My life is accelerating. And technology has played and will play a key part in successfully making the transitions I am about to attempt, both in the job and volunteer setting. Much of this has been affected by the speed with which 2019 has gotten underway, especially following the wonderful trip to Miami that I have documented over the last month.

Of course, the first and most immediate attempt at change will be in career. A number of near-simultaneous developments have made it likely that I will, at least I sure hope, finally have some real movement.

In the months since receiving hearing aids from the North Carolina Division of Services for the Blind, my counselor there and I have been working to construct a plan. To that end, and to find some kind of direction, we have scheduled me to go into the Governor Morehead School for the Blind and their Blindness Education Center (what used to be referred to as the Rehab Center for the Blind) for an extensive evaluation. I will arrive on campus on Sunday April 14, and stay there till Thursday April 18; undergoing a battery of tests and simulations to help determine what might be my best area of fit. I did a similar evaluation a little over 20 years ago, but one would imagine that the experience has been, updated? since then. I am excited and curious to see what I will discover about myself.

Self-discovery is also being helped at my current employer, Durham’s LCI (officially shortened from LC Industries now as they increase their tech focus). They have recently hired a Workforce Development Specialist, and I met with her a couple weeks ago to begin thinking about my long-term plans. We completed a values assessment, using an exercise to narrow my values from 50 to 10 to just five. These are, I suppose, my core values, and they include:

• Creativity
• helping others/serving people
• Influencing people
• Leisure
• Visioning

Certainly I would like to believe I am, and continue to find more ways to be, creative. The desire to help others and influence are a large part of why I’ve blogged in some way for the last 15 years now. I think leisure speaks for itself: I need time to read, relax, and sometimes even take vacations. I must confess I am not entirely sure what is meant by “visioning”, but I suppose it has to do with looking forward and thinking of possible futures.

I will work further with the specialist at LC after the evaluation, and well, we’ll see. In the meantime, I am about to also step up my role in the Norrie Disease Association. We’re now trying to create committees, which will hopefully make it easier to produce useful content, raise funds, and otherwise interact with the people we are trying to serve. One thing this new focus is already establishing for me is a need to learn to use sharable technology platforms such as Slack. So I’ve spent much of this weekend trying to learn at least the basics about it, and am pleased to find that it not only is pretty accessible, but it also has embedded features that help learn things relatively quickly. I know that this sort of collaboration will be a key part of whatever comes next as well.

That’s a little about what has been happening with me of late, hopefully the beginnings of real fun in coming months. As always, to the extent that I can, I will share what I learn with others as so many of us work to be more.