😉

I’ve done similar as well. My work gave me a real hard time with a grocery receipt, because there was a grocery store an easy walk from the hotel and I bought some deodorant or something along with some snacks and sandwich ingredients. It was maybe $30. My choices were don’t claim it or recalculate the cost without deodorant including tax from just the deodorant and write a memo detailing what meal(s) I was charging. I Also had to say why I wasn’t claiming certain meals (because leftovers, etc., I even had to have a meeting with the refund person because the company putting on the training fed us and I didn’t have receipts). After that I made sure I ordered as close to ~$43 as I could (meal plus 15% tip maxed out what I could claim) three times a day.

I also couldn’t order two appetizers or entrees without needing a memo and/or showing it was for the next meal because we couldn’t buy someone else food. Pizzas were never questioned beyond “you ate it all yourself?” though. I really like expensive pizza parlors when I’m traveling for work.

That’s only after taking away all the toys they pulled out instead of doing anything to get ready for the last 30 minutes.

I really like my synology DS216j. Pretty much all I use it for is as a file server and storage, mostly because it can’t really do much beyond that these days, but it sure does handle that like a champ. I’m not trying to run a business with multiple users on it, just me and the family, which means mostly just me and my projects. It was super easy to set up in my early days of home networking knowing that I wanted a central location for storing my files from different devices and holding my expanding media collection. I think I saw that it had been running for over a year (would have been several years, but we get power outages occasionally and it’s not on a UPS) without a restart when I increased my storage, and it’s been running without issue since 2017. I’m planning on upgrading to a device that has 4+ drives sometime soon to make expanding and redundancy easier to handle, but it’s a hard sell when this one is still chugging along.

I think it helps that I’ve always had a raspberry pi or other computer do the tasky things, so I never got entrenched in trying to make it do anything other than be a dlna/upnp server for media and shared file jockey for everything else.

With my step kid I’ve basically just told him I’m not making anything else for him if he doesn’t like what I made. If he won’t eat it, he can have fresh vegetables and/or last night’s leftovers instead. I give him some options before I start cooking, so he knows and has some say in what dinner is.

The exception is if I make something that’s objectively gross. I’ve had a few frozen package dinners that looked good but were outright nasty and made sandwiches instead.