MONDAY: Campus closed until 10AM. Due to the winter weather, the OU campus is closed on Monday morning until 10AM. Since there are no assignments due on Monday, I haven't made any changes to the class schedule. In general, campus closings do not affect the schedule for this class - but if a power outage or other winter weather trouble causes some disruption in your Internet access, let me know as soon as you get back online in order to figure out how best to make up any missing work.
You really can call me Laura! Some of you still seem to feel like you need to call me Professor or Dr. or something like that. No need for that, really! (Plus, I am just an instructor and not a professor, so I don't want to get in trouble with the professor police, ha ha.) Anyway, since I'm on a first-name basis with all of you, please do the same and just call me Laura.
Storybook Coverpages. I'll be updating the list of Storybook websites for Myth-Folklore and Indian Epics on Monday afternoon when people have finished turning in their Week 4 coverpages. You can continue to experiment with your coverpage design all semester long, of course! Starting tomorrow, Tuesday, for the Week 5 Internet assignment you will be looking at and commenting on each other's Storybooks via the class list. I'll have more to say about that in tomorrow's announcements!
Storybook stack. As always on Monday, I will have a huge bunch of assignments in the Storybook stack that were turned in over the weekend or on Monday morning. The first thing I will do on Monday morning when I get to work is to update the list of items in the Storybook stack. You can then check the contents of the stack to make sure I received your assignment. I will be reading and reply to the assignments in the order they were turned in. If you turned in your assignment on Sunday or later, you may have to wait a few days before you will get comments back from me. In fact, this is one of the busiest weeks for me in terms of replies to Storybooks because the Introduction is often the hardest part of the Storybook to write. It will take me all week to get through the stack!
Monday Events on Campus. There will be a free showing of "The Help" on Monday at 7PM in Meacham Auditorium (time/location/details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.
February 13-15: Lupercalia. Today is the Ides of February in the Roman calendar, which means it is the first day of the festival of the Lupercalia. Lupercus was the god of shepherds and his festival was intended to insure fertility in the coming spring. At the beginning of the festival, there was an animal sacrifice, and thongs were then made out of the hides of the animals. The Luperci priests would then run through the streets, dressed in goatskins, and lash the women of the city with the thongs, a ritual which was meant both to promote fertility among the women, as well as an easy childbirth. William Shakespeare famously included the Lupercalia in his play Julius Caesar; you can see that reference here. You can read more about Lupercalia in this Wikipedia article.
