Rhode Island has a great consumer-protection law: if a store advertises the "final price" of an item - that is, net of ANY rebates - alone or with the original price, the store MUST grant the rebate ON THE SPOT. This is true even if the rebate is a manufacturer rebate.

I was given soda, punch, and juices as a child - no one in the house drank water much. Now, with two little kids, we make it a point to drink water (with ice) with meals. I don't want my kids to grow up addicted to HFCS.

I tape store reciepts (they fade) to letter-sized paper, circle, label, and categorize; then I scan to PDF. Year-end financial statements get scanned, too. I use Turbo-Tax to prepare and print the resulting return as a PDF, too. Finally, everything is zipped together as a yearly file.

@PURKINJE: Excellent creative sneakiness. Will consider that tactic.

Every so often I enable these for comic relief. Between HAL, Homer Simpson, and Alan Alda, I get some good chuckles. Sometimes verbal alerts are better than visual, too. I frequently turn off my second monitor (where my email client is) so I can focus on what I'm working on while still keeping an ear out for awaited…

For our family in MA, we have canned food, frozen bread and shelf-stable soy milk along with shoeboxes of batteries and candles. We rotate these items as used or when we change the clocks & smoke alarm batteries.