Bounded in a Nutshell

This coming month's looking like it's going to be pretty full. Here's why:

• I'm moving both house and office in the next little while. I'm getting keys to both spaces tomorrow; I figure I'll be spending much of the weekend carting stuff between my old office and the new one, figuring out the finer points of how to arrange my new (window-licious!) space. Hopefully, I'll work out some way of keeping the new space somewhat more kempt than my current. As for the change of residence, I haven't figured out the means yet --- movers vs. old-fashioned moving party --- nor the exact timing of the move, including factors like whether I want to paint (and whether I could afford to paint, even if I wanted to).
• I'm teaching a totally new-to-me class (Math History). The week of introductory lectures have been short, but hopefully that'll be changing next week once I get into the real meat of the subject. There has been a certain amount of positive feedback to the idea that I should podcast the course, but doing that might possibly run afoul of the distance-ed people on campus; what I might do instead is wait until the fall and put together a "Math History Break" series once I've got a little more leisure to do so.
• Still trying to reach ten-and-ten: earlier this summer, my tenth research paper has been accepted for publication. I've got something like four more out being refereed right now, and a lot of mostly-finished papers lying around the bottom of the hard drive; it's not impossible to finish another six, giving me ten papers at the referees to go with the ten already accepted or published. (Although this might be an example of summer vertigo.)
• Social obligations: a wedding in Waterloo, a DANGER meeting, and a couple of visits to ecogrrl while she's in exile a little ways south of here. I'm having a certain amount of trouble readjusting to my usual social isolation after spending the better part of a month and a half around my people again, so I welcome these opportunities; however, getting to and from does take a certain amount of time.
• Oh, and a bunch of new novels came out last month; I'm grabbing and reading them as they appear at my local public library. Probably shouldn't count for this list except that they're what's driving my waking hours into Alaska Standard Time at the moment.

I'm beginning to think that airlines don't really do the whole travel-rewards thing. Oh, they'll say they do, but when it comes down to it...

So the two airlines with which I have accumulated miles¹ both have two tiers of rewards; let's call them "Level Suck" and "Level Rock". Level Suck requires only half as many miles as Level Rock, but there are restrictions; specifically, "peak routes" might not be available at Level Suck, Saturday-night stays might be required, etc. At no point does the documentation for either programme really get down to cases and explain in detail when one must redeem at Level Rock and when Level Suck is available.

The flight that I am trying to plan is entirely within the continental United States, over a weekend. I am trying to fly from a minor airport in a Midwestern city to a minor airport in a Southern city; "minor" should be understood here to indicate that the number of baggage claim belts at the airports in question --- combined --- can be counted on the fingers of one hand. This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a Peak Route.

And yet it seems that no reward flights are available at Level Suck on the days in question, on either airline. There was briefly the possibility of such a flight, but when I tried to redeem it I got a message informing me that I cannot book this online, and must call a toll-free phone number. The message did not inform me of the fact that no one would answer the phone at the number in question, but that turns out to be true as well.²

And so the whole frequent-flier thing gives certain indications of being a scam. By the time I've got enough miles on either plan to reach Level Rock, I suspect that they'll have changed the rules again somehow to prohibit the redemption of miles on days containing a Y or something.

[1]: The two airlines in question are now partners, as it happens, and one can earn miles for one's plan by flying with the other. This is a very different thing from being able to just, say, pool miles between the two plans and come up with something worthwhile; the latter seems to be a fundamental logical impossibility, somehow.

[2]: Plus, one of the airlines will happily quote "prices" at you which are impossible to achieve using the guidelines in the Member's Guide. If reward travel happens at x and 2x miles, how is it possible to get a search result which costs 1.7x miles?