Escape the Ordinary....

So this week the plan was to catch up now that my course load is significantly less. I can say that it’s a relief to not have that class weighing down on me. I have found for this class a strategy that I hope will carry me through to the end of the semester and get things done a little easier. The strategy I’m going to try and use is to group similar assignments together and complete them for several weeks in a row. For example, I did week 11 and week 12 reading all at the same time. It helped to be in the groove on one assignment and just keep going with it. Same with the commenting on blogs. It’s hard for me to be social and comment on blogs. I don’t use social media so the whole commenting thing is a foreign concept to me. I’m also brutally honest and I’m terrified I’m going to offend someone with my straight and to-the-point comments. Needless to say, I find it easier when I’m in the flow of leaving comments on people’s blogs/stories, to do a whole bunch of them all at the sa

For this reading assignment, I read The Giant Crab and Other Tales retold by W.H.D. Rouse. In the first story, Union is Strength, it tells a story about a man that catches birds. He sits by the water and when they get close, he throws a net over them. The birds come up with a plan to all work together and fly away with the net. They put the net on a bush and escape. This going on for some time and the man is sad that he is not catching any birds. But he realizes that if he waits, then the birds will start to bicker…and bicker they did! Soon, they were not working together at all and the man was able to take home his catch. I think this story is a short and simple example of why teamwork is so important. Obviously in this story it means life or death. However, there are all kinds of examples in real life that teamwork is the only way to accomplish a goal. Find the link for this story  here! The next story that caught my interest was The Quail and the Falcon. This is a stor

For this reading assignment, I read The Giant Crab and Other Tales retold by W.H.D. Rouse. In the first story, The Giant Crab, it tells a tale about a lonely crab that lives in a lake. When animals come to drink, he clips them with his claws and drowns them and eats them. One day, an elephant and his wife decide to trick the crab so that he stops killing all the other animals. When the crab gets the husband, the wife begs him to let him go. The crab said he would if she gives him a kiss. While she is pretending to be interested, the husband escapes and kills the crab. The elephants are praised by the other animals and made king and queen of the land. I thought it might be funny to turn this into a dating situation. Where a guy is a serial dater. A girl is duped by the guy and then her friend devises a plan to get him back. I’m sure there is a rom-com out there with a similar plot. Find the link to this story  here! The next story I read was The Wise Parrot and the Foolish P

For this reading assignment, I read part B of the More Jataka Tales by Ellen C. Babbitt. Again, I like these versions of the stories because they are stripped down to their simplest form so they are easily translated and understandable. The first story that I read that caught my eye was The Foolhardy Wolf. This is a story about a wolf that begs a lion to be his servant. The deal is that the wolf has to scope out the food each morning and tell the lion. The lion will kill the food and then share it with the wolf. The wolf gets the idea after a while that he is strong enough to kill an elephant by himself. He convinces the lion that he is capable of doing this. Knowing that it won’t turn out well, the lion plays along with the wolf’s plan. One morning the lion sees an elephant and tells the wolf about it. The wolf misses his mark and falls down and is crushed to death by the elephant. This story instantly brought up scenes from The Lion King. I could see a hyena trying to convince Sc

The first story I read was The Girl Monkey and the String of Pearls from More Jataka Tales by Ellen C. Babbitt. I liked these versions of the stories because the language it was written in is more simple so you get the moral of the story straight forward. I know these were written more for children, but to me, it seems easier to write these in my own version and expand on them from there. In this story, it’s about a monkey that steals the pearls of the queen. The guard devises a plan to find out which monkey stole the pearls. He puts glass beads on the branches and each of the monkeys grabs up one…except the monkey that stole the pearls. When the other monkeys say it’s too bad she didn’t get any, she pulls out the strings of pearls she stole to show off to the others. The guard snatched her up and that was that. I think this could easily be translated into a thief that wanted to show off their goods and that’s how they get caught. Surprisingly, a lot of criminals are shockingly d

Picture taken from my phone Coffee is my happy place for sure! This week has been quite an adventure! I dropped one of my classes and I can’t say that I’m sad about it. Taking an evening class from 6:30pm-9:20pm after having two classes right before is rough! I also felt that I wasn’t successfully handling the material for the course. The only thing that stresses me a bit about dropping it is that it will push back my graduation date. This week I also went through the hiring process at work for a different job. I had three grueling interviews and was stressed the whole dang week! After it was all said and done, I was not selected for the position, but I made it into the top two applicants so I feel pretty good about that. My partner, the one who was chosen for the position, was at least a worthy opponent so I can’t be too upset that I wasn’t selected. And at the end of the day, I still have a job that pays well and I get 6 days off every other week! It could be a lot wors

