A Minty Day

My day involved two types of mint.  Well, three if you count the mint toothpaste, but that's not too unusual.

Minty Thing #1: Budgeting

I signed up for Mint.com, a free budgeting site that automatically tracks and categorizes your spending.  Basically, it's the same as the budget spreadsheet I made in Excel earlier this year, but I don't have to personally enter all my transactions since it pulls directly from my online banking statement.  I feel like this is going to be a really, really good thing for me, because the reason I was having trouble sticking to the budget was because I was horrible at remembering to enter all my spending into the budget.  It's a bad excuse to be bad at sticking to a budget, but it's true.  My new plan is to check this daily to have an idea of where I am in all my spending categories, not exceed any one category, and hopefully transfer whatever is left over at the end of each month into my savings account.  I still need to shuffle things around a bit and do some math to figure out what my budget limits should be, but I'm excited to take better control of my spending (not that I'm a wild spender, but I definitely want to be smart about where my money is going.

Minty Thing #2: Ice Cream

I made my valiant return to The Fountain on Locust today (home of the world's best roast beef sandwich, described in detail in this post).  I took my friend Jessica along, and she now shares my opinion that The Fountain provided the best meal of her entire life, declaring that the sandwich made her want to cry and that she was going to go back into the kitchen and marry the guy who made our dinners (unless, of course, God made it, which also seemed likely).  Of course, we ordered dessert: I ordered the "Three Coins in a Fountain": Zanzibar Chocolate, Vanilla Deluxe, and After Dinner Mint ice cream, hot fudge, real whipped cream, and three chocolate coins.  Yeah.  It was soooooooo good...it tasted like a Girl Scout Thin Mint cookie in ice cream form.  Hands down the best ice cream I've had this summer (and I've had a LOT of ice cream this summer)...

Oh, yes.

And yes, I did eat that whole thing, thank you very much.  I asked Jessica if she'd like to consider splitting a dessert, and after a moment's hesitation she replied, "Well, I would...but I just feel like God made this meal for ME...and I wouldn't want to offend Him by sharing it with you..."  Hence, we each had our own dish of monumental ice cream.  Because, if you're going to have some ice cream, HAVE SOME ICE CREAM.

But don't worry, that ice cream went right into my restaurant budget for the month...and into my stomach :)