Tech Tip: Weather Widget

I thought it would be cool to add the weather widget since I'm a little bit obsessed with checking the weather! I liked getting to choose a design for the sticker, and it wasn't too difficult to figure out how to add the HTML to the blog. I spend so much time on my blog that I know I'll be checking this weather widget all the time!

Week 3 Storytelling: Camp Gopher Wood

Everyone loves summer camp, so I'm always so surprised by how little attention the classic literature gives the world's first ever camp. Everyone is dying to tell the story of Jonah living in a stinky old whale, and everyone loves to talk about Adam and Eve's brief time in paradise, but those stories aren't even half as good as mine! 

People will even start to tell the story of the first ever camp when they talk about Camp Counselor Noah bringing us all together for a year of fun at Camp Gopher Wood so we wouldn't die in the flood. But then they skip all the juicy details! Why would a story about a guy bringing a big group of animals into a boat fast-forward through the songs, crafts, and campfires? What's the point in telling a story if it ends in a dove flying all around with an olive, when the rest of us animals got to stampede around eating s'mores on the poop deck?

I guess I should let the ancient past go and just appreciate that I'm even getting to tell this story at all. It all started, as most experiences do, with tons of rules. There were rules about how many of each kind could climb aboard, rules about where boys and girls had to stay, and really strict rules about not jumping off the boat (something about not enough lifeboats). Luckily, the rules didn't apply so much to me because I'm an elephant. We're pretty big, so no more than two elephants could have even fit on the boat, and people can't really tell the difference between a boy and girl elephant very easily anyways, and finally, elephants are strong swimmers. The only real rule that applied to me was that I could almost never go onto the deck unless it was a special occasion.

Even with the rules to govern all the different kinds of animals, Camp Gopher Wood was pretty much the best year of my life. I had never gotten to hang out with so many different kinds of animals. Back home in ancient Africa, we pretty much stick to our own kind, so getting the opportunity to become friends with a flamingo and a cat was unheard of. Because elephants are big and no one can tell me what to do, I never learned their names. But the flamingo and the cat were still the fastest and easiest friends I ever made, whatever their names were. We got to do so much cool stuff together.

Probably the most fun we ever had together was right at the end of our time at camp. Counselor Noah had already set the aforementioned dove out to search for land, or an olive, or a rainbow or something. But the flamingo, the cat and I wanted to see for ourselves if the flood had dried up for. We were all bigger than the dove, so we could definitely figure out a better way to check out the state of the world. You'll never guess what our devious master plan was. Or maybe you will, who knows?

Anyways, we decided that instead of doing something weird and complex, all we had to do was look outside! The only problem was that Noah and the rest of the counselors didn't like to let animals on the decks very often. You see, way back during the Camp Gopher Wood days humans lived for a freakishly long time, like hundreds of years. And as you could imagine, their bodies basically hardly worked at all by this point. Most of the counselors couldn't really see well, so they didn't know how close they were to the edge of the boat. Even if they could see past their cataracts, their balance was no good because their hips and knees were all failing, and the few young counselors never wanted to go on the deck because they knew all the responsibility for safety would be on their young shoulders.

I told the flamingo and the cat, “With our great diversity of size, we could definitely find a way to sneak out onto the deck and have a look outside at the dry land!”

 I outlined a pretty simple plan that required a three-person stack-em-up. The flamingo was on my back, and the cat was on the flamingo's head. Then, the flamingo fluttered her pink wings to catapult the cat up through the chimney, and from there the cat presumably walked around just long enough to take a gander. Finally, the cat tumbled down the chimney and I caught her with my long and flexible trunk.

The cat seemed sad as we asked her what she had seen and if anyone had seen her. She said,  “There is basically no water left at all, and there is seemingly endless green grass all around.”

I guess I understood why that made her sad. Dry land meant that camp had to be over, and Counselor Noah had already prepared us for our serious and important job by telling us over and over, “Repopulating the earth with your own species after the flood ended was the entire reason you animals get the opportunity to go to camp.” I probably wouldn't ever get to hang out with the cat and the flamingo again because we would all be so busy on various continents raising the next generation.

