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1.  Introduction

The purpose of this process is to put everything together from the first five time management processes and create a schedule model.  This terminology is new with the 5^th Edition:  what does this mean apart from the schedule.  There is schedule data which goes into making the schedule, and then there is the presentation of the schedule, typically in the form of a Gantt chart or some other visual representation that is easy to understand.

The reason why it is referred to as a schedule model, it to distinguish it formally from the schedule data and schedule presentation, but to remind the project manager that it is based on assumptions that may change, or risks that may occur during the course of the project.

2.  Inputs, Tools & Techniques, and Outputs
This list of inputs, tools & techniques, and outputs is the most complicated of any of the other five planning processes in Time Management because it is in fact the culmination of all of them.

The inputs come mostly from the outputs of other time management processes, but also include outputs from scope, risk, and even human resource management.

The various tools & techniques will take a series of posts to discuss because they are so vital in understanding how a schedule is put together.  Plus, they tend to be favorite topics for PMP and CAPM exam questions, so there is another pragmatic reason for discussing them in detail.

The schedule data, schedule presentations, and schedule model are all outputs of this process.  The schedule model is the schedule baseline, against which the actual performance of the project is measured in the monitoring and controlling processes of schedule management, which are covered in the post covering process 6.7 Control Schedule.  This will be covered after the tools & techniques for this process, starting with the next posts on schedule network analysis.

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This is a summary of the fourth part of twenty-four in the course on the New Testament presented by The Teaching Company.  The lectures in this course are by Prof. Bart D. Ehrman, the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  His expertise is in the Greco-Roman cultural environment of early Christianity and the textual criticism of the New Testament.  For those who are interested in purchasing this course and listening to the complete lectures, please go to http://www.thegreatcourses.com.

This second post contains the last half of this lecture.  

6.  Authorship of the Gospels

Why would the fact that stories normally got changed over time have any effect on the Gospels?  After all, they were not written by hypothetical businessmen but by disciples of Jesus and their close followers, in other words, by eyewitnesses and those who knew eyewitnesses.  In fact, the question of the authorship of the Gospels is not that simple.

All four of the Gospels that were later attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were in fact written anonymously.  These books later came to be ascribed to people named Matthew, Mark, Luke and John:  two of Jesus’ disciples and two friends of his apostles.  Matthew, the tax collector, and John, the beloved disciple, were two of Jesus’ disciples.  Mark, who was thought to be the secretary of the apostle Peter, and Luke, who was thought to be the traveling companion to the apostle Paul, were two friends of Jesus’ apostles.  These attributions of the Gospels to these four men were not originally in the Gospels themselves, but rather arose in the 2^nd century AD some decades after the Gospels themselves were written.  There are good reasons for doubting that these ascriptions are accurate.  Even though Jesus and his followers originally spoke Aramaic, a language that is closely related to Hebrew, the Gospels were written in Greek.

Moreover, Jesus’ own disciples, at least according to New Testament accounts, were by and large lower-class uneducated peasants.  According to the Book of Acts, Chapter 4, both Peter and John, two of Jesus’ principal disciples, were known to be illiterate.  The Gospel authors, on the other hand, are highly educated and literate.  In addition, all of these Gospels are written in the 3^rd person.  Never does a Gospel author says, “and then Jesus and I went up to Jerusalem.”  These books do not appear to have written by Jesus’ own disciples.  They were later ascribed to apostles by later Christians, Christians who were interested in securing their authority as canonical scripture.  These traditional ascriptions, however, are late and questionable.

Who then were the authors of these books?  We can’t really say, other than that they were relatively highly-educated literate Greek-speaking Christians living several decades after Jesus who had heard numerous reports about his life from the various stories that had been passed down by Jesus’ followers and had written some of these reports down.

7.  Evidence for the Contention:  The Death of Jesus according to Mark

Is there any evidence for this view that the stories in the Gospels were changed over time?  Prof. Ehrman illustrates the kind of evidence that is widely available to scholars by looking at just two brief accounts.  The first account has to do with a relatively simple and minor question:  when did Jesus die?

Before going into this example, Prof. Ehrman has to stress the point that historians have to look at what seems to be minutiae in order to make a big point.  It is like the investigation of a murder case.  There may be a highly significant murder case but the inspector who comes into the room, instead of being aghast at the immensity of the crime, starts looking for fingerprints or strands of hair, which would seem small and insignificant in comparison with the crime that has been committed.  Historians are like that:  they have to look for little things in order to explain something big that has happened, because a little thing may have big implications.

