My schedule today. Each week, I try to arrange all my out-of-office appointments and obligations on one day of the week and this week that day is Thursday. I will be unavailable during the afternoon today, but I will answer any emails at the end of the afternoon. So, if you have questions or need help with something, please be patient: I will get back to you by the end of the day today although I won't be as quick to respond as usual to your emails during the day.
Storybook Stack. I'm still working my way through the large stack of Storybook assignments that people have turned in. If you turned in a Week 2 Storybook on time, you should have comments back from me. The items left in the stack now are either late Week 2 assignments or early assignments for Week 3 and Week 4 (contents of the stack). If you want comments back before the weekend on a Week 3 or Week 4 assignment, make sure you turn that in by Friday at noon - I always do my best to read and reply to all the assignments turned in by Friday at noon before the weekend.
Week 3 Read and Respond assignment. The Week 3 blog commenting assignment is not available yet; it will be available starting on Friday. The blog commenting assignment is the only assignment you cannot complete early, because people will still be adding posts to their blog today, Thursday. So please wait until midnight tonight when people should have finished their Week 3 blog posts, and then on Friday you can do the Read and Respond assignment.
Rosh Hashanah: New Year's Day. It's the first day of the Jewish New Year today, Rosh Hashanah (literally "Head of the Year" or "Top of the Year"). The festivities began at sunset on Wednesday and continue until sunset on Thursday. Like many religious holidays, this one is based on the lunar calendar, so it falls on a different day each year, depending on the cycle of moon. According to Jewish tradition, this is the day of the year on which God created man, and it is also the day of the year on which the Last Judgment will take place. One of the rituals on Rosh Hashanah is the blowing of the shofar, the ram's horn, to awaken the faithful before the coming judgment. You can read more about the holiday at Wikipedia, and below you can see the blowing of the shofar as shown here in an illuminated Hebrew manuscript:
