The substantive part of the day centered around Arabic. This was followed by lunch with the grandparents, who were down in the area for yet more medical tests.

In the afternoon, the red plastic case I’d ordered for my MacBook Pro finally arrived. It’s supposed to keep the case from getting scratched or banged up. While this appears likely, the cutouts for the ports on the right side of mine don’t match up right. This despite having explicitly advertised compatibility with the latest model MacBook Pros. Oh well. At least it’s pretty (I had a choice between transparent and red, and red seemed more appropriate.

The rest of the day was devoted to dropping by the post office, getting groceries, doing some bank stuff, and helping my roommate upgrade the memory in his laptop. Happily the laptop still works fine, although the performance increase from the new memory (upgraded from 256MB to 768MB was less noticeable than hoped for). Meanwhile my own laptop has been demonstrating a bit of instability. I ran a memory test, but it didn’t show anything. Hope I don’t have a partially defective machine.

Finally, some sad news today: Molly Ivins, one of the best columnists in the country, died yesterday as a result of breast cancer, at the age of 63. Ivins had the rare gift of being able to be both incredibly funny and deeply serious at the same time. She was a constant reminder that Texas has produced far more than merely bible-thumpers and smog.