The rain is gone and the sun is shining! O, frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!

After what seems like a solid week of rain, it’s astonishing how much a brilliant sun in a clear blue sky can lift my spirits.

I dumped an inch of water from the rain gauge this morning, then took my time to putter around the house and get my K1200GT ready, then rode in to town for a late coffee at Seattle Grind.

The bike tells me it wants to go for a long ride, maybe to Memphis for bagels, but I think not. I have errands to run – settling up with my bank for safe deposit rental that’s two months overdue (there’s nothing in the box, so I’m not worried about losing anything) and running down to the Honda shop on the southside for a can of their excellent spray cleaner and polish.

I finally quit trying to load my Garmin Zumo 550’s SD card with MP4s – a frustrating process, since the unit can only read MP3s and it clearly says so in the owner’s manual – and now have a selection of my own tunes to listen to, in addition to XM satellite radio. SiriusXM emailed me a couple of days ago to advise they’re reshuffling their channel lineup tomorrow, so I’ll have take time tomorrow to let the Zumo acquire the new arrangement.

I’m ready for the talking heads on TV to move on from the Osama bin Laden story. I was delighted to hear the news Sunday night, even if Obama did use it as a way to cheap-shot Donald Trump by preempting the crucial last 30 minutes of Celebrity Apprentice. But the death of Osama (have you noticed how many times people on TV slip and call him Obama?) has absolutely no relevance to my day-to-day life and all of the speculation about whether this makes Obama a shoo-in in 2012 (Rasmussen polling shows he got zero popularity bump from the killing) or whether Osama’s death will trigger a wave of revenge attacks has become excruciatingly tedious.

The network and cable execs apparently think we can’t get enough of the story and are going to absurd lengths to keep it going at the expense of real news. Like the impending collapse of the global economy and the epic flooding in the Mid-South.

We became more acutely aware of the consequences of flooding here yesterday when the server at lunch said the restaurant was out of certain items because high water road closures kept the supply trucks from getting through.

And human-snake encounters are up sharply since the serpents are being flooded out of their natural habitats. That is a lot more significant to me than whether Osama bin Laden, a snake on the other side of the world, is alive or dead.