When did Jesus die?  Each of the Gospels narrates the events.  Two of the Gospels, the earliest one, Mark, and the latest one, John, provide the dates for Jesus’ death.  All of the Gospels agree that Jesus died at some time during the feast of the Passover, the annual festival that was celebrated in Jerusalem by Jews to commemorate the events of the Exodus from Egypt.  The festival had as its background the story of God’s deliverance of the people of Israel from their slavery in Egypt under Moses as recorded in the Hebrew Bible in the book of Exodus.  In the 1^st Century, Jews would come from all over the world to celebrate this feast.  When they came to Jerusalem, they would purchase a lamb that would be eaten at the celebration in the evening.  The lambs were sacrificed in the Temple in the afternoon before the Passover where the lambs were actually eaten.  The day when the lambs were sacrificed was therefore called the Day of Preparation for the Passover.  It is important to recall that in Jewish reckoning, a new day does not begin at midnight as it does for us, but whenever it gets dark.  That’s why the Jewish Sabbath begins on Friday evening when it gets dark and continues until Saturday evening until it gets dark.  The lambs during the Passover feast then were sacrificed on the Day of Preparation for thee Passover; they were taken home and cooked for the evening meal, and when it got dark it would then be the next day and the lambs were would be eaten for the Passover meal on the Day of Passover.

Let us return now to the Gospel accounts.  In the earliest account of Jesus’ last days, the account found in Mark, the sequence of events leading up to Jesus’ death are clearly laid out.  The day before Jesus was arrested, Jesus’ disciples ask him where he wants to prepare to eat the Passover meal (Mark 14:12).  He gives them their instructions.  That night, in other words, on the Day of the Passover, they have the meal in which Jesus takes the symbolic food of the Passover Feast and instills new significance in them.  He takes the unleavened bread and says “this is my body which is given for you.”  He takes the cup of wine and says “this cup is the new covenant in my blood.”  Afterwards, Jesus goes out to pray.  He is betrayed by Judas Iscariot and handed over to the Jewish authorities for trial.  He spends the night in jail.  The next morning, that is, the morning after the Passover lambs have been eaten, Jesus appears before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate who finds him guilty of criminal charges and orders him executed.  Jesus is taken immediately off and crucified and we’re told when this was:  at 9:00 in the morning (Mark 15:25).  This is a very clear dating of when Jesus died.

8.  Evidence for the Contention:  The Death of Jesus according to John

Our last Gospel, the Gospel of John, also provides a precise dating for the events.  The sequence of events in John is in many ways similar to that found in the Gospel of Mark, but there are striking differences as well.  Here, too, Jesus has a last meal with his disciples, but there is no word of it being the Passover meal.  The disciples in this Gospel never ask where they are to prepare the Passover and Jesus does not speak about the symbolic foods, giving them new significance.  After the supper, Jesus again goes out to pray.  He is betrayed by Judas, is arrested, spends the rest of the night in jail.  The next day he appears before Pontius Pilate and is ordered to be executed.  We are then told precisely when it happens in John 19:14:  on the Day of Preparation for the Passover at 12:00 noon.  How could it be the Day of Preparation for the Passover, when according to Mark’s account, Jesus lived through that day, he had the Passover meal with his disciples that night, and was put on the cross the next morning on the day of Passover itself.  In John’s Gospel, though, Jesus was executed before the Passover meal even began.  How does one reconcile this discrepancy?  Well, it probably can’t be reconciled literally, although people try all the time.  It is worth noting, though, that the Gospel of John, which has Jesus did on the afternoon before the Passover, has him dying precisely when the Passover lambs, the lambs of God, were being slaughtered in the Temple.  Moreover, this Gospel is the only Gospel that refers to Jesus himself as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29 and 1:36).  In other words, in John’s Gospel Jesus is identified as the Lamb of God and he died precisely when on the day and at the time when the lambs are being killed in the Temple.  It appears highly probable that John changed the day and the hour historical time of Jesus’ death in order to emphasize a theological point, to show that Jesus really was the Passover Lamb.

