My first full week on the new job went extremely well. Working with the Modern Greek collection has already proven to be a thousand times more interesting than five years of Interlibrary Loan at the Med School Library - I've been ordering monographs (libraryspeak for "books") while I've been training, and I must say that it was rare when I came across a title that I didn't want to read when it came in. The thing about keying in Greek on a Romanized keyboard is that you have decide upon a transliteration scheme, and the one that the American Library Association and the Library of Congress decided upon has a somewhat interesting quirk to it. In the olden days of the Greek language, words that began with vowels either had what was called "rough" or "smooth" breathing, meaning that you either made an "h" sound before the vowel in the case of the rough or no "h" for the smooth. Although even not all of the Ancient Greek dialects made this distinction between rough and smooth breathing, and despite the fact that the breathing marks disappeared from the language entirely more than two thousands years ago, the convention of remembering where they used to be and marking them accordingly (and some would say obsessively and compulsively) persisted all the way until the 20th Century in Greece, and continues to this day in the ALA-LC transliteration scheme. So in other words, even though the Modern Greek doesn't show the initial "h" anymore, we do. Fortunately we Classics people spend a lot of time catching hell in class for not having our breathing marks down perfect, so I'm finding my knowledge of the Ancient Greek is paying off in all sorts of unexpected ways when it comes to working with the Modern.

(Okay, nerd-o-rama. Well, tough!)

In other news, the novel is at 48k, the baby is happy and healthy, and I'm going fishing tomorrow...