elucubrator

Another kitchen rule has been developed to aid in the consumption of mass quantities of H2O. Here it is: If ever anything is dropped in the kitchen you must pick it up immediately and then quickly drink TWO GLASSES of water before you can let go of the item, and if not… something terrible will happen to someone you care about whose name begins with the first letter in the name of the item dropped!!! :-0

is that I have since childhood disliked the taste of it, and have always preferred drinking juice and “mate” (a hot argentine drink in the same family as tea and coffee). But I have learned that water is essential, not just any liquids.

The trouble with any drink that contains caffeine is that they are diuretics and draw water out of your cells, slowly dehydrating your body. Good hydration is essential to one’s health. I find that when I do drink enough water and avoid the caffeine that my bodily aches and pains begin to disappear. Later, when I cut back they begin to re-emerge. That is a good advertisement for water.

The way I am trying to get enough water is that I have made it a rule that whenever I walk into the kitchen I cannot leave again without drinking down an entire glass. I do this quickly to get it over with. At the gym (it is easier to drink lots of water here because working out makes you thirsty) I have made it the rule that between every set I walk over to the drinking fountain and drink ten gulps. I am aiming for 8-10 glasses per day.

I was doing well with this the past couple of months, but in the last week I have started breaking the water rules at home, I have started drinking the “mate” again, and I have not gone to the gym. Not surprisingly, my back pain is re-emerging. It used to be really bad, and I sufferred from it for a long time. In the last few weeks I had completely eradicated it and could not believe that it was gone. Drinking lots of water, getting proper exercise and nutrition, is not just a one time cure for back pain. You have to keep doing it, but I discovered that this works. So, this week I am going to start up again with the heavy water drinking. Maybe I can still drink mate though. We’ll see.

I had to take this for graduate school. English not being my first language I always had a problem with the verbal section. When I took the SATs in highschool I scored a 470 on the verbal and a 600 on the Math. Neither of those scores was so great, but the thing is that in practice my verbal skills were much much better than my math skills. This was never reflected by the test.

I knew I would have to study hard to do well on the GRE. So I bought books, used flash cards, and studied 10 hours a day for a whole month before the test. I was taking practice exams daily and was consistently getting near perfect scores on both the verbal and the math sections. The more I studied for the analytical section and followed the “techniques” in the books I was studying the more that the analytical score kept falling. LOL. At any rate, my test was scheduled for September the 13th. Two days after the infamous September 11th. I couldn’t and didn’t sleep for those two whole days before the real test. My final scores were still acceptable, but not what I had been hoping for.

In the end it turned out that my first choice graduate programme was in a Canadian University, and Canadian schools don’t require standardised tests of their applicants. So, this was definitely not worthwhile. It is however worthwhile to improve ones vocabulary and the vocab questions are fun if you are not under pressure.