This shows that in John’s Gospel we have accounts that have been changed in order to make theological points.  We could show example after example of similar things happening throughout the Gospels, where it appears that you have a story told in two different accounts with differences between them, and the differences make sense in light of the theological views of the authors.  A natural assumption is that this kind of changing of the accounts, which you can show without much doubt in the written texts, was also going on at the oral stages, as people were telling stories about Jesus and modifying them in order to make their points.  Sometimes the Gospels tell different accounts of the same stories precisely because they derive from different oral versions of the same story.

9.  Further Evidence for the Contention:  The Birth of Jesus in Matthew and Luke

You can see this for yourself by comparing almost any two accounts of the same story in the Gospels.  The birth stories of Jesus in Matthew and Luke are a good example.  If you make a list of everything that happened to Jesus at his birth in each of the stories and compare the two lists, you find that the Christmas story that Christians celebrate every year on December 25^th is a conflation of these two accounts.  You can see the similarities and the differences between these two accounts.  For example, what was Joseph and Mary’s home town?  If you read Luke, it was Nazareth.  If you read Matthew, it was Bethlehem.

10.  Conclusion

It’s undoubtedly true that the Gospels of the New Testament contain stories about Jesus that are historically accurate, but they also contain stories that appear to have been modified as Christians told and retold the stories over the decades between Jesus’ death and these first accounts of his life.  One of the tasks will be to decide which of the stories in the Gospel represent historically accurate materials, and which ones represent stories that have been modified in the process of retelling them.  Our first task will be to look at the Gospels themselves to see what they have to say about Jesus, to see what their perspectives were.

The next lecture in the series will discuss the first Gospel to have been written, the Gospel according to Mark.

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This is a summary of the fourth part of twenty-four in the course on the New Testament presented by The Teaching Company.  The lectures in this course are by Prof. Bart D. Ehrman, the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  His expertise is in the Greco-Roman cultural environment of early Christianity and the textual criticism of the New Testament.  For those who are interested in purchasing this course and listening to the complete lectures, please go to http://www.thegreatcourses.com.

This post contains the first half of the lecture.  

1.  Introduction

The previous lectures have focused on the cultural background of Jesus’ life, starting with the Greco-Roman world and early Judaism.  This lecture starts looking at the New Testament itself, beginning with the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

What kind of books are the Gospels?  Are they historically accurate biographies of Jesus, written by people who actually saw him do the things that he did?  Or are they filled with legends and myths?  Or are they fictions created by his well-intentioned followers?  In short, are they facts or fictions, or a combination of both?

2.  Dates of the Gospels

One way to begin to answer the questions in the last paragraph is to look at some historical data:  the dates that the Gospels were written as compared to the dates of the events that they narrate.  Virtually all scholars agree that Jesus died some time around the year 30 AD.  The Gospels were probably written about 30-65 years after Jesus’ death.  Most scholars are reasonably sure that Mark was the first Gospel to be written, around 65-70 AD.  Matthew and Luke were probably the next Gospels to be written, around 80-85 AD.  The Gospel of John was probably the last Gospel to be written, some time around 90-95 AD.

Most scholars agree on these dates.  What scholars do not agree on is the significance of these dates.  Prof. Ehrman wants to discuss the time gap between the death of Jesus and the first accounts of his life.  This gap of between 30-65 years is significant for our understanding of these earliest accounts of Jesus.  In modern terms, it would be as if the earliest accounts of the presidency of Lyndon Johnson were written in this year.  Some of you may be thinking, that’s not a big time gap because many people remember his presidency quite well, but what if there no written sources between the time of his presidency and the present day?

That would only be comparable to the gap between the death of Jesus and the writing of the Gospel of Mark, some 30-35 years.  What if the gap were as long as that between the death of Jesus and the Gospel of John, some 60-65 years?  That would be the equivalent of someone writing about the Great Depression of the 1930s with no earlier written resources.  This demonstrates that the 30-65 year time gap between the death of Jesus and the writing of the Gospels is significant.

