Week 1 Introduction: Engagement, Mountains, and Surgery!

Hi everyone!

As you can probably tell from the blog, my name is Jeremy Brazel. I'm a Civil Engineering student and this is my last semester before graduation! My biggest extracurricular activity is being in the Navy ROTC program here. Once I graduate, I will be going to the Navy's nuclear engineering school in South Carolina and after that be an officer on submarines. My other big activity is sports, I love playing and watching pretty much any sport out there.

This summer has definitely been an interesting one. I started off by selling my Mustang and getting an old Jeep, which has been a blast to have this summer. My favorite thing this summer has been the places I've traveled. I got to go to Washington, D.C., Colorado, and New Mexico.

I went to Colorado with a friend for a backpacking trip, and got to see some amazing scenery. We went on a three day, 30 mile trip and were absolutely exhausted by the end.

This is a picture I took after hiking up 5,000' to the top of
the Continental Divide.

The last trip I took the summer was to Taos, New Mexico to do some fishing and hiking with my girlfriend. It rained everyday but we had a great time and got engaged along the way!

Next came the not so fun part of my summer. For a few weeks I had been helping a friend remodel the house his family was about to move into. On the very last day of our work, I was using a table saw to cut a board in half and when I was done and going to turn off the saw, I stumbled and my right index finger hit the saw blade. It cut straight through my bone and tendon, but thankfully not all the way through my finger. Just last week I had surgery and there are now pins in my finger holding it together. It will always look weird and I'm not expected to be able to bend it ever again, but at least it's still attached! My whole hand is in a cast which definitely makes typing a slow process!

I thought about posting some gross finger pictures but I chose the mountains instead :)

Week 1: My 3 Storybook Favorites

The first storybook that caught my eye was Mermaids--CSI. I immediately liked that the storybook was based on a television series and it was the title that got me to click on this storybook. It's obvious that the story will be about mermaids who have done some form of wrongdoing, and this is such a creative way to tell the stories! The introduction was very clever and provided a brief background about the author and gave the inspiration for writing the storybook, which I think is important to do. The introduction also explained the plot of the story. One of the things that I like about this story is that it's written in first person. I also thought the white text on a black background was a very good look for the pages.



The next storybook I found interesting was The Unanswered Questions of Pooh and Friends. This title intrigued me because I assumed that it was based on the Disney story, which it was. Unlike Mermaids--CSI, I wasn't sure what these stories would be about though. Very cleverly, the author based these writings on a story about a bear and a cat, but changed the characters to Pooh and Tigger. I really like the idea of taking a famous story and adapting other stories to fit the famous characters. I think this makes the stories more entertaining for the readers as well. The font looked like something that would be found in a children's book, which was perfect for these stories!



My other favorite storybook was actually from a previous Indian Epics class. Social Media in Ancient India struck me as a very ironic title, so I looked further into the storybook to see what it was about. The introduction explains that the author took two characters from ancient Indian poetry and created stories about how they keep in touch through social media. The design of the site was my favorite part of this storybook, with lots of Facebook posts, tweets, and Instagram pictures being exchanged between the two characters. This was extremely creative and used modern technology to tell a very old tale!

UN-Textbook Exploring: Week 1

Greek Myths: Ovid I, II, and III. The topics that immediately caught my eye for the first unit was the Greek Myths. I have always been fascinated by Greek Mythology and have enjoyed the very few stories that I have read for literature classes in the past. I'm already excited to select two Greek Myth sections for my first two topics!

Ancient Egypt: Keeping with the mythology theme, I think it would be very interesting to learn about mythology other than the most popular Greek and Roman stories that most people are familiar with. I am also interested to see if there are any similarities I would notice in these stories compared to the Greek Myths I will have read the two weeks earlier.

Alice in Wonderland: I was very surprised to see this in the UN-Textbook! I have only seen the movie and have never read the story but I would be curious to see how similar they are to each other. I also realized it's a long story so hopefully it will be a lighter week in my semester when we get to this unit!

Grimm (Cane and Hunt): These also caught my eye because they are the stories lots of Disney movies are based off of. I would love to read these and compare them to how the Disney movies portrayed them.

Week 1 Storytelling: The Ant and the Dove

The Ant and the Dove

One day there was an adventurous ant that was walking along a steep slope near a riverbank with some of his other ant friends after school. The ants were playing rough as young boys usually do, and after getting pushed one of them eventually fell into the river. None of his friends could save him because none of them were capable of swimming. Luckily, there was a dove sitting in a tree nearby that heard all of the yelling. As the drowning ant began to get washed away by the river the dove swooped down and gently pulled the ant from the river with her beak. She warned the boys to be more careful and flew away.

After dropping the ant back off on the bank of the river, the dove returned to her perch on the tree. While the ant was still drying himself off and starting to calm back down, he heard a rustling noise walking through the trees. He and his friends climbed the riverbank to get a better view. The ants looked up to see a huntsman pointing his slingshot directly at the dove who had just earlier saved their friends life. Feeling panicked for his newfound hero, the ant that had almost drowned scurried over to the huntsman and bit his leg. 

The bite startled the hunter just enough for his shot to miss the dove. Having no more stones, the hunter gave up and walked back home. The dove flew down to the ants and thanked them for saving her life. The ants warned her to be more careful and she flew off and thanked the ants for their generosity again as she flew by. The ant said thank you as well and they both happily went on knowing they each saved a life that day. 

Author's Note: 

The original fable has an ant fall into some water. The Dove puts straw into the water that the ant floats on back to safety. Then the ant sees that the dove is about to get killed by a man and stings his leg. The stone misses and the dove flies off. 

Bibliography:

The Aesop for Children by Aesop (2006). Web Source: The Project Gutenberg Ebook.

The dove shown is a grey-fronted dove. Web Source: Wikipedia.

My Favorite Place, Week 1 Assignment: Sydney, Australia

I visited my favorite place in August of 2013 when my summer training assignment for the Navy sent me to Sydney, Australia. I was lucky and got 3 whole days to tour Sydney before Navy activities started. Although it's an insanely expensive city, I couldn't resist doing as much as possible while I had the chance. My favorite part of every day was getting to see the city at night. From the bridge to the famous opera house, it's a beautiful city that I would go back to in a heartbeat.


                                                                     

This is a picture I took in August of 2013
 while walking across the Sydney Harbour Bridge.