Latin vs. Greek
My Latin class has only met twice, but I have already discovered some major, and to me, surprising differences between Latin and Greek.
Latin has no articles. No "the." Greek does.
One-syllable words in Latin have no accent mark. Most in Greek do.
Latin has only one accent mark, the accent grave. Greek has the accent grave, the accent ague, and the circumflex.
Latin verbs have only active and passive voice. Greek verbs have active, passive, and middle voice.
Latin verbs have only three moods: Indicative, subjunctive, and imperative. Greek has at least four. I might be forgetting one.
In Latin, the imperfect seems to be a tense. I could have sworn it was a mood in Greek.
I'm confused.

Some Dumb Evolves Into Something Good
My new apartment has a different sort of lock on it than my old apartment did. The new lock can be set so that it locks behind you when you shut the door.
This morning, I left my apartment to go to work, and I shut the door behind me. The lock clicked.
Then I realised I had everything I needed for the day. Except my keys.
I called my landlord as soon as I got to work, but by three pm he hadn't called back yet, so I called a locksmith. They were willing to come over and let me in, but they wouldn't do it after five. I got to go tell my boss that I had to leave at four.
Whee.

First Day of Class
I had very mixed feelings about taking another class here, auditing through the employee benefit program. After the summer's revelation that I would not start the UNC post-bacc program, I felt like ditching the whole thing. But I realised I had come to depend on being in a class, to distract me from the things about this job that suck, and to give me something to do in the evenings besides substance abuse.
So I decided to start Latin.
The teacher is a woman. I say "teacher" because she's not a professor yet, she's still a grad student. She is soft-spoken, but I get the feeling she has an edge. She kept us late this first day to make sure she covered what she intended to cover today and made no bones about it.
She also wouldn't give me permission to audit until she saw how many people showed up today. I found out late in the summer that a lot of undergraduates take Latin to satisfy their foreign language requirement because Latin only meets three days a week (if it's a Monday-Wednesday-Friday) or twice (if it's a Tuesday-Thursday). The introductory-level courses in modern languages meet five times a week.
Apparently few enough of them cared to learn Latin at 9:10 am, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. There was enough room in the class this morning that the teacher consented to allow me to stay.

* * * * * * * * * * *
I just realised something. It's still August. It's still "hotter than asphalt" (to quote Camper Van Beethovan). But for me, because the fall semester has started, the summer is over.