Cardpool and Plastic Jungle will buy your GCs. And Mr. Rebates will give you 1% back on both buying and selling GCs to Plastic Jungle.

I did consider that, and I probably should check square footage. But when I checked, the sheet size was pretty similar. But I'll update you folks -- I know you'll be on the edge of your (toilet) seats -- if I find that isn't true.

Pamela,

I don't have a deep allegiance to any particular brand, so I just buy what's on sale. And the whole point of this little scenario is that I never knew if I was getting all that great a deal. I certainly never knew if I got the best deal, simply because the suckers are so hard to compare.

Stephanie,

Sorry to hear you're suffering too. I was lucky in that Saturday was the only day of full dizziness I experienced. It started around 9 or 10 Friday night. And it was intermittent yesterday -- though by the end of the night it was pretty close to gone.

I'm not sure if I was lucky or just normal, but I honestly thought it would last longer. I did have a lot of fruit -- apparently Effexor depletes your levels of glutathione, which is found in fruit -- so maybe that helped? Just make sure you have plenty of crackers, but also some stuff that, uh, comes back up more easily. Good luck

Alane,

We definitely plan to use as many stretchy/oversize clothes as possible. Though maternity clothes have definitely started looking better -- and oversize clothes probably won't be the most flattering -- I'd rather just get affordable threads, since we really just want the one kid.

Kate,

Unfortunately, we don't know many folks around here with kids. But I'm definitely going to keep my eyes peeled.

Thanks Beth!

Heather,

You're definitely right about an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure. In this case, there was a snafu with who was supposed to clean the litter box (I go into that more on Monday) so it didn't get done. The first time Patches baptized the couch was because Tim's mom accidentally closed the door to the room where the litter box was and we didn't notice it until the next morning. (Which is when we moved it to the living room.)

As for the cat, no they're pretty good so far. But they're one reason we invested in the 5-year warranty for the leather. It covers claws and gouges and all that good stuff.

Sooverdebt,

Yeesh, I hadn't even CONSIDERED the repeat-offender factor. Now I'm doubly glad.

Christina,

I checked the coupon and, apparently, you are correct in this. So I will try to be more careful in the future.

That said, I still have trouble accepting that I'm committing real fraud when Fry's is the one that chose to accept the coupon and even round it up to $1. It may or may not receive the cash for those coupons, so it may simply be that Fry's decided to take the loss in order to encourage sales.

And, having said that, I plan on being extra careful to scrutinize coupons in the future to be sure the items correspond correctly. Usually, I'm pretty careful about such things. This time, though, I was in a hurry to get the coupons and clearly didn't check enough.