Well, writing blogs is rapidly becoming a rarity in my life. At first I thought that Twitter was useless - who can express themselves in 140 character hits?
You know what? I can...I even like it. Twitter has also become a place where I've discovered a vast amount of information in things I'm interested in...mostly news, and of course, baseball. Doesn't seem to be much of a pinball presence out there, however. Maybe I should copy my tweets in here from time to time...
I've still been writing here occasionally, but really, it's been slipping for a number of years with the advance of Facebook and more recently, for me at least, Twitter.
Maya has been in Chile for just over a week now - missing her a lot, but her temporary absence has allowed us to really focus attention on Chloe in a way she's not used to. With two of us on her like Donkey Kong, we're definitely seeing an improvement in behaviour. She's not terrible or anything - just really stubborn and whiny...but what do we expect? She is still 3....
So I bought another pinball machine last weekend. Went to Chris Benn's and his friend Doug's place on a Saturday night a few weeks ago, and got to play 37 machines between the two houses. Some I liked, some I loathed, and one was so quirky and entertaining to play that it stuck in my head, so much so that I asked Doug if he ever sold his to let me know. He didn't want to currently, so I moved on...kind of. When Chris asked me which machines I liked, I told him, but mentioned how much I had liked this one really weird one. He mentioned to me that Sparky had one.
So I emailed Sparky to find out if he was planning to sell it at some point, and if so, to let me know. I got back a never say never, but probably not kind of email, forgot about it, and moved on.
About a week later, Sparky comes back to me, and has decided to sell. Now, a couple of things about this particular machine. 1. Very rare - Stern went bankrupt with it on the production line - only 889 were ever made, and it's very safe to say that fewer than that have survived. Some blame it for killing Stern, but to be honest, my research into the history indicates that Stern was on shaky ground anyways, and they had a lot more orders for it that they never fulfilled. 2. Sparky is the kind of guy where other people selling their machines use him as a selling point - this was once Sparky's game, so you know it's great. 3. I started the whole process, although I was thinking next year some time, maybe by summer. Sparky, however, was all about now, and I was thinking that if I really wanted to own this machine, and a great condition one at that, that I'd better pounce on this.
So I agreed to the deal, conditional on me selling Triple Strike first. I listed Triple Strike, and we waited a week, before Sparky agreed to do a trade&cash for the new one, which of course is worth way more than my relatively crappy Triple Strike, although it was completely working and looked worlds better than it did when I bought it. Of course, as soon as that happened all kind of potential buyers came out of the woodwork, all regretting not contacting me earlier when I told them it was sold. Never fails...
So last Sunday came, with my place being the hub of Wayne coming from Waterdown, and Sparky and Rob coming from Montreal. We moved machines around between the minivans in my driveway, played some pinball, had a good time chatting and in the end I had Orbitor 1 sitting in my basement beside what remains my pride and joy, my High Speed, which of course proved to have a weak upper flipper when they arrived. All 3 of them being pinball repair experts, they quickly showed me what needed to be fixed...and when they left after an excellent afternoon, I went to The Source and picked up my first soldering iron and some lead-based solder, watched a couple of youtube videos, and surprised myself mightily by repairing the flipper successfully - and a week later the repair is still holding.
Of course, that night Orbitor went all wonky...odds are I caused a short, which took four hours and many emails (and a phone call) to Sparky to diagnose. I felt bad - there's no warranty on 30 year old machines, for obvious reasons - caveat emptor clearly applies - but he was awesome - really helpful, even though I'm sure he had better things to do that listen to me (or read me) rambling endlessly without much clue what I'm doing.
By the end of the night, I'd learned a boatload about pinball machines. It took four hours to find the short, and by it's location made me realize that it'd probably been me that caused it in the first place, making me feel even worse about bugging Sparky.
In the process I'd made a few changes to the machine, some on purpose, some by accident (somehow I set it to 5 ball - something I'm going to be changing next time I'm in there - because it seemed to have changed the 60 second ruleset that is driving me nuts too with the machine.)
Slowly rewatching Star Trek:Voyager. In Season 5 now - you know, it really is too bad they're not making anymore Star Trek tv. Maybe if the next movie is as good as the last one...maybe.
Going to resume squash tomorrow after two weeks off with a really sore knee. It's only a slightly sore knee now - but the only way to heal it is probably to take some weight off, which I really can't do without playing squash. Irony sucks, doesn't it?
So - the title of this entry - I was driving to work this morning, and a GNR song came on with the iPhone on shuffle. My commute is such that I get two, and if I hit a couple of red lights, maybe three songs (I know I'm really lucky on that score) so I'd better pick some good ones. Despite Axl being a racist cracker, the band really kicked some ass - You Could Be Mine was blasting when I pulled into school, and I was having a grand old time. So I started writing this to Appetite for Destruction...didn't last long, some of it hasn't held up well...but c'mon - we've got fun and games.
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