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, 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 Fooli...

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...