Monday morning stuff

I really must do something about the clutter in our upstairs office. It looks like I’m sitting in front of a trash heap. The cup, by the way, is from St. Bernards Healthcare. St. Bernard seems to follow us wherever we go. It was St. Bernard’s Catholic Church in Crawfordsville, Ind. But the local pronunciation is always counterintuitive. In C’ville, it was St. BERnard. Here, it’s St. B’nard. The t-shirt was a gift from my son Sean.

I took Sunday off from the blog, but I did gas up the lawn tractor and mow.
This may be the week I get my K1200GT up to the BMW dealer at Cape Girardeau and sort out my annoying brake warning light issue.
I thought it had corrected itself early last week when the warning light sequence went away on the morning I planned to ride up to the Cape, but it was just a fluke.
Pretty much every time I’ve ridden that bike since, the warning lights are alternately flashing at 1 second intervals.
Now that I know that it just means I don’t have ABS, but I still have normal brakes, I’m not worried about riding the bike. But I am loathe to embark on any long rides without fixing this problem.
And then there’s the matter of my starter button going wonky after working fine for about 8 or 9 months. One day last week, it took 6-8 presses of the button before the starter engaged. After 4 or 5, you start to wonder if it’s going to start at all and that’s a feeling I really really really don’t like. I experienced it in my son Steve’s garage in Las Vegas the morning of last July 26 and nearly freaked out, it being a Monday (when almost all BMW shops are closed) and me being more than 1,500 miles from home.
I’d ride up to Cape tomorrow except that we’re taking the Subaru in for air conditioner work. The A/C has become an off-and-on proposition, which is completely unacceptable when the heat index is 100 or above.
So maybe Wednesday, weather permitting.
I got an email from former Indianapolis News colleague David Mannweiler over the weekend about the counterfeit Pulitzer Prize certificate I made for him several years ago.
(I had occasion to make a scan of the certificate awarded The Indianapolis Star in 1991 and used it as the basis for tongue-in-cheek counterfeit joke Pulitzers for some of my friends.)
“My Pulitizer, through you, hangs on my garage wall,” Mannweiler said, “where son Eric's girl friend, Michelle, saw it.
”Fast forward to a birthday party for Michelle's grandmother. At the
party is the boyfriend of  Michelle's sister. Grandmother, who is brusque
and outspoken, does not like him,” he said.
”So, grandmother says to disliked boyfriend, ‘Eric's father has a
Pulitzer prize. What has your family accomplished?’”
“Can you get me a Nobel?”
“Stick with the Pulitzer,” I replied. “Al Gore and Obama have demonstrated that anybody can get a Nobel.”