ASE Certified!!!

As you all know already, Thak took the first of his ASE certification exams about a month ago. It was the Electronics one, which is pretty universally regarded as the most difficult of them all. Surely, his 12 years as a generator mechanic did not hurt his chances a bit, but he was still nervous about the test. It was hard to wait a month for the results. I wasn't nervous, though. I knew he'd do it.

We will be receiving the results via mail next week, so we were surprised to receive notification from ASE today that we could check his results online. Sure enough, when Thak got home for lunch, he logged into his ASE account, and saw that while no exact test score was posted, he definitely passed, because he is listed as ASE Certified in Electronics.

So what does this mean for us? Well, basically, as of today, Thak just became about 10x more marketable. You are only required to have one certification done in order to be considered ASE Certified, and to wear the patch on the left of the page. Thak is in school to become a Master Technician (the patch at the bottom right is what they wear). We've still got our eyes on that, and there's a ways to go before he earns it, but today's news that he passed the first of his certification exams, and the hardest one at that, was just what we needed to keep going with all this entails.

It has not been easy, and we're nowhere near done yet. Everyone in this family has paid for this. The kids miss their daddy, and I'm raising them practically by myself. Then there's Thak, who's running from 5 am each morning until after 10 pm each night. Finally, it's starting to pay off, though. It's for something. If Thak got out of the Army tomorrow (yeah, I wish!) he could land better jobs thanks to just even having one certification area completed, than he could have before with none. As far as I'm concerned, that's worth something. We're on our way!!!