The Salad Days: Volume Four
One of my all-time favorite movies is Raising Arizona. Nicholas Cage has a great line in the movie that goes, "These were the happy times, the salad days as they say." I've always called my busy times The Salad Days. The Salad Days for me run from mid-March to late June. It's funny how predictable my schedule can actually be as a freelancer with no set schedule. It usually picks up in January on the day after MLK Day, because the corporate world wakes up on that Tuesday morning and realizes that Christmas is over, the kids are back to school, and it's time to start working on annual reports. It really cranks up by mid-March and goes non-stop until the end of June. Sometimes, I may have 3-4 jobs a day during this stretch.
Then, come July 1st, the corporate world goes on vacation, and so do I. August is usually busy with back-to-school stuff with the universities, and I see the same trend as in January. It takes the Tuesday after Labor Day for them to wake up and realize that summer is over and the kids are back in school, and it's time to get started on projects again. It slows down in November, just in time for me to go deer hunting, but then comes back with a vengeance in December. It then becomes a race to get as much work done as possible before Christmas. In December, I'm back to several jobs a day until December 20th, and then it dies off again for the holidays.
I'm going to do a few blog posts on some of the work from this year's Salad Days, which I was glad to see, because it was the first normal season that I had had since the pandemic hit.
Today's post is from the two Honor Flights that I went on this summer to Washington DC. The first one in June was extra special because it was the first-ever all female flight from Kentucky. It was so neat to meet women like Ashley Hawkins, who was the first woman in U.S. Army history to receive the bronze star for valor, that came from a 2005 battle in Iraq, known as the Palm Sunday Ambush. And then seeing so much emotion from the MASH nurses from the Vietnam era lay a wreath at the Women's Vietnam Memorial. It's always a pleasure to go on the honor flights each year.
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