You have just missed the deadline for Early Qualification, which I believe is Oct 15. But you can still make E quite easily for 2009.

I learned this MR thing from this forum. My wife and I never have to travel for work but we make a lot of overseas pleasure trips. We have been using different airlines or points to travel to different parts of the world for many years. After reading the stuff in FT, we realized how much more benefit we could get by becoming SE and with the amount of pleasure trips we do per year, achieving SE status is so feasible. (Thanks guys on FT^) When I realized this in April this year, almost all our trips for this year have already been booked. I struggled whether we should become SE this year or wait till next year. We decided to give it a shot this year. So we booked two MRs to BKK in June. At that time, the fare was <$1K AI, but in Y. It was hell traveling in Y all the way to BKK and back, twice in a roll in two consecutive weekends, but it's worth it. So we quickly became E in June. Then we did a few more long weekend trips to NRT, PEK, SIN, etc, all in J with upgrade certs. We are now SE.

It's not that hard. I don't think we need to do any more MRs because I know we will be able to maintain SE from now on, with the amount of travel we do.

So good luck. Flying to Asia or Europe for a weekend is great. You get no jet-lags and you will be able to go back to work immediately the next day.