Captain G

We thought about "You've Got a Friend" by Carol King/James Taylor, but we would like something more recent. "You've Got A Friend In Me" is kind of played out and sappy. Any suggestions?

I'm looking for songs about politely saying "no thanks" to someone trying to pick you up. Like "I'm flattered but not interested" as opposed to "ew gtfo!" Suggestions?

For example, we got a 32-page book aimed at 3-5 year olds from the library yesterday, and today he's already finishing the sentences as we read it to him. Is he unusually good with language, or is it normal for a kid to memorize a book in a single day at a year and half?

I've noticed that a few of my customers based in Dubai and other areas of the middle east use the phrase "please do the needful" when they mean "please do what's necessary" in emails to me. Is there something about the grammar of Arabic that makes this sort of construction seem correct to them?

In the Word doc I'm creating (Word 2013 if it matters), we have a blue background color on the Heading 1 style. This creates a horizontal blue bar all the way across the page from margin to margin. Is there anything I can do to make the background color only go behind the text characters? We're trying to create a 'blue box' around the text rather than a blue bar across the document. Is that doable?

Is there any way to COPY plain text out of MS Word? I know I can PASTE plain text only INTO Word, but if I'm copying from MS Word into another application and I don't want to keep anything but the text itself, is there a way? Thus far I've been copying into Notepad and then back out again, but I'd rather find a way within Word itself to save the trouble.

I have an HSA but didn't have enough in it to cover medical expenses yet. I paid medical bills on a credit card and later paid myself back from the HSA. I'm confused as to whether these medical expenses are or are not deductible, since they were paid for with post-tax dollars initially and then reimbursed later. Does that matter, or does simply passing the dollars through the HSA account disqualify the deduction?

When I'm using my Nikon D60 with my manual-focus 50mm lens, it seems like I have a real tough time focusing at low f-stops. It will look sharp in the viewfinder, but when I look at the image full-size it's focused too close or too far. Is there any trick to this or do I just have to take a ton of shots at slightly different focal lenghts and hope that one of them is where I wanted it to be?

I'm making a purchase on behalf of a non-profit organization. If the store doesn't require me to use a payment method bearing the organization's name (say, a check or credit card) am I doing something illegal if I use my own personal credit card to pay for it? I wasn't sure if claiming tax exemption while using personal funds was illegal if I'm handing over the merchandise to the organization after it's been bought.

We had a large bed of bracken ferns removed and replaced with grass by a landscaper last summer. This summer the ferns are returning and growing right up through the lawn. Is there any sort of herbicide I can use to kill the ferns without also killing all of my new grass?

We live in a 1929 colonial and have one upstairs tub/shower. We've had inconsistent pressure as long as I can recall. It'll be high for a week or two, then one morning it's suddenly low, and it'll stay that way for a while and then suddenly be high again.

We have a newish shower head, a single-handle water mixer and a 'pull up knob' diverter on the tub spout. The shower head is new, but the handle is old - the new handle that went with the shower head was too small for the hole cut in the tile for the old one, so we left the old one. It's a 2gpm head, but I don't know whether our "high" or "low" pressure is the 2gpm.

Anyway, the other day we 'caught it in the act'. We turned on the shower and it was the usual higher flow, and then there was a loud bang in the wall and the pressure dropped to the lower level. It's remained low today. I've heard of 'water hammer', but since this has only happened the one time and only in the shower that seems unlikely.

Is it possible that something is "loose" somewhere that might be restricting the flow at random? Maybe the handle has a bad part? Any way to troubleshoot this before spending dough on a plumber?

Due to a payroll snafu, my Health Savings Account has nothing in it, and I'm having a baby next month. Since I'm on a high-deductible plan, I'll have to pay for everything out of my savings account for the expenses and repay myself out of the HSA whenever there's money back in there.

Do I need to do anything special regarding record keeping for this year's taxes, since I'm paying for medical expenses from a post-tax account and refunding myself out of my pre-tax account? Do I just hang on to the medical receipts and give them to my tax preparer as usual no matter how I paid the bills?

I was thinking of replacing the stock license plate lights on my car with amber LEDs. Can anyone tell me if that's likely to get me in hot water?

Each winter around this time, we find that the pressure in our shower suddenly gets higher for a week or so and then returns to normal. There doesn't appear to be any difference in the pressure to other fixtures, and changing the shower head didn't stop the problem. Normally I wouldn't mind higher pressure, except that we have a natural gas tankless water heater, and when the pressure in the shower ramps up, there isn't enough gas pressure to run the water heater and the furnace at the same time. If the shower is running heavy, we have to turn off the heat in the house to get a warm shower.

I'm a little baffled as to what might cause the shower to suddenly gain pressure for a few days and then return to normal by itself. It does seem to happen around January each year, but none of the neighbors have any increase and the other fixtures seem ok... do we just have plumbing gremlins?

For the unfamiliar, kvass is an old Russian beverage made from sugar, fruit, and bread ingredients like malted rye and yeast. It is a fermented drink that tastes like a sweet, bready "almost beer" but has no alcohol to it. I was wondering whether it would turn into alcohol if it was allowed to sit long enough, or if it would just spoil instead.

My wife and I are both on my health insurance. It's a high deductible plan with an HSA. Since I'm the only one with the HSA account, 100% of our medical expenses currently come out of my paycheck. My wife would like to be contributing to the cost of our healthcare of course, but her employer doesn't offer an HSA so she'd have to get one independently. If she did, we'd end up paying medical bills for ourselves and our kid out of two separate accounts, which could be tricky to keep track of if we're trying to pay for things evenly. How do other families handle this sort of setup?

I'm going to be playing D&D for the first time (4th Ed) and I want to be a wizard. The DM suggested I start of as a ranger instead because wizard will be more complicated. I've heard in 4e it's not much tougher than anything else. Opinions?

My parents have a Time-Warner cable box with a Synergy V RT-U63CP remote. They just bought a new Vizio 37" and are trying to set up the cable remote to control the TV. We followed the instructions in the booklet for the remote, and we successfully got the remote to turn the TV on and off and control the volume, however the remote ceases to be able to control the cable box. We can't access the Guide or list button etc. at all - the only way to get control back to the remote is to do the factory-reset. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that setting the remote to control the TV should not prevent it from being used on the cable box anymore, right? Anyone have a suggestion?

Our company makes software for HR professionals. Some of them have asked us if we can add I-9 forms into the software. Are there rules somewhere about what classifies a 'legal I-9 form'? If we generate an HTML form that looks like an I-9, does that count as a legal document, or does it have to be a pixel-for-pixel exact representation of the paper form to be valid?