Sick of Google dumping my carefully-crafted meta descrpitions and using text from other parts of the page!
Sick of Google reformulating my page titles too!
I hear ya!
Alas, this is something we can influence but not control.
It helps if you make sure your meta descriptions include one or more of the most probable search phrases for the page.
If the query (or a very close variant) is already in the meta description Google is less likely to grab something from the page.
As for the title, this is often affected by what the anchor text says on other pages that are linking to the page in question. See if there's any scope for tweaking there.
These steps sometimes help, but cure isn't guaranteed.
Thanks buck, yes i have the kw in meta, will check anchor text in links, my internal linking needs addressing.