I was meant to be born on a tropical island. I'm searching for a shangri-la (noun: a remote beautiful imaginary place where life approaches perfection).

One thing I've learned about setting goals is when a goal isn't working, revamp it. To add to that, when one goal is getting in the way of another goal, choose to work on the more important one (is that an aphorism?). I realized last night that my blog goal was actually taking away from my study time and sleep, and I didn't even finish the post I wrote! I felt like I was working on an assignment that I was passing in late. Not cathartic and actually counterproductive? Yes.

I haven't given up my goal of memorizing ten words a day, but I'll be remembering them with a different technique. And I'll still be getting up at 6:00 a.m. . . . wish me a good score!

Since I already wrote them out, here are yesterday's words:

1. Paean—(n) a joyful song of triumph, a hymn of praise or tribute
2. Evanescent—(adj) fleeting, tending to vanish; transient
3. Abnegate—(v) to deny oneself, to give up something desired or valuable
4. Imbroglio—(n) confused, complicated situation; entanglement
5. Deleterious—(adj) damaging, hurtful; harmful
6. Aphorism—(n) brief, often witty saying that states a truth
7. Myrmidon—(n) one who follows orders unquestioningly
8. Unctuous—(adj) oily, greasy, false and ingratiating
9. Sedulous—(adj) busy, hardworking
10. Salient—(adj) leaps out at you; conspicuous; sticks out; a salient point

Hi, blog followers! It's been a long time. But since my new GRE goal is to learn ten new words a day for twenty-eight days, could there be a better venue than Mad Libs? I say NO!

So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to list my ten words, and then if you see me, you have to use them in conversation with me. And YOU get to see me try to weave these words into a story about my day . . . here it goes.

Here are today's ten:

1. Obdurate—(adj.) stubbornly persistent in wrongdoing, hardened in feeling, resistant to persuasion
2. Perfunctory—(adj.) done in a routine way, indifferent
3. Assuage—(v) to make something unpleasant less severe
4. Mitigate—(v) to soften, to lessen
5. Obsequious—(adj.) too eager to please, overly submissive
6. Attenuate—(v) reduce in force or degree, weaken
7. Propitiate—(v) to conciliate, to appease
8. Obviate—(v) to prevent, to make unnecessary
9. Inimical—(adj.) hostile, unfriendly
10. Intransigent—(adj.) uncompromising, refusing to be reconciled

My day started off with a little surprise. A grandfather of a cricket. He was sooooo large! We've had these obdurate little crickets in our apartment for two summers now—so I'm used to them—but this one actually scared me. He was huge and brown and huge and huge and HUGE!

I generally try to obviate any inimical feelings towards these intransigent critters by showing them the door. But sometimes they're persistent. (Crickets have never had a problem with being obsequious, and they certainly don't propitiate.)

So I may or may not have left the room to prepare a mitigated castigation for the giant creature. You would think that getting rid of crickets would be pretty perfunctory by now, but it's not so easy. Observation quickly shows you they lead happy lives jumping around a room. They love making their cricket noises. And they like living their lives relatively free of problems. Anyway, when I came back to my room, that large exoskeleton was gone! All I can say is I won't attenuate the punishment next time. Nor will I assuage.

Did I use them all? May you appreciate an on-the-spot publish.