Wheesh

There's a lot of little stuff to write about, and I probably won't remember it all, but we'll see what we can do.

eBay season has begun and that means the return of the DIA. I sold a bank of Skateball targets for $11 which brought up the 7DPF and DIA slightly. The Loser 500 is way up, mainly because I've been spending over the summer with no visible means of support. The Centaur playfield was at least half of that, plus the new tumbler, plus concert tickets, etc. I sold the old rock tumbler for $17.50, so that and the targets are about the only reduction so far other than my spending money. My birthday is coming up next month, and my dad usually gives me a few hundred dollars, plus there are more eBays in the offing. So we'll see how things go.

We've got a few things in the eBay queue right now. I rebuilt and listed a bank of inline Fathom targets and relisted some of the Doctor Who plastics, this time in lots. They've all got bids so far. We've also got the rest of the plastics, the 6 target bank from Fathom, and if I can ever get it cleaned up, the Fathom playfield (which I thought I wrote about, but I guess not... I took advantage of some dog-free time and stripped the remaining parts from it while watching Miyazaki movies -- Kiki's Delivery Service and Laputa... I started watching Laputa in English, but it was so terrible that I switched to Japanese w/subtitles even though I wasn't paying full attention to it... but then, I've seen Laputa enough times that I pretty much know what's going on. Kiki at least has Phil Hartman as the voice of the cat, so that's listenable in English). Success story with one of the DW plastics: When I cleaned out of the cabinet of the parts game, I found a couple at the bottom, including one that was kind of warped. I shot it with the heat gun and plopped it under some old computer magazines I was selling and it turned out flat as a pancake. Very nice. The second set of inline targets from Fathom isn't complete, so I can't do much with those without some spare parts.

Tomorrow I'm going to the Mid-Atlantic Coin-Op Show, which is just up at the state fairgrounds. It's the first year for this show so it will be interesting to see what's there. Usually coin-op shows don't have as much pinball as I would like, but it's so close that I have to check it out. I doubt I'll find the parts I need for the incomplete Fathom targets, put I'm taking them along just in case.

Here's my latest guilty pleasure: When I'm tired of work, I sneak out and play Roller Coaster Tycoon at Continental Bar & Grill, which is just a few blocks from work.

I finally caught up with the TOPcasts -- including the awesome 3 hour Lyman Sheats interview -- and now I've started listening to Talk Pinball, which isn't as interesting but it's still pretty good. There's also only 7 of them, and they don't interview any big names, just guys who run pin shows and stuff.

Not much else I can think of... I'm getting antsy again, since I feel like I'm not making good use of my investment in pinball games. Part of the problem is that when I'm not working I'm getting stuff ready for or selling stuff on eBay, and my remaining spare time is taken up with walking the dog, cleaning the house and paying bills. My wife was supposed to take over the eBay duties from me, but so far that hasn't happened... I've pushed out 25 auctions to her 2 in the last month. She says after her sister leaves (the sister has been visiting this week), she's going to tear into the eBays. We'll see how that goes.

Her sister bought a video on craft soldering, so I watched it to see if I could pick up any pointers (I didn't). But the whole time I was thinking that the video would be so much better if the women doing it were more like Norm and Shaggy.