So I was going to try to sneak back up to the land of corn and soybeans (although, what with ethanol and all it’s probably more corn than soybeans anymore) to surprise my brother Andrew for his graduation from college. Joey gets to go to the Iowa later on in the month because his brother is graduating, so I wanted to see mine.

Alas. It is impossible.

Guess, just guess, how much a ticket from DFW to Des Moines, IA is running today if you’d like to get there on Friday.

No, it’s higher. Guess again.

Still higher.

OKfine, I can see you’re not going to get it.

A round-trip ticket to Iowa for May 9-11 would set me back $1,250. That is so high it should be illegal. So after discovering the gross overcharging on American Airline’s part, we called the Johnny On The Spot guy in my family, also known as Gramps, who has zillions of extra frequent flier miles that we mooch off him now and again.

Gramps immediately set to work on the problem at hand. He came up short, though, because American has rigged it so that:

a.) You can’t use your frequent flier miles pretty much at all anymore

b.) You can’t fly into Iowa pretty much at all anymore. (Oh, unless you want to use double your frequent flier miles)

c.) They’ll still get $200 bucks out of you as a “courtesy fee”

Courtesy fee my eye.

We thanked Gramps for his good, very quick, and thorough research. Unfortunately, we had wasted his time.

See, once we discovered it would take something like 500,000 frequent flier miles and $200 bucks, we abandoned ship. I will no longer be attempting to go to the Iowa to see my distinguished brother trip across the platform at Iowa State University, receive his empty diploma folder, and move his tassle.

LAME LAME LAME LAME LAME.

I will have to content myself with making Popsicle-stick puppets of Andrew, the fam, and the graduation type guys who will present Andrew with his diploma and have Joey put on a puppet show for me while I try to listen in to the goings-on in the Iowa on speaker phone or something.