's friends brought what seemed like a dozen Costco roast chickens and Sam's Club pizzas to the house. Only empty containers landed in the trash.

Coming back around to things that are different, one thing I like about the way Del's husband and inlaws are practicing shiva is that shiva is not just about him, it's also about the people grieving. That's different from Catholic faith where the only things that are part of the religious script are about the deceased. Here people are sitting shiva for Del, and he wasn't even Jewish. He was Buddhist. But that's okay because shiva isn't his process, it's the survivors' process. I like that because it always struck me as stultifying that funerals and Catholic traditions of grieving were solely focused on the departed and ignored the grief of the bereaved. I decided years ago that funerals should be about remembering fondly the dead and then caring for the living.