On the road again

I'm off this morning to Cape Girardeau, Mo., and GrassRoots BMW Motorcycles to get a new battery for my '03 K1200GT. It's one of the new (in 2003, anyway) gel batteries and has performed well for the past five years. However, when I tried to start the bike Sunday afternoon after about four weeks of idleness, the battery was too weak to fire the engine. I put it on the trickle charger and within a day it was registering as fully charged. Nevertheless, I know that batteries can fail at inopportune times and I'm loathe to head for the West in a couple of weeks with a five-year-old battery that may or may not be good.
It's 145 miles to GrassRoots, so I'd better get moving.

It's all good

Cooter is a small town in southeastern Missouri.
It sits between I-55 and the Mississippi River and has a population of about 440. There are a couple of explanations for the town's name. One holds that the town was named for an abundance of ducklike aquatic birds called coots. The other contends it was named for the Coutres, a prominent local family.
But if you look the word up in a dictionary of slang, you'll find it is also another name for vagina. (It's also a slang term in the Southeastern U.S. for the snapping turtle.)
So you can imagine our consternation when we turned to the sports page in today's newspaper and saw the headline:

Seams
Handles
Cooter

The story was about Seams Sports Academy winning the Fat City Classic American Legion Baseball tournament by beating the team from Cooter, Mo.
While the team in question was sponsored by the local American Legion post and not affiliated with the high school, it is interesting to note that the Cooter High School nickname is the Wildcats. It begs the question whether the "cat" reference was meant as a subtle double-entendre or purely accidental.
Cooter, as you may have noticed from the map, is close to Gobler and Braggadocio.
I could never make this stuff up.

Easily amused

I don't know why, but I love these stupid things.
I have no idea what you call them - wind puppets, maybe?
The first one I ever saw was about eight years ago at the Long Beach (Wash.) International Kite Festival. It was yellow and I thought its floppy gyrations were funny as hell. I guess I'm easily amused.
I photographed this one today with my Treo smartphone camera while on a pre-holiday weekend beer run to Mr. T's, the always-open liquor-and-lottery store just over the state line in Missouri. It's the nearest place I've found that stocks Spaten Doppelbock beer. I also picked up a six-pack of strawberry ale for Morgan.
At last report, she and Lance were about a hour north of Cairo, Ill., and the Illinois-Missouri state line. That would put them about 3½ hours out, with an ETA of 4 p.m. CDT. That's assuming they don't get lost in the fireworks aisles at Boomland.
We'll see how accurate my estimate is.