Panera men's room, Tippecanoe Mall in Lafayette, Ind.

So what do we do with the poop?

Feels like temperature vs heat index

I noticed the other day that my home weather station reports the "feels like" temperature and the heat index and the numbers are usually different.
A lot of TV weather people seem to have quit reporting the heat index and give the feels like temperature instead.
So what's the difference?
The heat index is calculated using the actual temperature and the humidity.
The feels like temperature adds wind velocity to the equation.
So now you know.

A chest pain-inducing bill

I got the bill for my 12-hour hospital stay last month when I thought I might be having a cardiac event. Turned out it was dehydration.

I shudder to think what it would have cost if I'd opted for an ambulance ride.

Happy 103rd birthday, Mom

My mother would have been 103 years old today. She made it to 85.

Battery wars

I bought this battery from Batteries Plus Bulbs in Lafayette eight or nine days ago.

I installed it in our John Deere LA125 and the engine started right up. But when I tried to start it a few days later, it appeared the battery was dead.

I put it on the charger for several hours yesterday. When I turned the key, the headlights came on, but when I tried to start it, the starter made a little err noise and then went dead.

I called the Lebanon John Deer dealership and the service manager said it sounds like I got a bad battery. He invited me to bring it in for testing, so that's where I'm going this morning. I also have the battery receipt in case my next step is to return it.

++++++++

Battery tested OK. Gotta take the mower in and it's going to be expensive.

Lacking life skills

I managed to coax one more mowing from our John Deere LA 125 yesterday morning after putting the failing battery on a charger for a couple of hours.
Then I bought a replacement battery online and rode up to Batteries Plus in Lafayette to pick it up.
I found myself in line behind a 50-ish businessman wearing an expensive dress shirt with French cuffs and gold cufflinks. He looked like an executive type, but the image collapsed when I saw why he was there.
He'd brought in his First Alert smoke detector because he couldn't figure out how to replace the battery.
Really? It's the same model we had in Arkansas and it's a breeze to replace the 9-volt battery. Even standing on a ladder with the unit on the ceiling.
The counterman managed to keep a straight face throughout the transaction.
I wonder what else he has other people do for him.

Historical t-shirt

Going through my t-shirt archives over the weekend, I found this relic of an Indianapolis BMW motorcycle dealership from the late 1980s and early 1990s. The shop was owned by Greg Polzin and was next door to a Dairy Queen on east 56th Street, just west of Keystone Avenue.

Bike report

The folks at AMA Road Service determined that my BMW dealer, Falcone Powersports, provides free pickup and delivery, so I had them collect my K1200GT Thursday morning.

I called Saturday morning and got good news and, of course, bad news.

The good news is that my battery was replaced under warranty.

The bad news is that my fork seals are shot and will cost $450 to replace. I told them to proceed. The other bad news is that my tires are down to the wear bars. The good news on the tire front is that I have a partially used set of tires for that bike that still have plenty of miles left. They came off the bike in July, 2015 and have been in storage ever since. When I get the GT back, I'll take it to my almost-next-door Gold Wing shop and have the old tires mounted.

Here's a photo of the Falcone trailer hauling my bike to Indy.

Whisper quiet

If you have a spare $600 to blow on a vacuum cleaner, I heartily recommend the Miele Blizzard CX1 Turbo Team Bagless Canister Vacuum.

It's German made and whisper quiet, yet very powerful. Some users say it outclasses their expensive Dyson models.

I got mine from Amazon and now I actually look forward to vacuuming the house.

I'm not really surprised by any of this

I had a 9 a.m. appointment today with the Indianapolis BMW motorcycle dealer to get my faulty battery replaced under warranty.

There's been rain in the forecast for several days as the remnants of a tropical disturbance make their way toward Indiana, so I was sweating having to ride the bike down to Indianapolis in rain.

But when I tried to start the bike, which had been on a battery tender for five or six days, the battery was dead.

So I called American Motorcyclist Association road service and ordered a wrecker. I used them last September for an identical problem and they sent a driver who thought he was picking up a BMW car and lacked the appropriate motorcycle dolly, which necessitated dispatching another wrecker the next day. (See photo above.)

So, true to form, when the wrecker showed up in my driveway a few minutes ago, he didn't have a dolly either. The towing company is now searching for a truck with a dolly as the rain inches closer and closer...

Circus Minimus

The Culpepper & Merriweather Circus was in town yesterday.

Dora woke us up about 7:15 a.m. after she detected circus folks setting up in the park diagonally across from our house. It was a novel experience watching from our house as they unloaded cages of a lion and a tiger and our dogs fell strangely silent when the lion roared.

The Big Top was up on the Little League ball field by mid-morning and several of our neighbors joined me on the front porch to watch the proceedings.

There were performances at 5 and 7:30 p.m. and the roustabouts (I guess that's what they still call them) started tearing things down before the second show was over. They were gone by midnight.

And, no, we didn't attend.

The good news is that BMW warrantees batteries for 2 years

My 2003 BMW K1200GT is headed for the shop.

I rode it last Thursday and then parked it for six days to see if the battery would hold a charge.

