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.

Happy Birthday, Lisa!

Today is my granddaughter Lisa's fourth birthday.
She is, without question, the brightest, most beautiful and most charming 4-year-old girl I have ever seen.
I'd like to claim some of the genetic credit, but while she's a Flora, she's also a Williams, and a Kroon, and a Carnes, and a whole bunch of other DNA strains.
But I see my father's smile whenever she grins.
Happy Birthday, Lisa!

Gonna be a hot one

It was 72 degrees when I fired up the John Deere LA125 and attacked our 1.23-acres of grass, trees, sticks and assorted vegetation.
I finished about 90 minutes later, during which time the temperature shot up to 82.
The forecast is for the low 90s today, so I'm glad to have the lawn out of the way early.
Now to my other tasks, which include packing and shipping some Ebay sales, banking and whatever else comes to mind.
I promise to have something more interesting later.

Lunch at Fuji Japanese Steakhouse

Yikes!
We had the scallops. Damned fine lunch.

It's about time

A lot of people I know don't wear a wristwatch.

Maria is one of them. The last time I checked, my son Sean was still not wearing one.

I'll be the first to admit that there are lots of things in our environment that tell us the time, the cell phone being chief among them. But I've worn watches since the first grade when I got my first Mickey Mouse watch, and I feel off balance without a wristwatch.

Like now that I have a gauze bandage wrapped around my left wrist to cover the stitched-up cut I accidentally inflicted upon myself last Monday afternoon.

I can't count how many times since then that I've glanced at my wrist to check the time and found it's bandage time.

The bandage is too bulky for the bracelet band of my Breitling Chrono Avenger.

I took to wearing my Suunto Advizor digital watch on my right wrist yesterday, but it just felt weird and I still looked at my bandaged left wrist for the time.

I've moved it to my left arm this morning, next to the bandage. I feels a little odd being that far up my arm, but I think I can deal with it for a day or two before the bandage comes off.

$2.98 computer repair

I pushed the on/off button to restart my Dell XPS desktop computer after a storm about a week ago and felt the button click the switch, then keep going into the interior of the computer.

Uh, oh.

I wasn't in a hurry to tackle the problem, so I didn't shut the computer down for several days - just taking it through the restart cycle every now and then to keep things running smoothly.

(And, yes, I'm still running Windows XP SP2 and have no immediate plans to change - I still don't think of it as "upgrading" - to Vista.)

I finally forced the issue Saturday when I shut it down before going to Mountain View with Maria, her daughter and the daughter's boyfriend.

That meant that Sunday was Fix The Button Day.

I disconnected all of the wires and cables and put the big XPS tower onto a table for easier access. I determined that the button base needed to be glued back in place. I also concluded it was a really lame design and wondered how many other XPS users have had or will have the same experience.

While we were at Lowe's in Paragould buying the Table of Drama (see earlier blog entries), I bought some Loctite  Super Glue. The switch base has five little pins and corresponding holes, configured like the dots on the number 5 on dice. I put a dot of glue into each of the five holes, held the parts together firmly for 30 seconds and then went off and did something else for awhile to give the glue time to set up/cure/do whatever it does.

An hour or so later, the switch was working like new and I was back in operation. It's not often that you can fix computer hardware for less than $3.

Missed photo op

Last Saturday, an outdoor wedding along Piney Creek near Dover, Ark. - about 64 miles northwest of Little Rock, ended with an apparent stranger shooting and wounding the bride and groom and a couple of bystanders.
Witnesses said he just walked up and started blazing away with a 9mm pistol.
The police caught up with him in nearby Russelville a short time later.
No photos of the shooting have surfaced, begging the question of whether there was a photographer present.
I can guarantee you that if Maria and I were there, we'd have snapped into News Photographer Mode without hesitation.

Motorcycle record-keeping software

Product review in the March 2001 issue of Motorcycle Tour & Cruiser page 85

By John M. Flora

If you're anything like me, your motorcycle records are chaotic at best. When my bike was new, I tried to keep orderly accounts and stuffed the paperwork from services into a file folder. But over the years, I got sloppy. The paperwork, often as not, landed on my desk. There it sat, until it got in the way one too many times and was pitched.

