Good news all around. First, the baggage folks at Islip airport called around midnight last night. Sure enough, when I went down this morning, my bag had been left with the doorman. Second, right after my Arabic class, a package from Apple arrived. My new machine is here. Nail clippers and notebooks, where to begin?

Arabic class is indeed the main constant in my weekly schedule: four times a week for 75 minutes. The wrinkle is the placement test on Friday that I am less than thrilled to take. Somehow, my vocabulary seems to have a knack for shrinking when I’m not using it regularly.

After lunch came anthropology, a course whose content looks quite interesting, but whose general purpose I still can’t quite properly describe. The Anthropology of Intervention, yes. But somehow I always conceived of anthropology as oriented toward poorly understood cultures, not political/ideological moments. We shall see.

I did get a chance to play a bit with the new laptop. So far, refurbished is just as good as new, and the $400 off was certainly worth it. I am slightly concerned about some rather random “program blah unexpectedly quit” behavior. Hopefully there’s an easy explanation. I will say that the MBP feels like a real nice machine, but it also feels like it needs to be babied a bit. The case is just asking to get scratched. Since it’ll be acting as a desktop mostly, that’s not a huge problem. More difficult is that unlike the Compaq laptop, it doesn’t have a simple docking mechanism, which leaves me with 4 cables to unplug each time I want to move it. Finally, the screen quality isn’t that good. Mind you, it’ll do, but I’m glad I’m using an external monitor for most of my photo-related stuff.