Another year older

Friday was my birthday and I now have to tell people I'm 23. It's my final year of being in my early 20's...not sure how I feel about that.

Thanks to our office policy of Summer Fridays, I had the day off. I slept in, I finally got most of my room unpacked (yes, almost a month later), treated myself to a mani/pedi and went out on the town with the girls. Don't worry, we didn't rack up this bar tab though:

I wish I was the server for this bill!! Tip alone was $24,869!

I actually didn't spend much money at all except for contributing a few dollars for a cab ride home.

I spent the rest of the weekend working, which turned out to be decent money. Thursday night I made $150, Saturday $150 and last night $130. Not too shabby. I'm really enjoying getting at least $300 paychecks every Friday.

The thing is, I would rather get my tip money in check form on Friday than take home cash at the end of each shift. I'm absolutely terrible at holding onto cash! The subways are usually down late at night on the weekends (or takes 30 minutes to arrive, which sucks when you are alone and there are creepy men and rats running around) so a quick cab ride home, sometimes a quick stop for food or drinks after work, a coffee in the morning and boom, there goes my cash when really that money is not mine to spend yet. Oops. So when I have the option to pay the bar and bus boys in cash or credit, I choose cash whenever I can. Does anyone else have this issue and what did you do about it?

In related news, I'm making more money than I expected. The week before Friday's paycheck went entirely to me to be split amongst debt/savings/me. Even that was plenty extra and I was happy to have helped my savings and make a bigger credit card payment. Since my cutoff each month is the 25th, when I have to start paying the following month's loans, the most recent paycheck from this past Friday should have gone to me as well. Another $300! Nice! However, since I am out of town this weekend (Thurs-Tues), I'm not on the schedule at all this week so I've decided to put that $300 towards my loan payments instead so I don't fall short in July. I'm out of town a lot in July so I probably won't make as much money. I don't even know if that made sense to you but I hope it did. It basically boils down to that I'm not being stupid or selfish with this paycheck.

Happy Monday! I'm off to Starbucks to redeem my free coffee! If you have a Starbucks gift card, register it because you get a free drink for your birthday! However, you only get one free drink even if you register multiple cards. Lesson learned!