Little Things

The last few days have been happy ones, as far as finances go. It's not like anything all that fabulous has happened, just little things to feel good about.
First of all, I finally got around to filing an expense report at work, and was reimbursed for over $1,600. I often lose track of how much I have outstanding for reimbursement, so I never count it towards my net worth at the end of the month. Realizing I hadn't actually spent that money on myself kind of feels like winning the lottery!

Then, there was a little shopping expedition I did with a friend in the suburbs. We went to the local Sports Authority, thinking we'd buy her a pair of swimming goggles and both of us a pair of surf shoes so we wouldn't be skeeved out by swimming in a lake near her house. Lo and behold, the Sports Authority was having a sidewalk sale with big discounts, and one of the items featured was surf shoes, at $6 a pair! I was so happy to check that off my list, I was ready to quit right there but my friend wanted to look at the other tables, one of which turned out to have a pile of my favorite kind of flip flops. I'd been thinking I could use a new pair, but it has always bothered me to pay over $20 for flip flops-- it just seems wrong! But at the Sports Authority that day, it was all right: they were marked down to $11 on the table, and then when I paid for the two pairs I grabbed, the cashier marked them down a further 40%! I love it when things like that happen!!

And I also love it when you can kill two birds with one stone. My recent discovery that I have high cholesterol has had me eating a lot less meat, which has made meals a bit cheaper. It's also inspired me to try to exercise more. In order to make it easier to fit exercise into my day, I've been starting to go to the gym in the morning, instead of after work. This is something I never thought I could do. I am totally not a morning person and the idea of exercising in the morning was just incomprehensible to me. But now that I've been seeing someone who lives in the same country as me, who I can actually spend time with, it's harder to go to the gym in the evenings, and once I started to force myself to go in the morning, I discovered that I actually love it. It's really refreshing to start my day with a nice swim, and if I eat just a yogurt or a granola bar or a banana before I get on the subway, my energy level is fine. So this means I'm not buying breakfast in the deli as much. I stock up on breakfast items to eat at home, and then just buy coffee and make instant oatmeal in the office. I think I might even have lost a teensy bit of weight already but I may just be thinking over-optimistically about that... and that would be a third dead bird, which begins to seem cruel.

Anyway, don't you love it when the little things in life work out? It makes the big things seem less daunting...

Minor Panic

Did you ever lose a receipt for a business expense and then have a hassle being reimbursed for it? I had to buy some baby gifts for a couple of business contacts. My boss knew about it and approved the amounts I was planning to spend, which were not large-- $50 for one and $25 for the other. So I went off to BabyGap, bought exactly $75 worth of cute stuff, and it was done.
But a few days ago, I went to submit the expenses and I couldn't find the receipt! It's usually no big deal if you don't have a receipt for anything under $25, but I was just groaning, thinking that a $75 charge at the Gap was surely the kind of thing that would raise someone's eyebrows, even if my boss signed off on it!
Luckily, the receipt, and some others I had paperclipped to it, turned out to be stuck to the back of a magnetic mirror I keep in my desk drawer-- problem solved. But I am curious now as to what would have happened if I hadn't found it!