When the dove came back to tell Noah what we already knew, we all had to leave Camp Gopher Wood and start our new families. I never got to spend time with the flamingo or the cat again, but I hope that one day, maybe in a few thousands of years, some future generations of elephants, flamingos, and cats get the chance to spend time together and become friends and prove how capable they can be as a team (especially compared to a dove).

Author's note: This story is based on the Biblical story of Noah following God's instructions to build an ark out of gopher wood and save a few of every species and his family from the deluge. After more than a year, a dove is sent out and comes back with an olive branch while there is a rainbow to symbolize God’s promise. 

I filled in some fun and exciting details during the year that Noah, his family, and all the animals are on the ark. Because this is a Biblical story, I didn't want to change any main details of the actual story, so I added new information! Of course, I have no idea what actually happened during this long period, but I decided to make it about camp because everyone loves camp, and I think it's a much more uniting and universal experience than building a giant wooden structure. 

I think some of these classic Biblical stories can get told and retold so many times in the same way that it can be really exciting to use your imagination and think about what the story might be leaving out. And as for the elephant's particular obsession with his size, I channeled my brother, who is 6'4" and very proud of it! Hopefully by reading this story, people of all sizes can realize that they've got to work together to accomplish something really noteworthy!

Bibliography: Noah unit. Story source: The King James Bible (1611), Genesis 5-6

Image Information: Noah's ark; Wikimedia

Week 3 Reading Diary, continued: Noah

Drunkenness of Noah, Michelangelo

When I finished the Noah unit from The Legends of the Jews by Louis Ginzberg (1909), I was interested in the differences between the ways the same stories were told between reading A and reading B. It's almost like these were retellings too, which made me excited to start brainstorming for possible storytelling posts.

Again, I was the most interested in the events surrounding Noah's ark. However, I really liked the story of Noah's sons finding him naked because it just seemed so strange to me that it was such a big deal that his sons respect Noah by not seeing him naked. I bet that their naked bodies looked a lot like Noah's, so it seemed strange that the son who saw him first was so harshly punished in the generations to come.

The one thing I'm looking forward to the most in my storytelling post is making these stories more straightforward and with fewer characters. I get so lost with all the generations and complicated relationships between them, that it will be my goal to have a storytelling post with as few characters as possible!

Noah is not written to be as flawless as he was in reading A, which I liked. I thought it was really strange that he couldn't perform priestly duties because a lion had maimed him. Small details like this are what I think makes a story interesting, so I'll have to add a lot like that in my storytelling post.

Week 3 Reading Diary: Noah

Building the Ark, 17th-century painting

I thought the Noah unit was really interesting! I haven't read this portion of the bible in a long time, and I was happily surprised that within the reading there was one of the famous old testament "begat" sections where the generations were just listed off. I think it would be a little funny to include this in a retelling, maybe in a slightly more interesting way. 

I also found it a little bit tiring that this story went on and on about how awesome and pious Noah was. When I retell this, maybe I could add in a little more independent personality. Like maybe he wouldn't want to put squirrels on the ark because he always thought they were creepy, but his wife convinced him because she thought they were cute.

Or maybe Noah could act out in an even bigger way, like maybe God didn't tell him to build the ark at all, but he just did it because he was a nice guy and that made God even happier than if Noah had been blindly obedient. I feel like the story of the ark is such a classic that there's a lot of creative freedom to change it up quite a bit, and that's why I'm so excited for this week's storytelling post.

I enjoyed some of the lesser known stories besides the ark story as well, but I feel like those wouldn't be as fun to retell because they aren't classics. Although the tower of babel could be fun because there's so little detail given that I have a lot of freedom to create a new story. I could maybe turn the people into different types of animals and have them strewn all around the world, and that would make the galapagos island even more interesting since those animals haven't had very much genetic mutation throughout the years.

Bibliography:  The Legends of the Jews by Louis Ginzberg (1909)