I started this space to track progress on the quilt I am making, having decided to teach myself to quilt a while back.  Other things happen, though, and I have a need to record it. To track the thoughts. Possibly following through on the email I send to myself with subject lines saying, “write this,” or “remember the thing about the kumquat.”  My Year of Gina is evolving, as it should, into a place to capture those thoughts.
Sleeping is a challenge for me.  I do okay by day, but when the lights go out, my mind takes over.   I write brilliant things in my head while I lay staring at the ceiling.  Neither the order of the words or the brilliant ideas make it to the light of day, but sometimes there are pieces that make it to those cryptic emails.  There’s more to process these days and the darkness involves too much worrying and not enough sleeping, so I’ll try to journal it here instead. With luck, progress on the quilt will be part of the mix, it’s been months since there’s been quilt progress.
Shortly after the previous post (May 2014), we must have had company coming over, because the sewing machine got put away. Then Summer happened, which means work, conference travel for work, and trailer camping when not working.
In August 2014 I suddenly decided to go back to school.  For me, “suddenly decided” means that I spent excessive amounts of time for months and months thinking about what I wanted.  I had a repeated thought: I need to learn something.  More than quilting. Still quilting, but more.  I was reaching for something that I couldn’t identify, only knowing that I needed to grow my education.  I would spend evenings browsing the web looking at workshops, graduate courses, degree options, leadership programs, and anything that passed in front of me that looked like an education goal.  Then, in a short period of time, a few things happened:

• After leading a training session at work, I became acutely aware of my joy. Driving home, I thought about how much I loved teaching others.
• While cleaning my office, I found a statement I wrote during a staff development event that communicated my core goal of helping people and helping libraries to always reach further.
• During a 10-day vacation to the Oregon Coast, I took time to be still and to accept that something will present itself.

Shortly after that vacation, I found myself, again, for the 3^rd or 4^th or 10^th time viewing the information for a Graduate Certificate in Workplace eLearning and Performance Support.  It was Friday.  The new semester would start 3 days later.  I called the school at Boise State University and found out I could enroll in the first course before formally being accepted into the program.
So I did.
That’s where I discovered a new source of joy.  Foundations of Organizational Performance and Workplace Learning (OPWL).  It was the core course for all the graduate programs in the department where I would be pursuing a graduate certificate.  I thought I’d suffer through it before I got to the fun courses focused on online course design.  I was wrong. Instead, it opened up new possibilities. I thrived. I was engaged. It made me love my day job even more. It took what I do every day to the next level. I was challenged, and I fell in love with the whole field of study.
Twenty years earlier, I had enrolled in the Library and Information Science master’s program at University of South Florida.  I knew then that I found a home.  Now, twenty years on, I felt like I reclaimed that home for myself. I knew right away that I made a good decision. It might be a stepping stone to something else, but I was on a path moving forward.
As paths can do, there are some twists. I was enrolled in two courses for Spring 2015 to continue the OPWL portion of my journey, but I’ve since put them on hold.  My energy is being focused on other things, which I will attempt to chronicle here. Hopefully, I still have updates on quilts and learning, but likely I will also update on health and healing. And, perhaps, those strange things I email to myself will make it here with hope that the things I find quite hilarious in the dark of a sleepless night will, one day, be just as brilliant or funny in the daylight.