AMC Pacers and Free TVs

Morley has had an American Express card for a long time. In fact, he opened his AmEx account back when Richard Nixon was in the White House and all the groovy people were listening to Dobie Grey on 8 track tape and cruising around in AMC Pacers (Pacers are cars that looked like a fish tank on wheels in case you didn't know).

And while Morley was breaking in his new AmEx card, I was still in high school wearing cute cheerleader outfits and shaking my pompoms to the enlightening and socially relevant "My Dingaling" as performed by Mr. Chuck Berry.

(That last sentence has nothing whatsoever to do with the story I'm getting ready to tell but I never pass up the chance to mention what a young babe I am) (relatively speaking).

Anyway Morley, and subsequently the two of us, have taken lots of trips on that credit card and bought lots of household stuff with it, not to mention the bazillion gallons of gas we've purchased for our Mega SUV to do our part in polluting the air and warming the globe.

All that exercising of the plastic was building up reward points but we'd never given it any thought until we got the new AmEx rewards catalogue. As we flipped through to see all the nifty merchandise one could get by trading in points, we wondered if we'd accumulated enough points to trade in for something nifty. So we checked. We had a LOT of points. Hundreds of thousands of points. To be specific, we had all the points.

Morley had never, ever cashed in a single reward point so we had every point he'd ever earned, going back to the days when Nixon ran the White House and Pacers ruled the roads. Well, that's probably going overboard on the Pacer, but you get my drift. We had decades' worth of points, baby, and we knew what to do with them.

And that's how it came to pass that American Express hooked us up with the free 32 inch HDTV that Federal Express delivered to the house this week. We decided to put it in our bedroom in place of our existing TV (the one that is so big you can watch it from space).

Here's a shot that shows the sleek, sexy, light-as-a-feather new TV compared to the gut busting, hernia-inducing old one (Note: I make that comparison from a position of authority since Heather and I are the ones who lifted the old television off the table and carried it as far as we could, which turned out to be approximately five inches from where we started):

But now--time for the real test: can I see the new TV over the top of my dainty Size 9's as I lay in bed at night watching all those weird sitcoms on the BBC?


Yup. We're good. We're real good.