3.  The Significance of the Time Gap

The significance of the time gap comes from figuring out what was happening in the intervening years between Jesus’ death and the writing of the Gospels.  Of course, there were a lot of events happening in the Roman Empire during those decades.  The most important thing that was happening, for the purpose of our analysis, is that Christianity was spreading throughout the Empire.  Christianity started immediately after Jesus’ death with a handful of his followers.  According to the Book of Acts, Jesus had 11 remaining followers amongst his disciples (the 12^th follower Judas had killed himself), and a handful of women, so let’s say around 20 followers altogether, all located in Jerusalem, who had accompanied Jesus throughout his ministry.  Between that time and the end of the 1^st century AD, Christianity had spread to the major urban areas of the Mediterranean as Christians propagated their belief in Jesus as the son of God who had died for the sins of the world.  So within 40-50 years, this tiny band of 20 or so disciples had multiplied themselves many times over.  In these days before mass media, the religion of Christianity was propagated by word of mouth, that is, by telling stories about Jesus from one person to the next:  stories about what he taught, what he did, and how he died.  People were trying to convert others to Christianity and the only way to do it effectively was to tell people the stories of Jesus.  We don’t have evidence of people doing massive revivals, tent meetings, campaign rallies in the Coliseum or anything of that sort.  It appears to have been propagated by having people hear the stories of Jesus, form church communities, and then tell the stories of Jesus within the churches.  This process occurred not just in Jerusalem, but in the cities of Judea, Samaria, Asia Minor, Macedonia, Akkea (modern-day Greece), Italy, North Africa and in Egypt.  Throughout the Mediterranean, people are converting to Christianity by listening to the stories about Jesus.

Who is telling the stories about Jesus?  Given that stories are being told throughout this entire region, they are obviously being told in different languages and in different areas.  The people who are telling the stories about Jesus are by and large not Jesus’ own followers.  They must have been by and large those people who had been converted to Christianity.  Imagine that you are a businessman who lived in the city of Ephesus in Asia Minor.  Someone has come through town on business or for some other reason and has met you and told you stories about Jesus, the son of God in Judea who did miracles and delivered great teachings, but who was then crucified by the Roman governor of Judea.  The more you hear, the more you believe in this story and you are converted to Christianity.  You go home and tell your family.  Based on some of the stories you have told, let us say your husband or your wife converts.  Your spouse goes next door and tells the neighbors, and they convert.  One of these neighbors is a businessman who goes to Smyrna and tells the stories there.  The people he tells in Smyrna convert and then tell the stories to their family members.  From whom did these family members tell the stories?  They heard it from the businessman who came to town.

So you can see how the stories propagate from town to town.  But the people who are converting are doing it based on the stories they have heard from people in their own town.  However, these stories cannot have been told by the eyewitnesses themselves, because the religion is increasing geometrically and therefore propagating too quickly to be simply based on eyewitness testimony.  The people who are telling the stories were not there to see these events happen, and they didn’t know anybody who had seen these things happen.  Prof. Ehrman stresses that the Empire itself did not convert to Christianity until much, much later.  But there were pockets of Christians who were starting to emerge in this period in various locales throughout the Mediterranean.

4.  Contention:  stories about Jesus were changed

What happened to the stories as they were being narrated by these people at this time?  Prof. Ehrman’s contention is that the stories got changed as they got told time and time again.  The stories of Jesus were modified as people told them year after year.  Sometimes the changes to the stories would have been purely accidental, just as every story gets changed as it gets told from one person to another.  He relates the children’s game “Telephone” where a group of children sit in a circle and one child tells a story to the next child and so on around the circle.  By the time it gets back to the child who told the original story, it has become a different story.  Imagine playing the game of “Telephone” for 50 years involving thousands of people in different countries using different languages.  Prof. Ehrman says it is reasonable to assume that the story told would get changed.

Sometimes the stories get changed because people wanted to change the story.  After all people are telling stories about Jesus expressly because they want to convert others to believe in certain things and to act in certain ways.  The stories were told to promote faith in Jesus and to promote the right kind of faith in Jesus.  Was it possible that sometimes the stories were changed precisely in order to make Jesus look even better than he did before, or to stress a particular theological point about the importance of Jesus.  There is historical evidence that stories were changed in these ways.

5.  Objections to this Contention

There are objections to this idea that the stories about Jesus were changed as they came to be circulated by word of mouth.  Some people state that the stories could not have been changed in such a short amount of time, especially when there were eyewitnesses around who could verify the account.  The logic behind this objection is that there were eyewitnesses around who would have been able to check to make sure that the stories being about Jesus were correct.  Prof. Ehrman does not put much stock in this objection, however, because it does not take much time to change a story; moreover, the presence of eyewitnesses does not usually have a lot to do with the accuracy of an account.  Stories can change overnight.  Even today, we can occasionally read a newspaper article or hear an account on the radio or television which turns out later to be wrong.  Some of Prof. Ehrman’s colleagues refuse to give interviews on the radio or television because they do not trust that their views will be accurately presented.

