This week was definitely more hectic for me than last week, though not for reasons related to this course.  Some family issues flared up Sunday evening and I spent much of the week travelling back and forth because of it.  That being said, my coursework this week was minimal, and now that it’s Sunday night and my deadlines are in a half hour, I feel I’ve definitely learned my lesson with spreading out the work load for this class.

Now onto the fun!

Has anyone seen this ”movie?”  I expected making a .gif from it to be complicated but it turned out to be so easy! Here’s what I came up with:

When using GIMP, I mistakenly clicked “open” instead of “open as layers” and spent the next forty five minutes or so trying to figure out how to move all the layers to the same canvas.  My ‘research’ consisted of asking a friend, who quickly noticed my mistake after I sent him a screenshot, and everything was downhill after that.  But really, I love Meryl Streep. So much.

Making the e-mail address might have actually been the most challenging task for me though.  I take instructions for tasks far too literally (cooking is the worst for me), so if anything is not exactly how the directions describe it, I get very flustered.  This week though I let loose the reigns a bit and just went with what seemed obvious.  Try sending me an e-mail at [email protected] — this is really the only way for me to know for sure whether it worked.  Whether I did the assignment correctly is a different story, and only the grading gods (Dr. Levine, I’m looking at you!) can answer that for me.

On the flip side, I think the easiest was choosing a theme for my blog.  I was worried the options would all seem cheesy or that I wouldn’t be able to find one that I felt reflected me.  I’m a little bit worried that it seems kind of dark, but when I saw it I felt an immediate connection to it.  If that sounds weird,…maybe it is. I feel like it reflects my interest in world issues and politics and information though, so I’m just going with it for now.  My other blog theme is a little more peaceful and relaxed though, so maybe that balances it out a bit.  I was a little confused as to what the widgets were at first, but once I realized I was able to change the titles of sections and preview them to see what the changes actually did to my page, I was glad I was able to.  I will probably go back and change them again soon, but I just wanted to make them different from the default for now.  I also want to explore more of the plugins, but like I said at the start of this post, I got to all of this way too late in the game to catch up and still meet the deadline.  I will have a spam-free blog though, because I did install Akismet!

My welcome site is a bit bare-boned right now, but I liked being able to pick a theme that reflected the more peaceful side of me.  Nature is really important to me so even though there is no writing on it currently, I’m hoping it will give people who visit it an idea of the more optimistic and happy side of me (as opposed to the activist, ‘there’s-too-much-wrong-in-the-world’ side of me!).

I actually did spend a lot of time trying to plan today’s TDC — (I’m currently dressed up sitting next to a wooden cutting board with a bagel, an avocado, and an egg sitting on it, if that tells you anything), but ran out of time to successfully record it before I started writing this post.  My lack of TDC’s for this week though is definitely what’s driving home the lesson I learned this week (which incidentally was spelled out VERY clearly in all the e-mails we received for this course)…”I should have made the time to start earlier.”

Anyway, what’s done is done and at this point I just need to make sure I get a jump on next weeks assignments as soon as possible!  If nothing else, I’d like to not be sitting in a costume next to a platter of food in front of my computer next Sunday evening.  This week I was able to learn more about the course and what it entails, and I had a lot of fun with the assignments I did get to.

Here’s to being a better student starting tomorrow; cheers!