That left me guessing how many miles I rolled my last set of tires. Could it really be 7,000 miles since my last oil change? How long ago did I install that aftermarket shock absorber? Wouldn't it be nice to have that information a mouse click away?

That's what David Portugal thought when he created For Two Wheels Only Motorcycle Management Software. A 40 year-old Gold Wing rider from suburban Chicago, this computer consultant and software writer created the FTWO program to fill his own needs. Last year, he logged over 28,000 miles, which included a tip to Alaska and the Arctic Circle.

David's program, which comes on a CD-ROM and runs on the Windows platform, lets you track every conceivable detail about your bike or bikes. The idea is to save money and time spent tracking maintenance records, accessories purchased, trips, events attended, and more.

The maintenance section lets you record all the parts and labor data from dealer services. There's a folder for tire information that calculates the cost per mile of your tires. (The Dunlop I just retired from the front wheel of my '91 BMW K100RS went 7,940 miles at a cost of 2.1 cents per mile.) The Insurance folder gives you a way to access details of your policy quickly and track rate changes.

Perhaps my favorite is the Trips/Events folder, where I can create a daily diary - complete with a photo for each day of the journey, a "notes" field for a running account of the tour, and data fields for mileage, tolls, food, lodging, recreation, and so on. This folder includes a trip/event summary that looks at the daily diary entries and compiles totals for the entire trip, including the cost per mile and per day.

If there's a downside, it's that you have to keep a thorough log as you go. For the Fuel folder, that means jotting down your exact odometer reading (required by the program), the amount of gas, and the cost of each fill-up. You also can record the name and location of the station, the octane, and how you paid. The good news is that the program helps you get into the habit by providing printable forms for the data, which you can stuff into a pocket or tank bag.

You also can print out detailed reports of all of the bike data you amass over time. And, the name notwithstanding, there's nothing stopping you from using FTWO to keep records on your four-wheeled and other vehicles as well.

David says that motorcyclists like the program for lots of different reasons. But his largest constituencies are folks who customize and/or restore motorcycles and want to track part sources and prices. And, of course, touring riders like me who want to record their trips and keep meticulous maintenance records.

The software installation went smoothly on my Win98-equipped PC. And even inexperienced computer users should get up to speed quickly on this straightforward program.

When I first clicked through the folders and saw the level of record keeping it entails, I thought it was a bit (well, maybe a lot) obsessive. But that was last night.

Tonight, I can't wait to finish this review so I can get back to reconstructing my vacation expenses from my last ride to the Coast in the Trips/Events folder.

May 28, 2008: As a footnote, I'm still using FTWO to maintain my motorcycle records seven years and another bike later. And I still love it.
You can get a 10-day free trial copy of FTWO from David's website.

More "tired" than I realized

I was poised to call Grass Roots BMW Motorcycles in Cape Girardeau, Mo., this morning to book service time for a new rear tire and a check of engine/transmission seals on my BMW K1200GT in anticipation of an active 2008 riding season.
But just to be sure, I went down to the garage and checked the tread depth on my Metzeler M6 Roadtec back tire.
To my astonishment, it was within safe tolerances. I say astonishment because my records indicate that tire was installed May 23, 2006 by Twin Cities BMW in Savoy, Ill., a suburb of Champaign-Urbana. That means the tire has rolled more than 10,400 miles. That may not sound like much in a world where radial tires on cars routinely go 40-50-60,000 miles, but 10k is a lot of miles on a motorcycle tire.
Why? Motorcycle tires have to work harder because bikes lean where cars don't. A motorcycle tire has to work in more dimensions than a car tire and that generates heat and heat is what kills tires.
So, assuming the seals aren't seeping substantially worse than in '06, I can put some more miles on the back tire before replacing it and dealing with the seal issue.
The front tire was put on last Aug. 38 by Foothills BMW in Denver and only has about 3,000 miles on it, so I'm good to go.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I just returned from lunch with Maria and, with her help, puzzled out why my rear tire has so much tread.
"Didn't you have an extra tire set aside?" she asked.
Of course! That's it!
In the final days of Revard BMW Motorcycles in Indianapolis, Dec. 14, 2004 to be exact, I bought a rear tire at dealer cost and stashed it in the garage until I needed it.
I keep (almost) all of my motorcycle records on For Two Wheels Only, a motorcycle-specific computer program, and neglected to log the fact that I had Grumpy, my Thorntown neighborhood bike mechanic, mount that tire last Aug. 7. So it only has about 5,000 miles on it instead of the 10,400 I calculated earlier. And I also recall that Grumpy didn't notice any problem with leaking seals last August.
So the mystery is solved and my seal anxiety is assuaged.

