Working at catching up

So I admit that in the two years I spent at Microsquish I kind of let my pace slack off for taking tests.
There was always so much work to do and keeping up on my certs was not a high priority in the office. As long as you had some, that was generally seen as good enough.
Not saying that is a bad or a good thing, its just a thing.
So for the last few weeks, I have had to play catch up to make sure that I am capable of teaching certain MOC courses. Not that the certification makes me capable, I am capable through my thorough and extensive knowledge of the subjects I teach. But it does make me eligible to teach them under the program rules which is important because I don't want to be decertified for teaching something outside the rules. And seeing I spent the better part of the last two years working on and supporting those rules I know them intimately.
So I have been teaching at a place that has a testing center that is actually open when I am available, usually they are only open suring "normal" business hours and I have to take exams on weeks off, this means a lack of revenue and cash flow while spending money on exams.
Not that I am actually spending money yet, I have many friends and a couple have given me birthday presents of exam vouchers so that I can get caught up.
Last week I actually did the two exams for my MCITP Enterprise Administrator, tough exams but very fair in my opinion, you needed to know the material well and be able to work through problems.
This week was the two upgrade exams for the MCPD Enterprise Applicaiton Devveloper 3.5. These were actually really easy for me as I use this technology all the time and am actually teaching(non-moc) on it and that helps with reviewing it.
I have a few more upgrade exams to take on SQL 08 and hope to finish them off before the week ends and I have to head out to my next assignment.
Testing for me is a state of mind, I have to put myself into the brain pattern of focusing on dissecting questions and answers, get inside the head of the person who wrote the question and see what their viewpoint was. Often times some of the questions on a developer exam have no realation to what you would do in the real world because the real world is rarely all software and tools from one manufacturer but exams always are.
I know that there will be more stuff next year as the Win7 truck gets up to full speed, VS 2010 and SP2010 and Office 2010 will be out in force.

As George once said after tripping while runing after Astro "Jane get me off of this crazy thing"