Both bikes are in the shed. Finally.

I picked up my 2003 BMW K1200GT from Falcone BMW in Indianapolis yesterday afternoon.

They determined the 10-month-old brand X battery from the Memphis BMW dealer was dead after five months in storage and installed a new BMW battery that, properly maintained, should last seven years.

Having dropped me off, Maria drove home. I found myself on West 16th Street in rush hour traffic.

I noticed traffic was heavy on I-65 when we drove into town and decided I-74 to Ind. 75 would be a less hectic ride. When I got onto Ind. 75 at the Jamestown exit, I realized why my Garmin Zumo 550 was telling me to go all the way to Crawfordsville to pick up U.S. 36 - the last time I updated the Zumo, I was contemplating riding to the BMWMOA Rally in Salt Lake City.

Since the Zumo has limited memory and can't store data for the whole country, I am forced to choose a specific region. I chose the Western region which does not include Indiana, hence the GPS database I was using did not show Ind. 75, which connects I-74 with Thorntown. Instead, it showed me riding through blank space through Advance and Dover to Thorntown.

The two bikes - sans saddlebags - fit snugly in the 12x12 shed along with the lawn tractor and other stuff. Maneuvering is tricky, but this will have to do until we can build a proper garage.

Oooops

The first sign that something was wrong came when we noticed our dishwasher wasn't getting our dishes clean.

We have very hard water, so a water softener is essential here in Thorntown.

I called Culligan and they sent Randy out to have a look at our softener. When he set it to cycle manually, water spurted out of the discharge hose.

It seems that when plumbers reconstructed all of our drainage pipes in the basement a couple of weeks ago, they forgot to reconnect the water softener discharge hose.

I called them this morning and they promised to send someone out today.

Way cheaper than the new water softener we almost bought.

Can 5 months of idleness kill a battery that's less than a year old?

I got a call late this afternoon from Falcone BMW Motorcycles saying they have determined my battery is dead.
Really?
I bought that battery last Nov. 19 at Performance Plus Specialists, the Memphis BMW dealership. It was less than a year old. The previous battery lasted five and a half years.

I just spent a miserable hot (91 degrees) afternoon waiting for a wrecker driver to haul my BMW K1200GT from Jay Beery's place in Brownsburg to the BMW dealer in Indianapolis.
Jay provided space for my two bikes from April until now. I retrieved the K75S over the weekend, but the GT wouldn't start despite being on a battery charger for several hours. No sign of electrical activity at all.
I solicited help from my Indianapolis BMW Club friends and got offers of a couple of trailers but no volunteer assistance to help load, secure and unload the bike. Not feeling confident to do it myself, I called the American Motorcyclist Association's Road Service and arranged for a wrecker to be sent to the Beery home.
I waited about 90 minutes and when the wrecker arrived, the kid driving it said he was told it was a BMW car. He had never hauled a bike before and didn't have the equipment to secure and move it safely. By the time we discovered all of this, it was too close to closing time at the dealership to proceed with a new wrecker and new equipment.
So I resolved to try again tomorrow morning.
Fuck!