learning by doing

Well, if you can believe it, after all my hard work...the company I was doing this for decided to go with thier old HTML designer. Long story short, admidst me working on it, he marched back into the office on his own accord and bent the boss to his will to prove that he is better for the company because he has worked there before (unlike me). So now, I have no idea what kind of thing I can do with Drupal right now so that Im at least learning something. Any chance that there is a place online for Drupal newbs to get into a project for learning purposes?