As to the other point of the objection, the mere presence of eyewitnesses cannot guarantee the accuracy of an account, especially in a world before mass communications existed.  There’s no way to guarantee that eyewitnesses will be around to guarantee that the telling of a certain story is accurate.

The second objection that people raise to the idea that the stories of Jesus got changed is that in ancient societies which were oral cultures, people had better memories than people do today who live in modern societies which are written cultures.  In other words, people in oral cultures had an ability to tell and recall stories accurately.  Since they had better memories, they had better accuracy when they told stories.

Unfortunately for this view, anthropological studies done in the past 20 years have shown convincingly that this is not the case at all.  In fact, the very concern for verbal accuracy that lies behind this theory is a concern that exists exclusively in written cultures like our own.  It is only in written cultures where one can actually check the accuracy of something that is said.  Since you can check in written cultures the accuracy of something that is said, we believe that statements ought to be accurate.

In oral societies it turns out there is no natural assumption that stories should remain unchanged.  In fact, anthropological studies have shown that the assumption in oral societies is that stories should be changed depending on the audience to whom a story is told.  So it appears that stories were changed as they were told by word of mouth from one person to another.

The next post will contain the second half of the lecture.  

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1.  Introduction

The last post covered the time management process 6.5 Estimate Activity Durations, and among the tools & techniques, which are listed below for reference, are the various techniques for estimating activity durations.

Estimates made by individual experts use the technique of expert judgment (tool #1), and opposed to this are group decision-making techniques (tool #6), which create estimates in a brainstorming fashion by a group.  This post will contrast the three estimating techniques of analogous (tool #2), parametric (tool #3), and three-point estimating (tool #4).  The remaining reserve analysis technique (tool #6) is particularly useful in conjunction with three-point estimating.

2.  Analogous, parametric, and three-point estimating

The reason why I am creating this post is because the PMBOK® Guide definitions of analogous and parametric estimating both use the words “parameters” and I thought, well, there’s a potential source of confusion right there.  So I am going to compare these definitions below to help the reader distinguish between them.

Analogous and parametric estimates are examples of top-down estimates, the first being on the basis of the entire project and the second being on the basis of some sort of unit measure (dollars per square foot, hours per line of code, etc.).  They both use historical data, with parametric estimates taking longer, but being more accurate than, analogous estimates.

Three-point estimates are example of bottom-up estimates, which are obtained from analyzing individual work packages.  The single-point estimates are enhanced by using risk analysis to figure out how much each estimate would take in a best-case (optimistic) and worst-case basis (pessimistic).

They are the most accurate of the three techniques above, but they also take the most amount of time to complete.  It is entirely possible that you could use all three techniques in different stages of planning, the analogous and then parametric estimates to get a preliminary estimate, and then the three-point estimates to get a more refined estimate.

3.  Three-point estimates

The three-point estimate relies on three different estimates:

However, they can be combined into the three-point estimate in two different ways:

The triangular distribution is simply the average or mean of the three separate estimates.  The beta distribution, based on PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique), assumes a great deal of confidence that the most likely estimate tM is accurate.  This allows the distribution to give 4 times more weight to tM than to either tO or tP.  The way to remember the denominator of this formula is to realize that there are the equivalent of six terms rather than three in the numerator, if you consider the 4tM to be the equivalent of four terms, tM + tM + tM + tM.

After a brief interlude this weekend, I will continue next week with a summary of the last planning process, 6.6 Develop Schedule, which puts together all of the other five planning processes in the Time Management knowledge area to form the project schedule.

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1. Introduction

Once the amount of resources that can be assigned to a project are known as a result of process 6.4 Estimate Activity Resources, then you can estimate the activity durations in the current process 6.5 Estimate Activity Durations.

2.  Inputs, Tools & Techniques, Outputs

The inputs come from previous processes in Time Management, such as 6.2 Define Activities and 6.4 Estimate Activity Resources, as well as from Scope and Risk Management. Risk Management is particularly important when it comes to the three-point estimating which take best-case and worst-case scenarios into account.

The tools and techniques are varied in terms of complexity and accuracy, and a comparison of these techniques will be taken up in the next blog post.

