The Monster Outside Our Window

Let me start off by telling you a little bit about how my appointment went last night. I'm SO GLAD that I went because I found out a bunch of great general information about court reporting, and I definitely think it is something that I am interested in and may pursue. There is a lot opportunity for job openings especially in captioning due to the requirements that all television has to be captioned by 2006. But I did find out if I'm going to do it that I DEFINITELY want to go with the home-based program for flexibility and the opportunity to work at my own pace. The evening program they have at the institute is Monday, Wednesday & Thursday evenings from 6 pm to 10 pm and can take up to 5 YEARS!!!! Not to mention the fact that it costs about $22,000 at the end of all your classes and that is just ridiculous. I mean, I know I would make good money as a court reporter, but not enough to have to pay all those loans back! The home based program costs about a fifth of that so it is much more reasonable, and that includes buying a brand new stenograph machine to use. It's still quite a bit of money so I want to make 100% sure that this is something I want to get myself into, but I think it would be interesting, provide for greater flexibility, and be an interesting option for my future career. I got to use one of the machines there last night just to see how it feels, and it's definitely different but with the software that they have to link to computers, so much of it is built in now so that helps. So I'll be thinking about that for a month or so more before making any sort of moves in that direction.....let me know any thoughts or opinions or if you know anyone and their likes and dislikes about it!

After my appointment, I went home, ate some dinner that my loving husband cooked, and watched American Idol and the Scrubs finale that we had tivo'd from Tuesday night. Then we went in the bedroom to watch the Mavs game. A little before halftime, I started to drift off to sleep, confident the Mavs could pull this one off. I woke up around midnight to this horrible grinding, squealing noise. I love our apartment complex and it's relatively new, but I think it's right at that age that they original appliances and systems are started to fail and are in need of replacements. So it wasn't in our apartment, but it was right outside our bedroom window that the horrible noise was coming from, from vents on the balcony next to ours that I think are to keep the hot water heater cool in its storage closet. Needless to say, it is LOUD and shrill and made me want to scream because I was still tired. The good news was that I woke up right before the final few minutes of the game and got to see the end and see the Mavs pull off a victory. But then the process of trying to fall back to sleep while screeching was going on was not pleasant. I managed and luckily am not too tired this morning, but as soon as the apartment complex opens, we are calling to tell them to fix that so I don't have another unpleasant wake-up call in the middle of the night. Not to mention the fact that I was scared that it was going to start sparking or something from grinding so hard and start a fire, and that is just too scary to even think about it so hopefully they will fix it today and I can put my mind at ease!

Hope you all have a good day and avoid any monsters outside your window. It's almost the weekend at least!!! :)