Speaking of gift certificates, I got an American Express gift card several months ago. What a royal pain in the ass they are! They act as a credit card, which sounds great, but if you have a $100 balance on the gift card, and the total purchase is $102, the card will be declined entirely because there are insufficient funds to cover the transaction. You have to keep the balance of the card in your head (it's not written on the card and the cashier can't tell you what is on it), and tell the cashier to ring up just that amount first. You pay that amount with the card, and have the cashier ring up the rest of the transaction to pay with your own cash. I think American Express hopes you won't deal with the hassle and will just leave a small balance on the card and forget about it.

Skip the gift cards, just write a check or give cash.

You said you've been getting into wines -- how about a fancy schmancy wine opener?

Or one that's less modernish, but even more fancy schmancy

A full body massage. How can you go wrong?

How about Palm TX accessories?http://www.cellar.org/images/smilies/present.gifhttp://www.cellar.org/images/moresmilies/wolf.gif

Hey, that's what I was planning on giving her. :blush:

The masseuse? Oh the Mrs. Don't forget the external bits.

Here's an idea. Why not ask your friends or family members to pay for your utility bills for the monthly cycle covered by your birthday? Somebody can pay for any one of the following as they choose: the cable, water, electricity, gas, etc. And you can also ask one of them to give you a full tank of gas in the car too. I know I would love to have THOSE for a birthday gift. It's a month of bills I won't have to worry about :blush: :blush:

That's right, rub it in! :lol:

Damn straight. You don't think I actually dust, do you?

(serious answer: I am old enough that I learned "English" instead of "Language Arts." This has a lot to do with why I can write and spell today. I had a very precise, some might say rigid, English teacher in High School. She taught an Advanced Diction and Rhetoric class that assured I would know when I was making a grievous error in Formal English Grammar and Spelling.)

Very neat idea, although I already have the world's best $5 wine opener. (Actually, I have one in my kitchen junk drawer, one lost somewhere in the house, and one in my coat pocket because I take it to parties along with the wine I've purchased so some moron trying to be helpful and open it with a traditional corkscrew doesn't cork it.)

[thread drift]
Wine does not get corked by the addition of little bits of cork on opening. That's simply little bits of cork floating in the wine and the remedy is to strain it through your teeth as you drink and elegantly and discreetly spit out the bits into the bowl of peanuts and nibbles so that someone can find them later and complain that the nibbles are stale ...Wine is described as corked when the wine's flavour is tainted with a mouldy overlay. (I don't know if the cork is actually the guilty party or not, I'm afraid but I'm sure some cellarite does.) The remedy is to send the bottle back/take it back to the shop and ask for a replacement. I remember a colleague doing this in a restaurant in Moscow in the late 1990s and the waitress reacting with a horrified expression which said "Thinks: I'm going to have to pay for that out of my wages". I hope she didn't have to ... but I'm not too sure.
[/thread drift]