The outputs of the activity duration estimates are used directly in the next and final planning process for Time Management, 6.6 Develop Schedule.

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1.  Introduction

Once the activities have been identified in process 6.2 Define Activities, it is necessary to find out what resources will be needed to perform them.  That is where this process 6.4 Estimate Activity Resources comes in.

It is not only the amount of resources, but the schedule of when they are available that are both needed to find out how long a particular activity will take.

2.  Inputs, Tools & Techniques, and Outputs

Here is a brief recap from the 5^th Edition PMBOK® Guide of the inputs, tools & techniques, and outputs necessary for this process.  A lot of the inputs comes from the process 6.2 Define Activities, but some come from processes from other knowledge area management processes, such as Cost, Procurement, Human Resources, and even Risk Management.

For the tools & techniques, the ubiquitous “Expert Judgment” is used when it comes to estimating resources.  For rough estimates based on previous projects or industry-wide information there are tools, but the most accurate technique is that of Bottom-Up Estimating.  It is the most accurate, but also takes the most amount of time to do.

Once the outputs of the Activity Resource Requirements and Resource Breakdown Structure are complete, these then become inputs in the next process, that of 6.5 Estimate Activity Durations, which is the subject of the next post.

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On April 9, 2012 I embarked on a quest to produce an article or “blog post” every day for an entire year.    I have done so for the past year, and now have 29,000+ viewers of my blog from over 120 countries to my credit.    What did I envision for the blog at the start?   What has changed in my vision since then?   And what do I foresee doing on my blog in the future?

1.  My blog at the start

I had an idea of my blog being a public journal.   I have kept a private journal for almost as long as I was in college, and it has served as my dream journal, planning journal, and in general my attempt to mine words for inspiration and then to record the inspiration when it comes.

But these are private thoughts; what did I want to transmit in a public space like a blog?   It was partially a utilitarian purpose because I was taking a class about project management and I wanted my blog to contain notes about the topics we were studying so that the study group I was organizing would have access to them when they couldn’t make our weekly study sessions.

However, I also had the idea that I would try blogging not just about foreign languages, but eventually IN foreign languages as well.   This has never satisfactorily worked out because I find that I could not have a separate blog page, one for each language I was studying, as I had envisioned.   If I put random pages in different languages interspersed among all the pages in English, I thought that might be confusing for my readers.   So I eventually dropped that idea–but am willing to entertain it again in the future if an opportunity presents itself.

I also wanted to discuss topics I was interested in, particular those having to do with global issues that I felt were important.   Toastmasters is an organization I have come to really be heavily involved in and it was often a subject of some blog posts.    A book review or movie review were things I would do once and awhile, as well as summaries of lectures I was listening to on various topics.    There are webinars that I listen to and summarize as well.

2.  My blog at present

I am doing a survey of the 5th Edition PMBOK Guide as part of a project to update the Project Management Institute of Orange County’s PMP/CAPM certification prep class workshops, and that occupies most of the current posts.   On the weekend, I take a break and blog about other topics.   Last week, however, I took the longest break I’ve ever done regarding project management topics because I was traveling across 2,000 miles from Los Angeles to Chicago, but will resume tomorrow now that my internet service has been established in my new place of residence.

But I foresee a continuation of the project management posts until I finish going through the 5th Edition of the PMBOK Guide.   This blog is my way of really getting to understand the material so that I can help the new students taking our classes to pass the new version of the PMP or CAPM exam.

3.  My blog in the future

However, when the 5th Edition is done, I would like to complete my survey of the quality control-related material in the Six Sigma curriculum that I started on in November and December of last year.   I want to study the global risk report when it comes out of the World Economic Forum held in Davos earlier this year.

I will certainly continue to write about Toastmasters, various global issues, and various other personal interests of mine.  But I really think I need to discipline myself to read more books and do more book reviews.   That would help not only me but those who are interested in the book to understand it more thoroughly.

I think doing this would also improve my writing ability as well as my ability to illustrate my words with images and pictures that add to the understanding and not detract from it.

But I do need to sit down and add tags and categories so that it is easier to find and cross-reference my blog posts.  I owe it to those who make it a point to read my blog and for those future readers who will be brought to it by those very same tags.