It's Toosday

We've noticed the TV newspeople and others around here pronounce Tuesday differently than we Hoosiers.
They say Tyewsday - not Toosday or 2sday - but with a "yew" twist to it.

Table of drama

This is the cause of yesterday's drama. Or one of the causes, anyway.
It's the Dockside 42" square table with tempered glass top and it came hermetically sealed in plastic wrap.
The Lowe's website has it priced at $70 and we got it on sale for $50, but when you factor in a trip to the ER, that $20 saving goes away very quickly.
I finished unwrapping and assembling the parts this afternoon in what must be 99% humidity and an unnaturally hot-feeling 80 degrees. The job is done and I'm sweating buckets.
Ready for the next disaster.

Spilling my Type B+ blood

We're back from about three hours in the NEA Baptist Hospital emergency room where a doctor from Indiana repaired the damage I did to myself with my Swiss Army knife.
We bought a patio table (some assembly required) yesterday at Lowe's in Paragould so as to have a suitable dining space on the screened back porch.
I decided to put it together this afternoon and discovered, to my chagrin, that the Third World wage slaves who packed the parts, went completely nuts with the bubble wrap and shrink wrap. I was down to the fourth and final leg, hacking away with my pocket knife when I made a stupid move and put a 1½" slash to the outside of my left wrist.
I thought for a moment that I'd only knicked myself until I noticed the blood - lots of it, running down my hand and dripping onto the concrete porch floor.
I pushed the back door open and yelled, "Help!" loud enough for Maria, who was working in the upstairs office, to understand immediately that something serious was afoot.
We flushed the cut with tap water in the kitchen sink and wrapped my wrist in a couple of clean dish towels, secured the dogs and headed for the ER.
This being Memorial Day, the ER waiting room was packed with other hapless fuck-ups who couldn't get through a holiday weekend without hurting themselves.
The most interesting of the bunch was a guy with a nail sticking out of his left bicep about three inches above the elbow - an obvious casualty of a nail gun. He was jabbering about wanting to pull it out but being afraid it might have hit an artery. He opined that he could cauterize it with a welding rod.
There was a guy with a cane who looked like Snuffy Smith from the comics page who was there with his fat wife. We think the wife was the one with the problem. She seemed very agitated and rocked back and forth in her chair. They apparently got tired of waiting because they left after about an hour without being seen by a doctor.
There was a teenage girl whose left wrist was bandaged like mine, but with the added feature of an ice pack, leading us to suspect a sprain or possible fracture.
An older couple was there with their young grandson who had somehow got poison ivy or poison oak all over his groin and privates. They left without being seen too, announcing they were going to a drugstore to see what a pharmacist could do for the boy.
It was a mildly entertaining way to spend three hours on a Memorial Day afternoon, capped by seven stitches.
And I left home without my cell phone, so I don't have any gory pictures to share.

Radio Ga Ga

Someone presumably cares about our radio listening habits.
I got a call from Arbitron a week or so ago, asking if I would participate in a week-long radio listening survey.
What the hell? Why not?
So I agreed and a couple of days later, I received a letter from Arbitron with a crisp new $1 bill telling me to watch the mail for our radio listening logs - one for me and one for Maria.
They showed up in Saturday's mail and I finally got around to opening the package this afternoon. The logs are for the week beginning on Thursday (May 29) and each one included two crisp new $1 bills. How nice.
They include internet and satellite radio stations in the survey, so I will have something to log even though I just about never listen to terrestrial radio.

