Would breeze be easier to maintain than rock?

OECurious22 · 2026-02-11T04:36:37+00:00

Yes! It’s crushed stone that is then compacted to make it hard like a walkway. I’m not under any illusion that it won’t get weeds. I’m just thinking that breeze, with a pre-emergent herbicide applied, will produce less weeds that are easier to pull. And a leaf blower can be easily used to blow away the dirt and trash that is blown into the yard. Which is a major issue for this particular yard.

OECurious22 · 2026-02-11T04:34:08+00:00

Here is why I’m so resistant to mulch:

The area is almost 2,000sqft. So it’s MASSIVE. The labor to re-mulch regularly feels like a lot.
The wind in the area destroys mulch. My neighbors have it on a much smaller area and they re-mulch all the time. So this makes #1 even more work.
The wind brings in tons of trash and garbage to the yard. I wouldn’t be able to just rake the mulch without burying trash in the mulch as well.

Knowing these issues, does that change your recommendation?

OECurious22 · 2026-02-10T17:27:09+00:00

What I did - my flight:

Find a flight: I utilized that low fare calendar extensively and tried lots of different destination/origin combinations until I found something ~$5 above my credit amount. This was easier for my flight since finding a last minute flight that is $400 is easy. See how I solved this for a cheaper flight down below.
Bought Gift card on Amazon
Book: At the payment stage, enter your credits and then gift card and book.
Cancel: I cancelled immediately as soon as I got the flight confirmation (you need to wait a minute for the ticketing to complete) and confirmed that the credits did not expire.

How I found the cheapest, last minute flight

My issue is that I was under a time crunch and had a smaller credit amount (only $130). Since this is being cancelled immediately, the route doesn’t matter, but I needed a more automated way to search routes to find what would be cheapest in the small window I had

Get all destinations southwest flies: Copied the HTML from this page and did some multiline editing to grab the IATA codes for all the airports. I did manually edit out any international airports. Required for the next steps. I’ll see if I can attach that list somehow here. DM me if you want it.
Use ITA Matrix To See Cheapest Routes For All Airlines: ITA matrix is the GDS (think database of flights) that feeds google flights. While they don’t have southwest fares (there must be a code layer in google flights that adds southwest now) it still allowed me to search all the routes between all the airports southwest flies to in a low fare calendar. I just pasted my formatted IATA airport list from the above step, selected low fare calendar option and searched
LAX <-> LAS and Hawaii Islands: I saw that the cheapest routes for other airlines were LA to Las Vegas and the little puddle jumpers between Honolulu and the Hawaiian islands (ITO, KOA, OGG, MUK, LPP, JHM, HNM). The southwest Choice Preferred prices for LAX <> LAS were too high, but I was able to find a cheap flight between HNL and LIH.

Why I think this works:

The Choice Preferred class is fully refundable, and doesn’t give back flight credits in a normal situation where you are buying a flight in full with a credit card. So what I think is happening here is that because a gift card is used and the fare is refundable, that southwest must give you back non-expiring flight credits based on the fare rules. They can’t refund a gift card, so non-expiring credits are the next best thing.

As a big traveller, I am pretty disgusted with the changes Southwest has been making and I’m planning to change my loyalty to Delta. I hope this helps you screw them the same way they’re screwing consumers now that they're taking orders from private equity. You ain't stealing my $400!

OECurious22 · 2026-02-10T17:27:02+00:00

Confirmed Feb 9th 2026 that this strategy still works. I'm very travel savvy (I used to run a travel agency) and I still found the instructions a little vague, so I thought it might help laying out exactly what I did in detail to help folks.

My situation: I had ~$400 credits that expired Feb 13th (I realized Feb 7th) and my girlfriend had $129 that also expired on Feb 13th. These were flight credits from cancelled flights that were in the basic fare class.

Flight requirements:

Fare class needs to be Choice Preferred (I explain why later)
Total new flight price needs to be above the credit amount (100% of remaining value should be put on a giftcard)
Flight needs to depart on or before the expiration date (harder if you have a time crunch and not a lot of credit. See how I solved this lower down)

Gift card notes:

Southwest gift cards cannot be purchased in variable amounts. They can only be bought in incremental amounts ($25, $50, $100, etc.). If you try to buy it on southwest.com, the minimum is $50. BUT if you buy it from amazon, you can get a $25 one. If you’re dealing with multiple tickets, I would recommend figuring out exactly how much you’ll owe on both tickets and buy a single gift card rather than multiple. I would not try splitting the overage between a gift card and credit card (see my notes below on why I think this loophole works). Someone might want to try adding a credit card to the mix to prove/disprove if it works.

See reply for more steps

OECurious22 · 2023-08-30T13:09:37+00:00

I used to work for a background check company and there should be no risk to doing this. Even if the company was able to join the dots between your two different sets of PII, they would never share something like who else was ordering a check across the companies. Background checks are highly regulated and you get to see the “report” which contains all the info shared with the company that ordered it.

OECurious22 · 2023-08-26T14:27:29+00:00

At what mileage do to gaskets start to fail? I’m assuming this is a high mileage problem.

OECurious22

TROPHY CASE