Randomness

It has been a while since I've posted and all I have are a few random thoughts/things going on...

I'm still doing the whole job search thing and at the suggestion of an aquaintance I went into Spokane and got registered with Accountemps. I've had a lot of experience in the Title/Escrow industry and would really like to get out of it and go more into accounting, since I got a little taste of that while working at Stewart in Boise.

The Escrow business is so stressful and is so up and down with being busy/slow. When I got into the Title business back in the early 90's, a little after high school, it was a good industry for me to go into since I don't have a college degree in anything. You can work your way up in the business and learn a lot and get paid a lot making it hard to find anything else to compare and the only way to get experience in the business is by working in it.

Out of high school, I had no clue what I wanted to do....kinda, I thought I wanted to go into photography but I wanted to do studio photography and found the best place to go for a degree in that was Santa Barbara, CA and I was in no way ready to move away or out on my own, so I ditched that idea. Now that I'm older and know what I'd like to get a degree in, I can't afford the college tuition to pursue it...but upon winning that lottery, that I don't play, enrolling in a college to get a degree would be one of the first things I'd do.

I've never had any experience with temp agencies and knew nothing about how they worked and I really wish I would have gotten hooked up with them back in December. I think it will be easier for me to obtain a job in accounting being with them. It is hard for me to really boast about myself and how good of a job I can do and how quickly I can learn new things and most companies want you to have a degree in accounting before they will even interview you. Accountemps will be the ones to market and sell me and my work. The rep I interviewed with helped me with some major suggestions on my resume because she said it screamed "escrow" and she wanted me to highlight my skills and what I could do to get me more into accounting. So I spent some time completely re-doing my resume and I had to come up with a Marketing Summary for myself too, ugh. I also did some pre-liminary testing with them to see where I was with experience in Excel, Accounting principals, Quickbooks and 10-key. The Excel I was tested on was Excel 2007 and I haven't even opened up the new Excel but I've heard that it has changed a lot from those who have used it and it has taken them some time to "find" some of the items in it. If I can remember right I scored around a 60-70% on that test. The test wants you to know from memory where to go to do a task, and I'm used to if I don't know, clicking on each of the tabs at the top to find it. On Quickbooks I did pretty well (80-90%) considering I've never been in that program either, but the rep said that from my score on the test it showed that "I got it" as far as accounting procedures go and where I need to go within the program to apply accounting tasks. I did exceptionally well on the the 10-key test. On the average key strokes per minute (spm) most get around 7900 spm and I came in at almost 11,000 spm with 95% accuracy. She said I could actually slow down quite a bit on that and my accuracy would come up and I'd still be doing really well. The accounting principals I did so-so (50-60%) on but it has been 8 years since I've worked in the accounting department at Stewart.

I have access to their online training site and can go in and take a HUGE number [8,000] of courses online and do tests, but I have to go back into their office to re-test on their system to get scores they can use. I have already gone through the big list and so far have 28 courses to take in Excel 2007, Accounting and Quickbooks. Once they are able to place me after I get my first check, I am eligible for their insurance and it has health, dental (including orthodontics - now that we won't need it), vision, short-term disability and AD&D. After working 1, 150 hours, I get 6 paid holidays; after working 1,000 hours, I can enroll in their 401K; and after working 1,500 hours I am eligible for a bonus check. Some pretty good benefits for a temp agency, especially since I figured working with a temp agency, I wouldn't have any benefits at all.

I have already gone on and taken the Basics to Excel 2007 course and took a bunch of notes, I have another 12 courses in Excel 2007 alone picked out to take but they also include Advanced procedures and things I've never done before in any Excel program before...if I can only retain the information because I don't have Excel 2007 on my own personal computer and I typically forget if I'm not utilizing it.

Since I have been unemployed though (or really since the first of the year) I have been reading A LOT...I went back through and counted and I've read 36 books. My sister told me to get a library card and that would save me so much money by not having to buy books...wow, I'm so glad I did. I also have over 100 books (so many that I've had since before Scott & I were married but have never gotten around to reading) of my own to read and I also have a friend who loads me up every time I go to her house....so I've been reading up a storm trying to get through all of them.

For the summer though we're hoping to get in several camping trips (especially if the gas prices don't go up too much) and we have some decent weather on the weekends instead of so much rain. Scott is even wanting to make a long weekend trip over to Montana and fish around Dillon, sounds good to me, I've never seen that part of Montana and I'm sure it is beautiful. I know my oldest girlfriend, Nichole, and her husband, Terry, will be coming up for a long weekend in July to do a mini tri-athalon and that will be fun since they will be sans children for the first time so us adults can do what we want. We are also hoping and planning to go down for another "Cousins Reunion" in August this year at my Dad & Terry's...wow, it has been 3 years since the last one and I've heard that a lot of my cousins from Missouri are planning to be there. Before we know it, the summer will be over, but I hope it doesn't go by that quickly because I'm not ready for it to get cold again anytime soon.