Archive for February, 2010
Today is the 1st anniversary of this blog’s creation. Happy Anniversary, Boomer’s Bridge!
Almost forgot to mention, during my self-imposed exile from writing, I wasn’t just sitting around enjoying the holidays. I have now officially completed two of the four Microsoft Office certifications I’m attempting, courtesy of the state of Michigan’s “No Worker Left Behind” program. I am now known as a “Microsoft Certified Application Specialist”, certified in both MS Word and MS Excel 2007. PowerPoint is next up, which I began studying for just yesterday. I suspect this one will be much easier and faster than Excel, which was a monster. Also continuing work toward A+ and Network+ certifications. Whether any of this will help my unemployment situation is up for debate. Are certifications minus real-world experience really worth anything in today’s hyper-competitive job market? I say it’s doubtful. But what do you think? Leave me a comment! At any rate, it’s something I’ve wanted to accomplish for quite awhile so I am getting a sense of satisfaction from having achieved these certifications. And the oh-so-pretty certificates from Microsoft – signed by none other than Bill Gates, himself – look so nice on my office wall. 
Returning from a very extended holiday writing break. Ok, ok, I know. The holidays have been over for awhile. But if the number of people STILL inexplicably turning on their Christmas lights at the end of January are any indication, the holidays aren’t truly over until February. This is one of my pet peeves. Yes, the Christmas lights all over your house are very pretty. Yes, they were a lot of work to put up, I realize. It might be tempting to burn them just a bit past the holidays, to make the work seem more worthwhile. But, come on, people, the Christmas season ends on New Year’s Day. That’s it. It’s over. You might not want to take them down, since the weather is less than ideal. But, for God’s sake, don’t turn them on, please? But I digress.
At any rate, it’s very hard to “restart” after a self-imposed vacation. Especially when the boss is, well, ME. I can extend my vacation as long as I please without worrying whether I have the vacation time to use. Not a good habit though, I realize, and one I’ll definitely not be repeating. Anyway, as previously stated, it is February. The groundhog apparently saw his shadow this morning so, if you go in for that sort of thing, we can expect six more weeks of winter. Sounds about right, especially in Michigan.
Speaking of the land of unemployment, I just read this morning that the “jobs bill” President Obama called for in his State of the Union address includes yet another unemployment extension. There are some republican rumblings about this “jobs bill” being code for another “stimulus” package. They just don’t want to call it that. Stay tuned.
Reporting on my research into work at home jobs from awhile back: West@Home does, indeed, appear to be a legitimate outfit, albeit a low paying one. They do have work available, especially now with Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day right around the corner. You’ll do phone work, some sales and some customer service, such as the current ProFlowers project, taking orders for the aforementioned holidays. As I said, the pay is low – $7.00-$9.00 per hour and you’ll need to have an actual landline (not DSL/Vonage) in your home and you’ll need to purchase a noise-cancelling headset for your phone. Your computer must meet certain requirements, also and they will run a background check, in addition to a phone interview. If all this sounds good to you, then by all means check them out. http://www.westathome.com Haven’t received anything from the other companies to which I applied.
On writing for Demand Studios/Examiner.com: Took a break from these, also, but am getting back into the swing of things. Demand is a really interesting organization to be a part of and their forums and Facebook page are very lively, so I am enjoying that part of it. I also think they are poised for bigger and better things in the near future so I think it’s a good place to be right now, in terms of my fledgling writing career. That being said, the topics you’ll write about at Demand are less than exciting. “How to Seat a Floor Drain Flange” doesn’t exactly get my creative juices flowing but it pays $15 bucks per article, which can add up pretty quickly, I’ve found. Examiner.com is proving to be a little less satifsying for me, only because there is a complete lack of editorial control and some of the writers aren’t the best at grammar and sentence structure. The exposure provided by the articles I’m writing may be all but overshadowed by the bad reputation I’m gaining by association. They do, however, have a new feature which pushes my articles to Google News if they’re on topic for a particular news story, which could increase the exposure value. Jury’s still out on this one and we’ll see what happens.
