I love clipping coupons. I find it very relaxing to shop -- with my sole focus on shopping the coupons and saving money on other in-store bargains. My “game” is to save at least $20/trip at the supermarket, and at least 30% when I buy higher-priced items at other stores.

Last Monday, one of our team members was late to work. He'd had a flat tire…and his spare tire was also flat, so he had to wait, and wait, and wait for a tow truck.

This morning, I arose to a series of alarms -- three fire trucks, two ambulances,three police cars. The commotion, it turns out, was right next door where a small fire was wreaking big havoc. The first evidence of the fire was smoke coming out of the light fixtures in the kitchen so my neighbor, thinking it was an electrical fire, turned off the lights and checked her oven, although she knew nothing was cooking at the time. "Donna and Sam" finally figured out the source of the fire when they opened the bathroom door and saw their towels aflame. That's when Donna remembered that earlier, she had lit a match in the bathroom. A spark must have flown onto one of the towels, because she had flushed the match. As Donna tried to put out the fire on the towels, the arm of her nightgown caught fire. She was luckily able to put that out by patting at the flame with another towel.

I've been watching the news reports on the Toyota recalls very closely since I drive a Toyota myself. The other day I was at the dealership for a minor repair (my car is not one of the recalled models) and asked the service manager whether it was a relief to be dealing with a problem that had nothing to do with the recalls. His response, "Oh, I don't mind the recalls. It's great for our service business. We get paid by Toyota, so we're now very busy at an otherwise slow time of the year." In our down economy it's interesting to find a silver lining in a cloud such as the Toyota problem. I was also surprised to hear that, despite the media hype, their customers are not in a panic over the recall so it's been pretty easy to manage.