A Week of Waking Up Early

There's one thing I didn't particularly expect to happen after coming home from Thanksgiving travel 8 days ago: jet lag. I barely even got onto Eastern time while I was out there; there were only 2 days I got up before 9am. But starting last Monday after getting back home I was up at 5:30am. It then became a pattern as I woke up at 5:30am all last week.

Waking up at 5:30am isn't all bad. It actually helped a bit as I had early meetings, 7am, almost every day of the week. I did expect the jet lag to wear off by Wednesday, though it didn't. I had it all the way through Saturday.

The big downside of getting up early, of course, is tiring out early. All week I was feeling pooped by 8pm and was usually in bed by 9. 🥱

Sunday I finally slept in. I slept in 'til just after 7am. 🤣 Though that was at least partly because Saturday I stayed up "late"— past 11pm!

Today I woke up at 5:30am again. Though today I decided to stay in bed and see if I could fall back asleep. I did... and I swatted the snooze button on my 6:45am alarm a few times before getting up.

Maybe I'm back on a normal, local-timezone schedule now? I'll see what happens tonight and tomorrow.

Coming up Short on Southwest. Mileage Run Planned.

I've remarked a number of times that airline elite status is important enough to me, given how much I travel, that I track my earnings on a spreadsheet. I've got lifetime gold status on United so I don't track that anymore, but I do track my Southwest earnings rigorously. All this year I've been watching my elite qualifying points and forecasting my future flight and credit card activity to map how I can get the 70,000 points to renew A-List Preferred (A+) status.

Back in October it seemed like it would be a long shot to get A+. A long shot but still doable. Then a better plan came together in November with a business trip to Austin. I saw a clear path to cinch A+ by now. When the final points I needed failed to post recently I went back and checked my records. It turns out one of my estimations was off. I am currently 140 points shy of the 70k needed. A lousy 140 points out of 70,000!

So, how can I earn points to make up the difference? This late in the year there's only one way: fly. Fly on a paid ticket. Thus for the first time in 14 years I am going on a Mileage Run.

Mile·age Run, noun: a flight or series of flights taken solely to earn frequent flyer miles or airline elite status.

I scoured Southwest's booking engine yesterday and came up with cheapest trip I could find. December 28th I'll fly a completely gratuitous round-trip to Los Angeles (LAX). I'll fly down in the afternoon, spend a few hours on the ground without even leaving the terminal, then fly back late evening.

What's it going to cost? The one-way flight that gets me the points I need is $109. The other flight I bought with points, 9k.

Is it worth it? Hard to say. A lot of depends on what A+ status is really worth next year. It's kind of a big question mark because Southwest is completely revamping its customer operations with assigned seating. Nobody really knows what it's going to look like in terms of getting good seats with the new policy. But A+ elite status gives me the best crack at it— and like I said above, I fly enough that it matters. So I'm spending some money now to buy a better experience across all of next year.