I checked it this afternoon and it was flat again.

So I called Falcone Powersports in Indianapois, my local BMW motorcycle dealer, and made an appointment to ride down for service next Wednesday morning.

In the meantime, It's back on the charger.

Stay hydrated

This is what happens when you're pushing 73 and don't stay hydrated on a hot day.

I ended up in the Witham Hospital ER Sunday evening after nearly passing out at home. The initial fear, of course, was that I had a heart attack, so I chewed up the obligatory two low-dose Bayer aspirins while waiting for the EMTs. They did a quick EKG and determined there was nothing obviously wrong with my heart, but advised me to go to the hospital. Maria drove me there and the next stop was the ER (see photo above).

They gave me a chest x-ray to rule out a blood clot in the lungs, wired me up with a heart monitor and decided I should spend the right there.

Twelve mostly sleepless hours and a few blood tests later, they cut me loose with instructions to get hydrated and stay hydrated.

So I did and I am and now my GP wants to see me next Tuesday.

Makes iced coffee too

I got this Russell Hobbs coffee maker from the Amazon Vine Program last October and have used it almost every day since.

But its features conspire to leave me with coffee to thrown away the next morning. It turns off the heat after 40 minutes and most days that's too soon for a second cup. Happily, it only makes 8 cups instead of 12 like many coffee makers, so the waste isn't as bad as it could be.

I was lamenting the fact that I always have coffee left over at the end of the day the other evening when it finally dawned on me to pour the remaining coffee over ice, add sweetener and creamer and voila!, iced coffee.

Now I wonder why I didn't think of it long ago.

Diagnosis pending

The GT spent the last couple of days on the BMW charger and it was showing solid green when I disconnected it and went for a ride this afternoon.

I made a point of unplugging the GPS at each stop - post office, veterinarian's office and DQ. When I went to plug it back in at Dairy Queen, I noticed green corrosion on the plug. I scraped as much off as I could with my fingernail, plugged it back in and rode home.

The bike is sitting in the shed without a charger connection and with the GPS plug out. I'll let it set for four or five days and then see if the battery is drained. If the battery isn't up to snuff after that time, I'll charge it again and take it to the BMW dealer in Indianapolis. It's only eight months old and almost certainly still under warranty.

This poster is on the bulletin board at the Thorntown Post Office. Note the reference to Thornton City Park.

O, frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!

I took the K75S out for a spin today, convinced that the surgery my neighbor Grumpy performed last week had failed to fix the speedo.

As expected, the speedo needle didn't move during the ride to the post office, but it miraculously came to life when I headed out of town on Ind. 47 and continued to perform consistently all the way to Dairy Queen, where I stopped for lunch.

Suddenly, I am happy with my bike.

I had the Indianapolis BMW motorcycle dealer install a new battery in my 2003 K1200GT in late September.

I had it on a battery tender off and on through the winter, but it was dead when I tried to start it last week. I gave it an overnight charge and it was good to go for a ride up to the Lafayette Sam's Club and down to Aldi in Lebanon. That was last Thursday. It was dead again when I tried to start it yesterday - five days later.

I find it hard to believe that an 8-month-old battery can fail like this and wonder if something isn't draining it. The first suspect is the Garmin Zumo 550 with Sirius XM radio.

So I put it back on the charger this morning and will leave the GPS disconnected to see if it still can't hold a charge. Either way, it's a sure thing I won't be riding to the European Riders Rally in Burkesville, Ky. this weekend.

It's a Hafner

Sorting through random boxes from our moves to and from Arkansas, I found this Hafner wind-up O-gauge train set that my parents gave me for Christmas around 1950.

It's the closest I ever got to an electric train set, my parents being overly cautious about electricity.

Today, it enjoys a new life on our living room mantel.

It would seem that I've still got it

Back when I was a suburban bureau chief and reporter for The Indianapolis News, and later for The Indianapolis Star, I covered a lot of primary and general elections and spent several election nights in the Boone and Hamilton County courthouses.

Maria arranged for me to feed vote totals to the Associated Press last night from the Boone County primaries. I got minutely detailed instructions from the AP over the past couple of weeks and was just a little nervous about it since I haven't covered an election in more than 10 years and have never done it as an AP stringer.

I needn't have worried.

Old friends retired Judge Becky McClure and Debbie Ottinger greeted me like a long-lost relative at the clerk's office and Clerk Jessica Fouts did a superb job of feeding us the returns as they came in. The AP folks were easy to work with and the evening went smoothly.

I hadn't planned to take any photos, so I left my Nikon at home.

But when the crowd outside the clerk's office exploded with shrieks and cheers at 8:15 p.m. with the news that Lori Schein had scored the upset of the evening, beating County Attorney Todd Meyer and another attorney for the Republican nomination for judge of Boone Circuit Court, I stepped outside and fired five quick photos with my iPhone. The one shown here dominates the front page of The Lebanon Reporter this morning. I can't recall taking a better election photo in my 30-some years in newspapers. And I did it with a chickenshit little cell phone camera.

I love being able to play newspaper on my own terms.