As for plans, things have gotten much easier since American changed the rules on expiring miles. Now I can take my time. My first use of pudding miles will be to take my family of four on a trip to Italy and Spain this Easter.

As I implied, I devoted a considerable amount of labor to this project. Tearing the sticky labels off each cup took the most time. I would peel off the labels while watching TV and stick them ten-at-a-time on sheets of paper. I must have come up with several hundred different ways to affix 10 labels to a sheet of paper.

I filled out about 25% of the 500-mile forms by hand. This took several nights. Then I figured out how to print directly on the forms from my printer. I filled out 600,000 worth of miles in a couple hours.

Before pudding, I was a non-elite, very occasionally flyer with dreams of world travel. I claimed miles for Delta, United, and Northwest, but I mostly I got miles for American. American gives lifetime Gold membership for one million lifetime miles-not flight miles. Yes, the miles I got from Healthy Choice put me over 1 million miles.