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.