Pay me in science.

I had a fairly normal dream this morning (which is unusual in itself).

I was with my mother outside the house where I grew up, watching fire trucks pull up to the house next door. Then we headed inside, so I could get ready for the first day of school. All the planters in front of our house had been paved over with concrete. As I went upstairs to my bedroom, my mom said that it was windy, so I couldn't wear shorts to school. I looked out the window, and, indeed, it was very windy (trees bent over). I thought that, not only would I have to wear long pants to school, I'd probably need to pack a sweatshirt and sweatpants for gym class, so I wouldn't freeze my /ahem/ off. Someone came to my room and said there was a problem in the forensic lab downstairs. When I got down there, the guy who runs the lab said that their computers had been wiped out, so all their billing records and their case data for the past week were gone. They seemed rather worried that they wouldn't be able to tell who paid their bills and who might say, "Yeah, I paid you, but that was the week your records were lost, so you just don't remember." A young woman who was there to pay her bill (a look at it told me that the lab charged about $100 an hour, which sounds pretty reasonable to me) offered to trade her services in kind. "Can I pay you in science?" she asked.

That's when the alarm clock went off.

I know some of you out there work in science. Some of you discover neat stuff (even if it's not what you hoped to discover). Some of you work in fields that mean $100 bucks an hour is a downright bargain. Thank you for doing what you do.

And, yes, you may pay me in science. Just get the movie's theme song out of my head.