You'd think that you shouldn't have to pay a lot for a meal you cook yourself. However, it was delicious! It starts with a cheese fondue course as an appetizer, then a salad, the main course and a desert. You can pick from different choices for each course, and you also pick your cooking medium for your dinner. To be honest, when I saw each course I thought for sure I would be hungry afterwards, but we determined that the style of eating helped us eat smaller portions and fill up naturally, and also I think it helped us savor our meal.

Highly recommended! Come hungry, bring a fair bit of cash and be careful not to drip vinaigrette on yourself.

This morning I was having a dream that I was back in college. I think I was a returning student, and this was supposed to be a class on biology. The room was unkempt, as many college classrooms are with desks that used to be in rows, but have since been shifted into clusters by students and no centralized authority to organize returning them to any sort of order. There were other people in the class, but the central focus of the dream was the professor.

He was probably in his early thirties, jeans, T-shirt and slightly ovoid black frames. He looked like (but didn't sound like) a younger Ira Glass with a worm-eaten beard that would be more at home on the face of a homeless man than a college professor. One thing I remember for certain was that I was having trouble hearing the lecture he was giving, even though he was standing in amongst the students and I was only feet away. I was straining trying to pick out what I could but not catching very much at all. Finally, he came closer and was speaking where I could hear; in fact, he was practically in my face! "...and you should read as much as you can. Do know what wisdom makes you?" he asked me.

I was dumbfounded by the question, and shook my head. "Wise?" I answered questioningly. The professor glared at me with disapproval and started to speak, but his voice drained away into silence as the scene fell to dark.

I woke up.

I noted it was 6:30, long past time for me to start getting ready for work. I stepped into the shower and closed the door behind me wondering what this dream meant. Wisdom? Reading? Why was I studying biology, when I haven't had a biology class since Bio II in high school? I had no answers. I didn't even understand the question.

I've since done some research on this dream, and it appears that to have a dream that you've returned to school as an adult means that you either have a lesson to learn or you have something that you want to learn, and potentially that you need to pay attention to your past or childhood. A professor symbolizes higher learning and wisdom (that word, again!).

I don't know so much that it's a life lesson, because the context is that I should be learning something by studying. When I was young, I read quite a bit; I have grown apart from that over time. Now I absorb content from the internet. I am starting to wish that I would spend more time reading. I have a desire to learn electronics and get knowledge of computer engineering beyond what I have now, which is a good but higher-level overview of computer architecture. Perhaps that part of me is telling me to get studying.

But why can't I hear? Do I not want to hear? Am I unable to understand? Do I not understand the question, what does wisdom make me? I don't know if that's the issue or not.

While I was in the shower, one thing I wondered was the professorial role. When I was in high school, I saw myself as becoming an academic and being a professor, but that is a dream I lost hold of long ago. The trick is, a professor is one who pontificates on subjects that he is learned upon (and, at times, perhaps not as learned on).

What's funny, though, is that even though I'm not an academic professor, I am the "professor" at work: I'm the departmental know-it-all. And I don't feel like I know it all. Not too long ago a coworker was cracking jokes about something, saying, "hey, Mike learned something today!" when I said I was looking into something and found out some really interesting information.

Right after that I told him that I was sorry that I come off like I know everything, because I don't mean to sound that way and it makes me feel like a complete asshole if that's how people take it. He countered by saying that I don't come off that way, I just always have an answer or know what to do to find out or at least narrow the field so someone else can take over. He was being genuine.

That bothers me. I'm not sure why. Perhaps I don't feel like I deserve it? Perhaps I wish I had this channeled elsewhere? I don't know. But it bothers me.

One thing I did successfully ponder in the shower was our so-called "surprise bills." We're not good at picking up our mail from the community mailbox regularly, so last time we retrieved it we got a few surprise bills that we weren't expecting such as our homeowner's association dues and the quarterly damage for our alarm system monitoring. Add to that other unexpected bills like our home warranty payment and car insurance, and these unexpected bills can derail a fairly good savings plan. In fact, to cover the checks I wrote for it, I had to rob our savings of $350.00 just in case. (If I don't spend the money, though, it's going right back into savings!)

I added up the rough cost of these four expenses, and it comes out to a little less than $2500.00 a year. If I save just a hundred dollars per pay period into a savings account, they'd be covered without surprises, plus whatever interest gets earned can either be put back into savings or offset the amount I need to save.

Also, this is good training for when I decide to close our escrow account for our house insurance and property taxes in the future. I can do the same thing I do now, and keep the interest the money bears.

Is it crazy that I was thinking, "wouldn't it be nice to amortize a year's bills out in advance and save enough every pay period to cover them, too?" We could just automagically save money and have it automagically deducted from savings or a money market account to cover the bills. We could just let computers be our financial nannies. I think I'll see how this goes, first.

restlessmind