Avoiding Kroger

I'm avoiding Supermarket Hell.
Maria has mercifully excused me from shuffling up and down the aisles at Kroger, so I'm hanging out next door at the bookstore and listening to a Leo Laporte podcast.
No big Memorial Day plans - certainly not on the order of what I did about 10 years ago when I led a 14-state motorcycle ride with five Indianapolis BMW Club friends.
We started Saturday morning and did a lap around Kentucky and Tennessee.
The sequence was:
Indiana
Kentucky
Illinois
Missouri
Arkansas
Tennessee
Missippi
Alabama
Overnight at Huntsville
Georgia
North Carolina
South Carolina
Virginia
Overnight in northern Virginia
West Virginia
Ohio
We put our tires in all of these states in about 21 hours of riding.
Later, we figured we could have added Pennsylvania and still do it in under 24 hours.

You can't see us

Morgan and I are invisible. It's the camo hats.

Two thumbs up

Saw it this afternoon.
Liked it. Good summer fun movie.

Road Trip

We took a 120-mile road trip yesterday to Mountain View where we left Morgan and Lance to camp and hike for a couple of days.
This is Blanchard Creek Falls where the creek emerges from a cave of the same name.
Much of the trip was on 2-lane state roads, with lots of twisties and elevation changes, which explains why it takes three hours to go 120 miles. We got deep enough into the Ozark area to appreciate how different the terrain is from here.
Everyone but I took the cave tour. I've been feeling a bit claustrophobic lately, didn't want to shuffle through a cave with a bunch of annoying old people and found the idea of dozing in the car with my iPod pretty attractive. So I did. And when Maria and the kids returned, they regaled me with horror stories about annoying, slow old people.
During the course of the afternoon, we also met a gregarious guy in bib overalls who was on a mission to deliver a chilled glass gallon jug of homemade liquor (aged a whole day) to a friend. The friend turned out not to be home, so he gave each of us a sip of white lightning before he returned it to its hiding place in a white plastic grocery sack and went on his way. I just wetted my tongue, since I was driving, but the 100 proof stuff wasn't all that bad.
Dinner was a the Anglers where we feasted on catfish. Excellent food and excellent service and the view of the creek is spectacular.
We left the kids with their rental car to roam around the mountains for the next couple of days and Maria drove us home.

The picture that won't die

Twenty-two years later, this picture just won't go away, Tim.
This is Tim Balough, borrowing some gas from wife Linda's R100CS, to get his K100RS to the next gas station.
We were on our way home from the 1986 BMW MOA Rally in Monterey, Calif., and Tim had just led us through Salt Lake City. His gas gauge had fried out and he was using his odometer to estimate his fuel level. Bad idea.
Linda and I had been eyeing gas stations at several exits, wondering if Tim would pull off. We were using helmet-to-helmet commnicators at the time and finally Linda called to Tim, "When are you planning to stop for gas?"
"Right about now," said Tim, as he rolled to the berm, out of gas.
For the record, we made it to the next gas station and passed a pleasant evening in Vernal, Utah, home to a whole bunch of anatomically incorrect concrete dinosaurs.

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.

May without "500" festivities

How odd to not be in Indiana during the month of May and the run-up to the Indianapolis 500-Mile Race.
Here's a photo I shot of race driver Dan Gurney conferring with his pit crew during practice for the 1969 race. He finished second in that year's Indy 500.
Gurney, now 77, is still active in racing and is almost certainly in Indianapolis right now, awaiting Sunday's race.
My earliest recollections of the race are from the late 1940s or early '50s when we would listen to the start of the race on the car radio while taking coffee cans of peonies to the graves of my parents' families.
I attended my first Indianapolis 500 in 1964. I listened to the 1967 race on a telephone headset, taking dictation from Indianapolis News Sports Editor Wayne Fuson for the paper's running story of the race. We prided ourselves with having the final race edition of the paper, with a complete story of the race and the winner's photo on the front page, at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway before most of the crowd had left the grounds.
That was when the race was held on May 30, regardless of what day of the week it was. Since The News was a Monday-Saturday paper, the decision to hold the race on Sundays took us out of the game. We hated it because it was the highlight of our year.