Early bedtime, and brief intro
It's a rare day, nowadays, when I get up before noon. I don't usually go to sleep until four or often later, and interestingly, I've found that I wake up almost exactly 8 hours later, on my own. Once in a while I'll wake up earlier than that but I almost never sleep more than 8 hours. So I mostly don't bother to set the alarm. It's a bit of an unexpected side-benefit of unemployment, I guess!
So anyway, in the morning I have to be at the airport well before I normally get up, and it's gonna suck. I'm going to Dallas to a coding seminar - I had a flight credit or I would be driving. I'm not sure I really ought to be going at all from a financial standpoint but it will be useful for (my theoretical future) work so I guess it'll even out eventually. So I'mna have to get my butt in bed at a decent hour tonight so I can get up - in the middle of the night, by my standards. The good thing is that I'll get to Dallas pretty early and have some time to fool around. I can't remember when I last went to Dallas - I think it's been about 5 years. (Actually, the seminar is out around DFW - so not in Dallas proper at all - but my flight credit was on Southwest so I'm flying to the airport that is in Dallas, Love Field. It might have been cheaper to just pay for the flight and skip renting a car, actually, but it sure wouldn't be cheaper now, if it ever was, so oh well.)
The profession I'm training for is one where you take a certification test and later you have to maintain it and there are CPUs and things like that to keep up with, so I see a lot more seminars like this one in my future. I decided to go to this one, even though I don't have a certification to maintain yet, because I'm not going to be taking the exam until 2010 and the codes are updated annually effective January 1st. So this is to make sure I'm coding by 2010 rules and not 2009 ones, when I take the exam. (I'm currently shooting for February, with the exam. Right now I'm nowhere near done with the coursework.)
Jette has put on the Holidailies site that we should introduce ourselves. I think you get a good little mini-picture of my life from the stuff about about unemployment and my classwork. The short version of how we got ourselves into this mess: 1st floor apartment in Galveston hit by Hurricane Ike - not flooded too terribly seriously but requiring relocation. Our employer (UT Medical Branch) was heavily damaged also and laid off half the employees two months afterwards due to cash flow. My husband was in the half that kept their jobs, luckily, but I was not. Last year at Christmas there was a lot of whining about how I wasn't looking forward to the job search. I finally realized that didn't really want to be a secretary any more - thus the training program that is related to my old job but hopefully will pay a good deal more, at least after a few years.
(I have had an Ambien, so I think I better stop. The last sentence of the paragraph above was very very difficult to type.)
So anyway, in the morning I have to be at the airport well before I normally get up, and it's gonna suck. I'm going to Dallas to a coding seminar - I had a flight credit or I would be driving. I'm not sure I really ought to be going at all from a financial standpoint but it will be useful for (my theoretical future) work so I guess it'll even out eventually. So I'mna have to get my butt in bed at a decent hour tonight so I can get up - in the middle of the night, by my standards. The good thing is that I'll get to Dallas pretty early and have some time to fool around. I can't remember when I last went to Dallas - I think it's been about 5 years. (Actually, the seminar is out around DFW - so not in Dallas proper at all - but my flight credit was on Southwest so I'm flying to the airport that is in Dallas, Love Field. It might have been cheaper to just pay for the flight and skip renting a car, actually, but it sure wouldn't be cheaper now, if it ever was, so oh well.)
The profession I'm training for is one where you take a certification test and later you have to maintain it and there are CPUs and things like that to keep up with, so I see a lot more seminars like this one in my future. I decided to go to this one, even though I don't have a certification to maintain yet, because I'm not going to be taking the exam until 2010 and the codes are updated annually effective January 1st. So this is to make sure I'm coding by 2010 rules and not 2009 ones, when I take the exam. (I'm currently shooting for February, with the exam. Right now I'm nowhere near done with the coursework.)
Jette has put on the Holidailies site that we should introduce ourselves. I think you get a good little mini-picture of my life from the stuff about about unemployment and my classwork. The short version of how we got ourselves into this mess: 1st floor apartment in Galveston hit by Hurricane Ike - not flooded too terribly seriously but requiring relocation. Our employer (UT Medical Branch) was heavily damaged also and laid off half the employees two months afterwards due to cash flow. My husband was in the half that kept their jobs, luckily, but I was not. Last year at Christmas there was a lot of whining about how I wasn't looking forward to the job search. I finally realized that didn't really want to be a secretary any more - thus the training program that is related to my old job but hopefully will pay a good deal more, at least after a few years.
(I have had an Ambien, so I think I better stop. The last sentence of the paragraph above was very very difficult to type.)