I spent a good part of this morning going around town to all the pawn shops, just in case my laptop and/or iPod may have ended up at one of them. According to the yellow pages, there are six pawn shops in Murfreesboro, so I went to all of them. Unfortunately, only one of them even had an iPod... and it wasn't mine.

I also plan to check eBay in a couple days. It's always possible that they might turn up there. Meanwhile, I'm trying to get back in touch with Best Buy (called them twice today and got no answer) to see if I can get the serial number of my laptop. The police said that would help them in their search for it.

There's a pawn shop on the Square that had a very large eastern diamond-back skin on the wall. I would love to have seen that snake alive.

I also ran across the local Republican campaign headquarters (it's on the Square as well), so I picked up a McCain bumper sticker for my Explorer :-)

MTSU is in a bit of an uproar (and not because of my stolen laptop).

The campus police chief held a press conference earlier today, and I caught part of it on the radio. This is what I know:

Threatening e-mails were sent to certain specific people in the university. Then there was a fire last night in one of the dorms. The cops think that the fire may have been related to the e-mails, so the decision was made to cancel classes for the rest of the week, effective at noon today. Since fall break is Monday and Tuesday, that means no class until Wednesday.

While I was at the police station taking care of my theft report, I saw people from Homeland Security, TEMA (the state equivalent of FEMA), and the FBI. So obviously they were taking this whole thing pretty seriously.

Lost music collection notwithstanding, it was all sort of cool :-)

Well, today has been a day.

I was in the middle of lab when the biology dept. secretary came up to tell us that all classes were being canceled for the rest of the week because of a security threat on campus. I had just finished lecturing about flatworms, so I told my class that they were dismissed and that we'd pick back up on roundworms in our next lab.

Just after the last student left, another student (not one of mine) came up and asked if I could unlock the A&P lab for him because he'd left his jacket in there. So we went down and got it unlocked. (I had to find someone else who had a key because apparently my lab key doesn't work for the anatomy rooms.) He looked around in the lab, didn't find it, and then discovered it sitting on a bench outside the lab.

That whole process didn't take more than about five minutes, but, when I got back to my lab room, my computer case (containing my laptop and my iPod) was gone.

So, to make a long story short, I went to the campus police station, filed a theft report, called my insurance company to file a claim, called the Best Buy where I bought the laptop to get the model information to complete my claim... and now I'm about to call the insurance company again to give them that information.

Good news: All my school stuff was backed up on my flash drive, which was in my pocket the whole time. So I didn't lose that.

Bad news: I decided a few months ago to back up my iPod to my laptop, just in case. So I had all my songs on the laptop as well as on the iPod. Well, the thief got both, so my music collection is history.

That's the literal translation of "Agkistrodon piscivorus", which is the scientific name of the cottonmouth.

There's a rather dense population of cottonmouths not far from Nashville, and it looks like I'll be going up there on Saturday to check them out. Lisa Powers is studying them (I'm not sure exactly what she's doing with them), and she said Jerrod and I could come up and help out.

That should be a ton of fun. There was a lot of rain up there over the last couple days, so that should have brought them out. Plus, it's about time for them to be heading back to their hibernating dens anyway, so we should run into a few of the little guys. I can't wait. I love vipers... and especially the Agkistrodon species (copperhead, cottonmouth, and the two cantils).

I always wanted to play in the NHL when I was a kid, but this herpetology thing is really not a bad deal ;-)

Um... weird.

So yeah, these are the new Atlanta Thrashers 3rd jerseys, just released today. I'm not sure what to think...

The state bird of Delaware is the blue hen chicken, which is sort of relevant to this post.

Anyway, it looks like the Biology Graduate Student Association's regular Thursday night hangout (which had been taking place at the Mellow Mushroom) is now moving to the Blue Rooster indefinitely. The Blue Rooster is this new bar that just opened up on the Square in downtown Murfreesboro.

My friend Will works there, and he wanted to show it off, so he tried to get people to come last week... and everybody went to the Mushroom instead. So I decided to check out the Rooster tonight to see what it was like, and it seems like a decent enough place to move our little gathering.

The Square is a really cool part of Murfreesboro - very charming. And I've never gotten into the whole downtown social scene before, so this will be a fun new experience.

In case you're wondering, I don't drink... at all. (And I take a lot of grief for it too, but oh well.) But I see no problem with socializing in bars, and most of my friends are pretty responsible with their drinking, so it doesn't really become a problem.

Oh, apparently they serve Spaghetti-O's at the Blue Rooster. How awesome is that?

For the last few weeks, I've been thinking about taking a big road trip this summer. I've already planned out a couple of month-long trips to choose from, but today I got the crazy idea of driving to Alaska. So I went to MapQuest and figured out that, at an average of 6 hours of driving a day, I can get to Anchorage in 12 days. I figure 6 hours a day is short enough that we'd still have time to see some of the sights along the way.

So yeah... I've planned the trip as far as Grande Prairie, Alberta. (That's only halfway, which should tell you something about how far Alaska is from Tennessee.) I have a feeling that finding motels is going to get a bit stickier up in the Yukon, but we'll see :-)