We have thousands of human-written stories, discussions, interviews and reviews from today through the past 20+ years. Find them here:

Search the site Search

My gift to myself

November 30, 2007 at 7:18 AM

I use a VISA credit card associated with amazon.com, and every time I use the card, I get points which can be transferred to dollars and spent only on amazon.com. I initially decided to use my points for something practical – a humidifier. Fortunately, amazon.com didn’t have the kind I was looking for. I thought about my shopping list on amazon.com. I search for things I like, put them on my shopping list, and after a while, buy some of them. This time, I got the idea that this is “found money” and I could use it to buy something special.

Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts, which I wrote about in my blog of Sept. 16, 2007, is something very special. It is a boxed set of 9 DVDs, each with three 1-hour concerts, in which Leonard Bernstein makes so many complex aspects of music seem easy and lots of fun. The list price on amazon.com at that time was about $180, and it has now dropped to $129.99, still way beyond the constraints of my budget. I borrowed the set from a friend, watched the DVDs, loved them, and wished I could buy them. Recently, I checked amazon.com again and found that one of their associated sellers with a high customer rating was selling the set for a mere $77.99 plus $3 shipping. Using my $50 in accumulated points, I could buy the set for just $31. That’s exactly what I did. Yay! It’s my Christmas gift to myself.