A Walk Down Storytelling Lane: The Merriest Christmas Season!

Monday, December 20, 2010

The Merriest Christmas Season!

This has to be the busiest, yet merriest, Christmas Season I can remember! Some people in the family have overcome serious diseases or at least are holding their own, and one nephew and his girlfriend have been talking about getting married, plus we've been invited to my cousin's huge wedding next April which I'm really looking forward to. Ahh, young love at Christmas! These pictures are of me at Starbucks and one I took of my husband, Tim, and the snowman at Wendy's.

Since completing the requirements of my two online SUNY-ESC courses this semester, I have returned to the Retirement Volunteers Senior Program Crocheting/Knitting Group that I usually get together with once each week. All the other members did a countdown while I finished doing the border on my lavender baby blanket that I'm donating to a local hospital new mom and her baby. Tim and I went to a monthly group Christmas party; I wore my Mrs. Santa hat too! Everyone greeted me warmly, and it was certainly a wonderful conversation piece!

Hubby and I did all the Christmas shopping this past week plus I also shopped for jewelry online for my granddaughter, niece, sister and girlfriend. It's amazing how many great bargains are out there. I really feel like Mrs. Santa Claus! One day I wore my Mrs. Santa hat in to Wendy's for lunch, and everyone seemed to really enjoy it; wearing the hat made me feel very jolly too.

I have really enjoyed all the holiday movies that hubby and I have borrowed from Redbox.com and from our local library, from Santa Baby 2 to A Christmas Carol, we've really enjoyed getting some time to kick our feet up and relax and enjoy them in the evening. We did go to see The Chronicles of Narnia Voyage of the Dawn Treader movie too. I wish you all a wonderful holiday season, whatever religious holiday you follow!

Reference:

Chronicles of Narnia movie (2010)http://www.narnia.com/
Santa Baby 2 YouTube Trailer Video (2009) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Siv2-NnJbAE
Jim Carrey's A Christmas Carol (2009 Disney) YouTube Video (above)

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Final Reflective Essay On blogging

Reflective Narrative on My A Walk Down Storytelling Lane Blog

Writing my blog posts for the Digital Storytelling course was an extremely positive assignment for me. From my first post about my being diagnosed with malignant melanoma and how I overcame it with surgery to my last post about creating my VoiceThread project, I felt that it was a wonderful way to express my feelings and what was going on in my life. It was very important to me to convey my positive feelings about doing whatever was necessary to overcome my skin cancer, and fortunately, I was lucky to be able to continue my SUNY-Empire State College Online Digital Storytelling course through fruition.

My intended audience was my professor and classmates as well as any other blog readers interested in my stories. I intended to evoke happiness and a strong will for survival that we all need to make the best of our lives. My creative process during my blog-creation activity was that I would first choose a subject from my course textbooks, except for my first post about overcoming cancer. In my second blog post, I wrote a children’s story about my favorite hiding place, but afterwards I always wrote about something that I had just learned during each module. Often I included some of my completed course assignments.

The technical considerations that helped my project were that I learned how to include hyperlinks and embed codes so that I was able to include related completed assignments on my blog posts, e.g., Wordle, Animoto Video, Jing Video, reflection narratives, and my final VoiceThread project so that readers could see the results of my course work. The highlight of my blogging experience for this course on blogger.com was that I believe that I enjoyed focusing all my attention on using the site’s capabilities for importing pictures, writing and editing the posts, importing hyperlinks and embed codes, and reading and listening to the videos, especially the one about Jonathan Livingston Seagull with the accompanying song, “Be” by Neil Diamond. I must have listened to that song on my blog dozens of times! I hope to be able to continue developing digital stories and to continue to create blogs for entertainment and hopefully for education purposes too!

Narrative For Anne and Tim's Love Story Video

I felt inspired to tell this story because my husband, Tim, and I have been very much in love almost since the day we met online on a site called Plentyoffish.com, and we decided to live together after several months together. He encouraged me to continue my education in writing, and he wrote, The Girl In The Window, which he said I inspired him to write. I wrote, Love on the Internet 2005, and The Love of My Life for him, and we just became inseparable! It is very important for me to tell this story because I have never felt so completely in love and happy with another human being. My intended audience is all my classmates, all the lovers and spouses, and all those who are looking for love. I hope that everyone finds their soul mate, and enjoys their lives as much as possible while you can. My husband, Tim, has given me hope and encouraged me to complete my BA and to write and live life to the fullest extent possible. I intended to evoke courage for everyone to complete their education and reach out to your soul mate, much as Julia Roberts’ character in Eat, Pray, Love was encouraged to do. My creative process during the activity was like a whirlwind of exploring the capabilities of my digital camera, uploading the pictures online, and trying to put them in an order that would make sense but not detract from the excitement and whirlwind love that Tim and I experience. I have to admit that I had a lot of trials with the audio and the timeline in particular, and finally I added a few title clips to make some sense of my momentos in my story. I tried to put together a storyboard from our pictures which I took every day for over a week. The fact is that everything that Tim and I have accumulated during our relationship has great meaning for me, but none of it would be that important, even the beautiful diamond engagement ring and wedding band and the new car we’ve recently purchased, if they were not from him! The highlight of my experience was that Tim was as much excited to take my pictures to use in my courses as I was to take his and my other pictures for the project. I felt technologically challenged to use all the capabilities of the Jing and Camtasia sites, and although I did explore and listen to several of the instructional videos, I know that I have a lot more to learn about making videos. I know that having made this video on Jing and Camtasia will help me to have an easier time with the next video I attempt to make. Also, I created several Captions which showed up on several of my pictures which I planned in the video, such as, “Home Sweet Home” under the shot of our condo, but for some reason, they did not show on the produced video, so I edited and added title boards. All in all, it was a very exciting opportunity to showcase my life with Tim, and I only hope that others will enjoy my attempts at conveying my love and joy in my life with Tim!

A Walk Down Storytelling Lane

My Rendition of "New York, New York" and "In My Life"

Monday, December 20, 2010

The Merriest Christmas Season!

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About Me

Final Reflective Essay On blogging

VoiceThread: If I Were A Spirit, I Would Be An Angel!

Annetherese Reciting Her Poem, To My Dearest Son, Salvatore

Jenny Wakefield's Blog

Narrative For Anne and Tim's Love Story Video

Tim at the park

Enjoying Rituals and Starbucks!

Annetherese with our car at nearby park

Annetherese at the Park

Anne McCorkell

My Favorite Pictures