Andrew's Atrium

There are a lot of bad turns for Koly. Have you ever hear the saying ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire’, well for Koly it’s out of the frying pan and into the fire, then out of the fire and into the oven, then out of the oven and into the pit of lava under the house for most of the book. Usually she tries to look for something that’s good in her life, and there usually is. In chapter seven, Sass starts acting really nice to Koly, but then ditches her in Vrindavan, but at least Sass was nice to Koly before, so I guess when you go out of the frying pan and into the fire, you get a little cool in-between.

It’s not always instant, but if you give Koly enough time, she’ll adapt to a new surrounding. It can be tough, even emotionally or some times physically painful. ” I was up early, dressing quietly while Chandra still still slept. All traces of the wedding had disappeared, and the house and courtyard were bare and unfamiliar. When I looked for even the small comforts of my old home, a worn rug of a lumpy cushion, there were none to be seen”. Even though it hurts at first, Koly can get used to new things.

I think that the theme of the book is that when the going gets really tough, you can’t give up, no matter how much you want to, you need to keep going and hope that life will get better. But it’s not just that. You can’t just hope that life will get better; you have to make it better. Pg. 82 “When I found I could no longer talk to Sassur, I looked for something to care for. If no one would love me, than I could at least love something.” Koly is making her life get better because it’s not getting better on it’s own.

Gloria Whelan uses literary devices and comparisons to express what is going on or what Koly is thinking or feeling pg 2 ” I watched as the spoken words were written down to become like caged animals, caught forever by my clever baap.” Koly is thinking of how the words her baap writes are trapped like birds. Pg 20/21 ” As I lay there in the strange house, I felt like a newly caged animal that rushes around looking for the open door that isn’t there.” It seems like Koly often compares things it her life to trapped animals that need a way out but don’t have one.

I looked up towards the surface. Towards my life and everything I knew. Then I looked around. There was nothing but peaceful, carefree living. The fish were swimming freely like nothing bad would ever happen. Suddenly I knew that this was a new world, and I wanted to be a part of it.

“Andrew, get up, it’s time.” It was a bright summer day on Harbor Island. The air was crisp with the smell of the ocean. Still, I couldn’t help feeling something tugging at my gut. I had been waiting for this day, training for it. It was the day I was going to dive in the open ocean.

We had breakfast and got our stuff together. Once we got to the docks, we got on the boat with the rest of the group, but we were the only ones getting certified. We put together our scuba units, which are made up of a regulator, a BCD, which is an inflatable vest that you use to control your buoyancy, and a tank. Once that was together, we put on our wet suits and went over what we were going to do. Then we were in the water.

Once we were all good to go, we pressed the deflating button. There are two buttons on a BCD, one that inflates it, and one that deflates it. Once we were under, we swam to the descent rope. I’d gone diving in a pool as part of my training, so I was used to the feeling of breathing under water, but this was new. It might have been the salt water, or looking down fifty feet, but something told me that this was different.

We started going down, and because I’d had trouble with equalizing during my confined water dives, I was worried that I would have trouble here, but I was fine. Since water pressure counts a lot more than air pressure, and since the air spaces in your body are compressible, you have to add air to those spaces to make it the same pressure inside as outside, which is what equalizing is. Once we were down about 40 feet we started doing some of the things we had done in our pool work: taking your mask off and putting it back on, buddy breathing, checking air and depth, and so on and so forth.

The whole point of an open water dive is to re-enforce the things you already learned during your pool work in the open so your instructor knows you can do it in the new environment, with the coral and fish. Also so you can do some stuff that a pool is too small for, like learning to use a compass. But we were required to do four dives, so lucky for us, we didn’t have to cram everything into one day. When we were done with each dive, we still had a good amount of air left, so we swam around to see what else was down there. There was a large assortment of coral. As for fish, we saw some parrot fish, a few snapper, several species of tang, and we even saw a Barracuda.

I’m still not sure why, but I keep feeling that something a lot bigger than me getting certified happened that weekend. I’ve been diving several times after that, but no moment in time can ever eclipse the first breath I took under the ocean.

In class we we decided on a topic that we wanted to research further into. I decided to do irrigation because it was one of Mesopotamia’s biggest achievements. My question was How and why did Mesopotamian s build irrigation systems.

Mesopotamia was once swampy and wet in some places and desert and dry in others. So people drained the swampy areas and transferred the water to the dry areas by building a series of canals,dams,and ditches so to sort of balance out the water and allowing them to farm crops to sustain themselves. The farming lead to a food surplus, and the food surplus lead to major civilizations, so irrigation indirectly started civilizations. Irrigation was also used to decrease the chance of flooding by somewhat draining the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, but flooding could sometimes help crops grow rather than wash them away. As useful as irrigation systems were, they were hard to build and even harder to maintain. However, some canals may have been used for 1,000 years or more before new ones were built. So the answer is Mesopotamian s built a series of ditches and canals to bring water to areas that would normally be to dry and to hard to farm in.

Irrigation was really important, I mean where would we be if our great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandparents hadn’t been able to farm food, we might not have have  lasted. I think that this was a really good topic to research and I learned a lot.

information found on the folowing

http://www.ancientmesopotamians.com/mesopotamian-irrigation.html

Mesopotamia irrigation

http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/Hy-La/Irrigation-Systems-Ancient.html

irrigation systems ancient

http://factsanddetails.com/world.php?itemid=1513&catid=56&subcatid=363

Agriculture, Crops, and Irrigation in Mesopotamia

I feel just kind of amazement that Bud can under go all that’s  happening to him. I can’t imagine someone going through all of that in real life, but given what went on at this time I know that some people probably did. And I’ll bet that was what was what Christopher Paul Curtis was trying to tell people when he wrote Bud, Not Buddy, that this kind of stuff really happened at this time.