Waiting, waiting...

It's 3:25 p.m. in my time zone and 2:25 here in Savoy, Ill., where I'm waiting for the mechanics at Twin Cities BMW Motorcycles to finish with my bike.
The manager offered me the use of the R1150RT loaner bike to go out for a mid-aftenoon snack. He suggested Dairy Queen and the longer I sat here, the stronger the desire for something from DQ b ecame.
I finally caved in and rode over for a medium banana cream pie blizzard.
The DQ is staffed by Indians - Hindus with bright red dots on their foreheads and lilting accents that sound remarkably Irish - a similarilty I noticed a few years ago listening to an Indian woman doing the news on NPR.
After I retired to a booth to eat my blizzard, I heard them jabbering happily in Hindi.
There was an old gray-haired woman (hey, I have gray hair too, but I refuse to be old) in her 70s or older who had finished eating and was sitting about four tables away staring at me.
I suppose I was slightly more interesting to look at than the furniture since I was wearing a red-and-black BMW Savanna jacket with my bug-covered Schuberth Concept helmet on the table along with my blizzard.
At any rate, it was an odd little interlude in what has turned out to be a rather long day of idleness.
I had lunch around 11:45 a.m. local time at a Subway down the road.
The manager of the BMW shop had mentioned there was a good bookstore nearby, so I dropped in to poke around for something worth reading. I finally settled on a paperback copy of Hunter S. Thompson's "Kingdom of Fear."
Thompson was pretty much my political polar opposite, but he was so entertaining as to make it easy to overlook his politics.
......
Damn! The service manager just announced my bike is done and, pending a successful test ride by the mechanic, will be ready to take me home.
I just hope I can afford gas after paying the service bill.
......
The tab was $821.13. I'd been bracing for something in the $1,100 range, so this was considerably less painful. Still a lot for routine service, though.
The dealer told me the new K-bike has no scheduled maintenance - just oil changes at 6,000-mile intervals at which time they plug the bike into a diagnostic computer and determine what, if anything, needs attention.

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Sent from my Treo