Caitlyn's Point of View

Zoe the very cuddly cat, taken by Caitlyn Buckley Wow, what a crazy semester this has been!  I have had many ups and downs over the last few months and I am ready to bring this semester to a close.  This week has been filled with presentations, papers, exams, review sessions, and also lots of cuddles with my boyfriend's cat Zoe.  Animals are the best answer for stress and anxiety.  Zoe is definitely up for the job as study cuddly buddy.  Every time I work from the couch, she demands to sit next to me (sometimes on me or my laptop) and turn the purrs to high.  Hug your pets tight as the semester comes to a close.  They will make everything better and easier. Title inspiration: Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy  series .

Clock. flickr For the tech tip this week, I created a countdown timer to show how long until the end of the semester and the beginning of winter break.  This semester has been a crazy one and I am in desperate need of a long break from academics.  I start capstone in the spring and I need to get some good sleep in before then.  I am fairly certain I will have many all nighters this next semester.  You can follow the instructions here to create your own countdown for your blog.

For the Wiki Trails this week, I decided to start out at the Avatar the Last Airbender article, since I needed to do some more research for my portfolio stories.  I learned a lot about the series that I actually didn't know before, especially about the inspiration for the cultures in the story. The next article I read was Sireniki , which is one of the cultures that influenced the Water Tribe in teh series.  I had never heard of this before and really wanted to learn more.  This village is in the very north east corner of Russia. Drawing of a Bowhead Whale from 1884 , Wikipedia After this one, I read the article on the Bowhead Whale .  This is a whale whose migration patterns take it around this village.  This is such a wonderful creature and I am so glad I learned about them.  I really love whales and I am excited to have a new one to study. The last article I visited was the Sea of Okhotsk .  This is another place along the bowhead whales' migration patterns.  Ap

I watched these awesome TED talks about storytelling.  I really loved Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's talk about "the danger of a single story."  In this video, she tells of how she would write stories all the time as a kid and they were all like the ones she read about.  All her characters had white skin and blue eyes and ate apples and played in the snow.  She grew up in Nigeria and had not left her home country, yet.  So why were her stories so different from what was around her? Because she read English books and they were always the same story.  I grew up in a mostly white elementary school and then transferred to another district.  In this district, I made friends with a lot of first generation Americans.  I knew people in my classes from Myanmar, from China, from Venezuela, from Mexico, and from Nigeria.  When I first moved to this school, I was blown away by all of the people from all over and who looked so different from each other.  In my first school, I was stuck i

Guru, flickr I continued watch more of the Epified videos of The Mahabharata for the last bit of reading.  These videos are so good for telling these stories and giving little illustrations to help you better visualize this epic tale.  I decided to watch more of these to see if there were anymore details I wanted to add to the stories on my portfolio site.  My favorite part from this section of the videos was Karna Becomes King.  In this video, the stories tells of a competition of sorts to decide who will be king.  Karna steps forth and blows away the competition with his skills.  They say he must be from royal blood to truly compete, but he can only say he was found in a basket in a river.  This reminds me a lot of the Moses in the basket story from the bible, but flipped.  Moses was raised like a prince, but was really from low birth.  I found this part very interesting.

Christmas Book Flood On the announcement's page for today, I saw this post about Jolabokaflod in Iceland.  This is something I learned about 2 years ago when I started researching Iceland.  Teaching in Iceland is something I have been thinking about doing for a few years now and I keep making these lists of reasons to go.  When I found out about the Christmas Book Flood, I instantly added it to the list.  This sounds like the cutest little tradition.  The holidays seems more stressful than fun around here when we have to spend so much money.  Having a sweet tradition of just exchanging books sounds amazing.  I'm hoping I can talk my boyfriend into doing this for Christmas.  He and I are big readers and would love to do this. I watched this video of Sanjeeb Sircar playing O Come All Ye Faithful on the sitar.  I really love the sound of this song on the sitar. This instrument has such a rich sound and it really adds to this song.