Birthday Weekend Update The First

On Friday, my parents took me (and K) out for a great dinner at Sfoglia. I hadn't had a nice dinner out in awhile, and this was an exemplary one, replete with a pre-meal bottle of Prosecco and five desserts for four people. Mmm.

There was another birthday dinner there the same night, a table of well-dressed people not much older than I. My father said he heard one of them congratulate the birthday girl on being 29. I thought for a moment about having enough money, and having friends with enough money, to go out to that kind of a restaurant for my birthday at the age of 29. I let the thought pass. And then yesterday it crossed my mind that more than one of those chic young Turks may have put her dinner (and her dress, too) on her credit card.

Tucked inside the cover of the cookbook they gave me (a great-looking one with a focus on technique, which I'm excited to peruse) was a check for $240 (that's 24, my age as of Saturday, times ten). The obvious thing to do with it is to save it in the Freedom Fund, but I don't want to. I'm really attached to the idea of the "no strings attached" Freedom Fund, the fact that it's all money I earned. Yes, I know that it doesn't matter at all, because spending this $240 just means that I free up other money to save in the Freedom Fund, but still, I find the idea of saving this money in that way kind of distasteful, somehow. So that check isn't going in the Freedom Fund. I think it will be spending money if I end up going to France in November (more on this later), or, if I don't, it will flesh out the Gift Fund for Christmas.

And, okay, the other birthday present is the coolest thing ever. It is a machine that makes seltzer. Now, you have to consider that I drink a ton of seltzer. I grew up drinking it, and I'm just sort of stuck on it. I didn't think I'd want to spend the money on it once I moved out on my own, but...I do. Can't go without it, somehow. So I end up buying 5-10 one-liter bottles (bigger bottles go flat) at my local supermarket for $.75 apiece, or, when I need seltzer but the market is closed, little bottles at the bodega for $1.25 a pop. But no longer! Now I can fill one of their proprietary bottles with cold water and carbonate it myself, and it costs me nothing. It came with two CO2 cartridges, which make 110 liters of seltzer and which you send away to be refilled once they're empty for $20 a pop, plus shipping. That means that exclusive of the machine (because I didn't pay for it), I'll be paying about $.27 per liter once I exhaust my current supply. And there's no schlepping, and it's environmentally friendly! I am in love with my seltzer machine. And if I'd bought it myself, that $130 (which includes four of their bottles and two CO2 cartridges) would have paid for itself slowly but surely in the savings on my seltzer habit.

K is pretty enamored of the machine, too. The joke goes like so: when we break up, he'll have to buy a seltzer machine, and I'll have to buy all the Six Feet Under DVDs.