Rainy Friday afternoon

 

I'm blogging from the Hastings Hardback Cafe at Caraway and Nettleton in Jonesboro and it's raining like a mofo. People are coming in soaked to the skin.

Thunder was rumbling at home this morning and Pete the Nervous spent about an hour crouched at my feet under my desk. We usually leave the dogs out in the back yard/back porch when we leave, but I figured they'd feel more secure in their kennels with the stormy weather blowing through.

So I brought the laptop along when I came to town for lunch with Maria, looking forward to a few hours of not having to be a doorman for dogs. They both seem to find the sight of a closed back door very disturbing. Regardless of which side of the door they're on, they want to be on the other side and guess who gets to solve their problem for them. Yeah, someone with thumbs. Like me.

I don't recall whether I mentioned it during my road trip last month, but my XM satellite radio, a Delphi Roady 2, crapped out on me on July 16 as I rode from Rapid City, S.D. to Gillette, Wyo. I hit a bump and the sound went all fuzzy. I got it going again briefly by wiggling  the power connection, but it was clearly broken.

I raised the matter at the BMW MOA rally with Sean Franklin, owner of Cyclegadgets.com, and the guy who installed my first XM Roady several years ago. He said the problem was common with motorcycle-mounted Roady units: the solder connection with the power plug had broken. The newer XM units are even more problem prone, he said, advising me against buying the current model.

Of course the ultimate solution would have been to step all the way up to the XM-ready Garmin Zumo 550 GPS and I'm sure Sean would have loved to set me up with it for around $1,000. The Zumo also plays MP3s.

But since my Roady 2 mount is still in great shape, I figured the answer was to find a cheap now-obsolete Roady or Roady 2 online and soldier on.

In the meantime, I completed the trip using my iPod for entertainment, running it through my custom molded in-ear monitors/earplugs as I had done the XM radio. With more than 9,500 songs, I had plenty to listen to. I put it in the map compartment of my tankbag where I could poke the "skip" spot on the control wheel whenever a tune came up that I didn't want to hear. It worked great and, with the exception of the news channels, I hardly missed XM.

Last week, I got around to searching for a Roady 2 replacement online. I found what I was looking for on Amazon.com and bought it, using credit from a birthday gift from my stepdaughter Morgan.

So now I'm playing the waiting game, keeping an eye out for the letter carrier or UPS or FedEx driver headed for my front porch.