Freelance Growth

So, 2015 was my best freelance year since 1998.

1998 is when I went back to work full-time so that I could stop working night/weekends and spend time with my family.  Most of the work from 1998-2014 were special projects that I did when tuition was due or when there was a conference in Buffalo etc.  Then last year my family got so busy that I had a lot of free nights and weekends to work at home again.

So, now I balance my full-time job with a lot of really interesting freelance projects.  The internet has created opportunities for me that I never could have imagined when I started to phase away from doing that freelance stuff full-time. Now I can see huge potential in the future and I'm really excited about where it is going. 

Still not a towing company

But the phone calls are lessening and the need to get my name erased is getting better. My guess now is that a description from the Off Peak Towing company in Hawaii got merged with my business somehow. I think I've managed to scrub most references, but there are old cached sites that still have the wrong info. This is proof that anything posted to the internet never goes away. Even when it is wrong.

Third blog post for my class

Well, with the second blog post I've officially passed the class, but I'm planning to keep on doing the homework. It's actually pretty interesting to see how they collect content and have peer grading. I got dinged last time for writing only 300 words, but since the assignment said "write a 300 word blog post" I'm not sure I get that. Oh well.

Here's my third and final post for the class:

One of my fondest grammar memories, and yes those exist, occurred on the first day I was in fifth grade.  My teacher drew an upside down “e” on the board and asked for a show of hands for people who knew what it was.

I raised my hand.

Now, I’ve never been a popular kid but that pretty much sealed the deal that I was one of the biggest nerds and possible teacher’s pets ever in the history of the world.

You see my dad, who taught English for several years, had just explained what that symbol meant the previous night at dinner. Less than 24 hours previous to her asking the question.  How could I not raise my hand?

For those of you who don’t know, the upside down e (and I can’t get that symbol to work right now) is called a schwa. According to Merriam-Webster the schwa is “a vowel that has the sound of the first and last vowels of the English word America.

That moment saved me tons of time for the rest of the year. She assumed I knew what was going on most of the time and so I got to do lots of fun things in the room. She had a box of starter sentences. If you needed to write an essay but didn’t have any ideas, you could go pull out a card and finish the topic. I loved that. It was a great idea generator.

Someday I hope that I can write a novel or a series of short stories. When I try to get my thoughts on paper I often catch myself creating first sentences, just like that box, as a way to get started. Helping my own kids get through school limits my time right now, but someday I think I’ll get it done. But, I did manage to do one thing for my kids, just like my dad did for me. They all knew what a schwa was on the day their English teachers asked.