Mustard

My bank's nearest ATM is enclosed in a booth which is also home to an intense pungent smell resembling honey mustard.

The air is warm, moist, and fragrant this morning. It makes me think of spring. The added fact that I recently have a career goal is reminding me what it's like to be eager for the future. As in "Oh right, that's what it felt like before eight years of postsecondary education." Sorta like wanting to be an astronaut or a firefighter (which I never did. So ... the comparison is theoretical.)

My remembered dream last night featured a recurring location. My father, myself and two other people were driving around in the countryside, possibly trying to evade someone without much urgency. I forget why we were out and about. We pulled over off a dirt road and started crawling through some pine forest where the lower branches were all brown and the floor was carpeted with dry pine needles. Eventually the landscape to the right looked like farmland. Soon the pine forest became a thicket of enormous bamboo, though it too was dry and brown and growing up through pine needles.
We came to a small house which I immediately recognized. The house belonged to a middle-aged woman. I believe that we had explored the house before she bought it. Now that she lived there, we sometimes snuck in and visited while she was away and ate her cookies and looked at her family photos, then remembering to try to cover our tracks.
This time, there were an assortment of homemade cookies out. One looked like a blueberry baklava and the taster displayed some disgust. I went for a different cookie. There were stacks of them, round pale cookies about the size of your hand, loaded with chopped macadamia nuts and candied pineapple and maybe some coconut shavings and something else yummy. I ate it and bragged to my unfortunate blueberry-baklava-eating friend that I had picked the better cookie. I checked the floor to see If i'd left any obvious crumbs.
The last thing we wanted was to be caught yet we could have been a lot more cautious. We examined some of her family photos, picked up tiny picture frames which had fallen off of the desk, dusted them off and wondered about those pictured. I put one on a shelf then remembered that something little like that might be noticed. So I put it back in the dust on the floor and hoped for the best.
I reminded one of my companions that making phone calls was probably not a good idea if we didn't want to be noticed. Turning on music or talking loud also was not too smart. I figured it was time to be getting out of there!