Wrapping up this week officially signals the halfway point in the semester. It has gone by so quickly yet seems like this semester is dragging on. Usually at this point in the semester my grades are a little more on sturdy ground. I will have to work my butt off the next several weeks to get them back to where I’m comfortable with them. I was finally able to catch back up in this class and for the most part, have been able to stay on top of the assignments this week. I say this at 11:30pm on Sunday night! However, I did have better time management this week and knew that I had a lot going on and to start early. I was able to knock out half of the assignments in one morning which freed up time to work on other assignments during the week. I had a work conference in Tulsa on Tuesday, a full day at work and school Wednesday, parent teacher conference Thursday, and two birthday parties to attend this weekend. I’m exhausted and ready to find time to sleep! In this class, I hav

Well.....this might be a hard post to come to terms with. Thus far, I've only completed about 4 weeks worth of work. So needless to say, I'm pretty far behind. According to the progress chart, I need 235 points in the class so far to get an A....I have 134.....I need to work my butt off to catch up to where I need to be. I have found that if I work on this class a little each day, it's not quite as overwhelming. And now that I'm caught up and trying to get a little ahead, it'll be easier to catch back up and doing a lot of the extra credit to make up the missing points I had for those weeks I didn't do anything. I'm getting ahead today, Monday the 7th, in hopes that the rest of my week can be spent doing extra credit and moving on to week 9. I have days off coming up and I will spend all 6 of them investing the majority of my time in this class. Looking back, I think my biggest mistake was time management...and maybe signing up for too many classes! I do

This assignment is reviewing feedback both giving and receiving: 1. Feedback In  - I will say the most useful feedback I have received so far is suggestions on how to improve things. Or the feedback as to how the reader felt or questions they had. Even though some people see these as negative, I see them as constructive. Especially since I've decided to go with the portfolio version, it's nice to have comments that I can use to work on my project. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the nice comments and praise, but those just boost my ego. I do also appreciate them because a few of them have told me what they specifically liked about a particular story. This is helpful because then I can use that information to either repeat it in another story, or leave it alone in the story that I'm tweaking to make better. 2. Feedback Out  - I have found the easiest way for me to provide feedback is to take notes as I go along. This way I can focus on specific parts of the story in

This week we were asked to review and re-read a lot of our work in this class. The first part of the assignment was to review our online platforms. For the blogger page, I did adjust some of the arrangements for the blog itself. I took the search off the top of the page and moved it to the sidebar on the left side of the page. There wasn't much there and it looked blank. I also didn't want the search bar to distract from the theme I chose and the pattern that shows up in the banner. I also took off a few things that I thought were unnecessary and distracted from my page. For the Googles Sites page, I'm pretty dang happy with this page. I think that the style of the page I have created really portrays the feel I want to establish. I want the readers to be drawn in by not only the stories, but get a good feel of what to expect when they look at the pictures. The opening page has a beautiful picture of an elephant Image Source : Ganesha Hindu God I think this image i

Edit: I have added this story to my portfolio. If you'd like to look at it in a different format, follow this  Link ! The moon sat high in the sky. I remember how it bathed the muddy streets in an eerie pale-yellow hue. It’s finger like rays crept into the windows of the houses that dared to leave the shutters ajar. The howling of the wind sent a shiver down my spine. A chill settled deep in my bones and I couldn’t shake the feeling we were being watched. Sleep escaped me that night. I had been on edge for weeks. Waiting. Watching. It was not safe to stay in one place and I felt we had worn out our welcome here. It was time to move on and find another safe haven. Nazi controlled Germany had invaded Poland and forced us to seek refuge at the House of Varanavata. Its walls were vast and the space inside seemed endless. It was furnished with the finest items money could buy. Under any other circumstance, we would have been welcome guests. We would have lavished in the wealth

Image Source:  Pandavas Brothers So I'm not sure if this is supposed to be the Pandavas Brothers or not. However, this is what I got when I googled "Pandavas Brothers". I also saw something akin to this in several of the stories for this section so it leads me to believe that it is in fact some weird rendition of them. I haven't seen any Indian art work like this, but it's interesting. Kind of creepy and steampunk-ish... I used the public domain version again. I like that someone else is reading it. I can't pronounce all the words right so it's nice to have someone who knows what they are doing read them. There were two stories out of this one that I found I could rewrite later on. There are as follows: Riddles at the Lake The 5 Panduvas brothers hunted a deer. Because of the hunt, they were thirsty. They found a lake, but before they drank, a voice told them to answer the riddles before they drank or they would die. Four out of the five

This week I'm catching up on the Mahabharata Part B. For this reading assignment I decided to try out the public domain version of the story. This had audio with it and it made it easy to listen and take notes. There were two stories that really resonated with me and I could picture them in a different version to tell a story in my own words. The first was  The House of Fire . This version was found in Indian Heroes by C.A. Kincaid. The queen and her children came to the palace of lac. The house was soaked in oil and ready to burn. Vidura warned them of this and begged them to dig an underground tunnel so that they may escape. When they dug the tunnel, Vidura returned to seek revenge on the guards. He burnt the guard shack, but little did he know that there was a woman and her children there to beg for food. The next morning when they village awoke to a smoldering palace, they assumed the bodies they found were Queen Kunti and her children and they wept for their loss. The e