Monday, March 7, 2011

Obsessed.

Lately my life has been stuck in this constant school/study/sleep loop (with a little party/dance it out/sleep in mixed in on the weekends) with very little excitement. 

Ho hum. 

That was until one Saturday, in the midst of studying and mowing down my ever-growing to-do list, an e-mail from Wells Fargo popped up informing me that 7,500 or so of my credit card points would expire. I normally delete these e-mails, which gives you an idea of just how badly I was procrastinating this particular day. But there they were, my hard earned miles, about to expire. So I did what any sane person would do. I dropped everything and headed over to the Rewards website to see what I could redeem them for.

There's 4 hours of my life I'm never going to get back! Seriously. And the nerdy business student in me actually made an Excel spreadsheet, weighted the items, and then used "what-if" analysis to determine the best mix for a given point value.

I'm telling you people, I have procrastination down to an art. A fine art. 

At the end of those 4 hours, I did the right thing. I walked away. I slept on it. I dreamed of HDTVs, acrylic watches, diamond earrings, knife sets and gift certificates. In the morning, I woke up and went to the gym.

As a reward for working out, I went online and redeemed 1/3 of my credit card points for one of these little beauties:

And. I. Am. Obsessed!

So here are my feelings. I love books. I love to read. I do not, however, like storing books or having lots of "stuff" in general (remember how I moved 19 boxes across the country!). I purged a lot of books when I moved out of my apartment, and sold about 2 of them at my parents' garage sale. The only ones that I've kept either have special meaning to me, or are nice hardbacks that I'd one day display in a nice book case. 

I also am anti-iPad. Now hear me out on this one. They are cool and all... but they are expensive, easily breakable and basically remind me of an over-sized iPhone. And I figure that there ain't much that the iPad can do that my iPhone can't do. Plus, it's hard to read my phone in the bright sunlight, and that would get really old when reading books.

So I have my Kindle, and I've already burned through two books on it, both of which I highly recommend: "A Discovery of Witches" by Deborah Harkness and "Water for Elephants" by Sara Gruen. Love love love. Currently reading: "The Hangman's Daughter" by Oliver Potzsch, which is turning out to be quite good as well. It also pulled in all of my audiobooks purchased on Audible automatically, which was an unexpected bonus. 

So I'm a happy camper. I'd be even happier if my reading for school involved novels and NOT Harvard Business School cases. Le sigh.

3 comments:

  1. 1) I also recently got a kindle, and I LOOOOOVE it!
    2) I was just thinking of you this weekend, because I finally got around to finishing the Girl Who... With... etc... (on my Kindle of course), and I thought.. it's time I asked Bron for another book recommendation... because... Bron has NEVER steered me wrong in this department (as well as many others). So, now I know what books to download!

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  2. I'm going to number too :)

    1. What is this Wells program that you can purchase a Kindle with 1/3 of the points you have earned?? I need this!
    2. So glad to hear you are happy with your purchase.
    3. I confess...I want an iPad :(

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  3. @Irene - I know you've already read the Hunger Games Trilogy... next you should try "Outlander" by Diana Gabaldon. The first 60 pages are a bit slow, but then it's amazing!

    @DSS - I should clarify that I did not use 1/3 of 7,500 points to get my Kindle! I used 1/3 of my 60,000 points to get 2 $100 Amazon Gift Cards. It's just their normal CC rewards program (on the first Credit Card I ever had). I used to have their checking as well, and I got points from my debit card, too.

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