Sorry for the confusion. FedEx tacks on an extra 2 bucks to deliver to rural areas and calls it a 'rural delivery surcharge'. The way our checkout code is written, it calculates this fee after the shipping cost is determined. I'll look into the possibility of amending it, but considering that we so heavily subsidize shipping to begin with (about $8 to rural addresses), I'm not sure how much further we can reduce it.
As for the multiple gift certificate issue... Many years ago, we had multiple gift certificate fields in the checkout, but realized that only 2 or 3 people a year used multiple GC within the same purchase. We made the decision to remove the additional GC fields and thus simplify the checkout experience.
For your convenience, I have combined your two GCs into one (use the one send to you for your birthday). Please let me know if there is anything else I can do to help.