To paraphrase Robert Heinlein, “The Blog is a Harsh Mistress.”   Having the will to sit and compose an entire blog post every single day is a tremendous discipline that I have sought after and have succeeded in accomplishing.   But creating a discipline is just the first step in having the discipline to create.   That’s what I want to succeed in doing in the future…

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As the backdrop to my recent travels by car from Los Angeles to Chicago, I listened to the lectures series by Joseph Campbell on Occidental Mythology entitled Western Quest. These lectures focus on the troubadours and writers in the crucial century from 1150-1250 who created the medieval romances that centered on tales of King Arthur’s Court.

The titles of the five lectures are as follows:

1. Origins of Occidental Mythology
This gives the historical background to the Arthurian romances.

2. The Mythology of Love
Joseph Campbell relates the central figure of Eleanor of Aquitaine and how the force of love or Amor was seen as force to counterbalance the oppression of the church or Roma (which is Amor spelled backwards).

3. The Arthurian Tradition
This lecture describes how the English literary tradition centered on Arthur, but the French tradition focused not on Arthur but on the various Knights of the Round Table like Lancelot, Gawain, and Parcival.

4. The Grail Legend
This introduces the secular version of the Grail legend where the Grail is like the Philosophers Stone, as opposed to the ecclesiastical line of the legend where it was the vessel used by Jesus during the Last Supper (which is the version of the Grail legend most are familiar with).

5. The Forest Adventurous
This discusses the main theme of the Grail legend, which is the renewal of the “wasteland” through an act of individual compassion which sometimes requires one to perform it in spite of social conventions.

In all of these lectures, Joseph Campbell emphasizes the unique position that these legends hold in world mythology in their positive depiction of the role of the individual vis-a-vis society. It was the perfect series of lectures to listen to as I set off on a new adventure of my own, and I recommend them to anybody who wants to know more about the spiritual roots of the values that would eventually flower in the Enlightenment.

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There is a Chinese saying that “a journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.” I was reminded of that saying recently due to a move I have just completed from Los Angeles to Chicago in order to assist my father who is dealing with some health challenges.

However, the saying in my case should be the reverse, “a journey of a single step starts with 2,000 miles.” Any big move brings a combination of hope and trepidation, but this move comes with the added concern over my father’s health and the general state of the economy.

But with all the changes that a move across the country will bring, I will to keep some continuity in my life by joining a local Toastmasters club, continuing my blogging, maintaining my volunteer projects with the Project Management Institute, and networking.

There was one definite positive about the move, which was that it meant I would see more of my immediate family and my extended family. But knowing I will be a great help to my father gets rid of any qualms I may feel about moving.

After my father’s health condition improves, we’ll see whether fortune steers me back to California or whether I remain here. In the meanwhile, I’ll just settle in start the next chapter of my life here in Chicago.

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I am visiting my cousins in St. Louis and this evening they are going to hold their biweekly Game Night where they invite family and friends over to play board games.

They invited me to join them and I told them I would love to. The Game Night is a tradition that I remember in my childhood. I lived in Germany for a year after college and the board game or Brettspiel tradition was strong there, with adults commonly giving them as presents to other adults and not just to children.

I kept the tradition of the board game alive in my immediate family, and was a great fan of board games made in Europe (particularly Germany). At holiday time when I visited my cousins, I would always bring some new and interesting game I had discovered.

However, I found as I lived abroad in Japan after graduate school, and then in New York and Los Angeles, that fewer and fewer people were interested in playing board games as video games had practically completely displaced them. My collection of board games ended up languishing in my mini-storage unit.

So it was delightful not only to see my cousins, but to realize that they have kept this tradition alive. What do I find so fascinating about board games?

1. They are fun! Our family likes games that involve word play like Balderdash.

2. They are interactive, and like card games are great at breaking the ice and allowing even the normally introverted to come out of their shell.

3. They are inclusive because they
allow everybody to interact and join in, even those who are only spectating and not even playing the game.

4. The European games in particular are beautiful because the board and components are simple but elegant in design.

5. Board games are leisurely in that they can take an hour or more and so provide a chance for “quality time” with friends or family.

For these reasons, I am happy to revisit the quaint tradition of Game Night with my cousins. It is a reminder of happy times from childhood, and a chance to stop the world, stop time, and enjoy the present having fun together with my extended family.

If you’re interested in starting a Game Night tradition of your own, go to the Funagain Games website and choose from one of their recommendations. You’ll receive a box filled with potential good times in return!

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