Been a while since I've done one of these, and this last week has been full of life changes.

I took my final final last week. It's been 2 years since I was laid off (after 14 years of working for the same company) and I decided to go back to school. I graduate on May 16th with honors (I maintained 3.77 average for the last two years.) The bad thing about all this? There are few jobs in the career field I've been studying (computer network technology) due to the economy.

After i got laid off, I got a job at our local library as a part time shelver. This was great as part time work fit in very well with my college schedule and my family life. After all, 40+ years of filing comics (I have over 20,000 comics not including all the books on my book cases) made learning the Dewey decimal system and the libraries idiosyncrasies fairly easy. (Hi Kenya!) After a year of that, I applied for the library’s cataloguer position, which has been the most fun job I’ve ever had. I get to play on a computer all day, learn the ins and outs of library cataloguing and database manipulation, and I get to essentially index books. I’ve been indexing comics on the Grand Comics Database for years and am currently an editor there (here the link: www.comics.org) so combining indexing, computing and books was great!

But the economic reality set in. My family has been without health benefits for 2 years now, something we’ve never been without. It became apparent to me about 2 months ago that I wasn’t going to land a well paying IT job out of school without any certifications. In our business in addition to schooling, you have to take certification tests and pass them, much like teaching. Certs cost about $125 a pop (some are higher) and there’s about a gazillion tests to take. I realized that as soon as I graduated my schooling money would stop cold. And as fun as the library is, I can’t make my mortgage payment on my salary there, much less the expense of raising a family.

As a result, I applied for and accepted a job at the local VA hospital working in their medical library. It’s a pretty good salary (almost as much as I was making when I got laid off) and comes with full benefits. I’m going to work there for at least 3 years while continuing school part time to finish my BAS degree. That will also allow me to get some IT certs under my belt and keep an ear and an eye out for any librarian cataloguing positions that open here, as that’s what I’d love to do the rest of my life.

In addition to all of that, my autistic son moved into another home. We still dealing with that, but hopefully everything will work out there.

So in one week, I graduated, lost a job, gained a job, and helped my son move. As I said, life changes.

Thanks for spending part of your day with me. Now go forth and be creative!

Gregg