Studying for the GRE

June 23^rd

I must be ready to go back to academics, I'm studying for hours a day for fun? Wow. I woke up very leisurely around 6 and went back to sleep until around 7, then got up and had my tea and oatmeal. I tried to read but soon abandoned it for my GRE book. I finished up the Verbal practice section, revealing that I am wonderful at sentence completion, pretty good at analogies, need work on reading comprehension, and felt like a pretty big failure on antonyms due to a large number of words I just didn't recognize in the least. Good news is that there's a mini-dictionary in the back with the most commonly used GRE words, and I started writing my own list to study, but it was admittedly disappointing to feel like I read so much and yet have what they would consider to be a limited vocabulary.

I put down the GRE book after finishing the verbal section and picked up my Maternal-Neonatal Health book that I got at a used book store in Half Moon Bay. It's a little outdated and kind of...thin, as though it's a review to accompany a bigger book or a lecture series, the information isn't very detailed, but it's also a lot of fun to be reading about things that I vaguely remember and look forward to re-learning in detail, like embryonic development (this time with humans instead of zebra-fish or sea-urchins) and fetal blood flow (they were kind of confusing on that, somehow oxygenated and deoxygenated blood seemed to be going through the same pathways of the heart but not mixing?).

The frogs are out in full force the past few nights, croaking away at an almost unbelievable level. I wonder what they do in the dry season, where they go? After the first good rain or two they just appear, as if they hibernate in the ground and the rain loosens the soil above them and tells them it's time to get going again.