Yesterday's acquisition was that Totem playfield I mentioned last time, from an ad on the Mr. Pinball classifieds. Yes, it was $50, but had I remembered that there was a toll booth every 150 feet north of Baltimore I probably would have had it shipped. And because we have an EZPass, I wasn't really conscious of the full amount I was paying... I'm fully expecting it to be at least another $30. ^_^; That would make this a $100+ playfield except that I plan to amortize the cost across the other two stops I made.I left the house around 7:30 and the drive up was largely uneventful... in the festive holiday spirit, I listened to the Librivox version L. Frank Baum's Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, which my parents have in their library but I never got around to reading. I find Baum in general to be very dated, and this was no exception. With stops it took me about 4 hours. The warehouse was in the business park adjacent to Monmouth Executive Airport, which is such a busy and active part of our nation's transportation infrastructure that a wrong turn almost took me onto the tarmac. The previously mentioned dinginess was accompanied by the not unpleasant smell of old games. I paid the guy my $50, looked around at his other wares, then took off. The playfield has some wear but is mostly just dirty and looks intact. Considering it's a medium production machine that I was looking for, for $50 + some transportation costs, I think I got an OK deal.
Here ends the parts of this post that are actually about pinball. Sorry.
My next two stops were pure happenstance, since they were both within a half hour of the pinball place. I went over to the New Jersey shore and visited Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash, the comic book store owned by Kevin Smith. Based on the many craptacular comic book stores I've been in, it's pretty nice. Of course, there are a bunch of props and stuff from Kevin Smith movies, and I took pictures of it all -- my daughter is a fan and my wife and I have been sucked into listening to SModcast, the funny and generally pretty filthy podcast he does with his partner. I picked up a few Christmas presents for them at the store to fully justify my trip. Red Bank, or at least Broad Street, seemed nice... it reminded me of Melrose back in the old country, where I spent a great deal of time and money in the 80's.
Then it was up the Garden State Parkway to Metuchen, where my friend Alex and his family live. Alex is a former school- and D&D-mate whom I hadn't seen in at least 15 years. Pinblog regulars will be fascinated to know that Alex maintains that he coined the name Joe Entropy back in the day. This is disputed by me, because I thought I came up with the name. We even disagreed on Joe's address: Alex said he lived at 666 Marine St in Santa Monica, and I said he lived a few blocks over at 666 Ozone. Anyway, we goofed around for a few hours, had some good Indian food, and exchanged current information about friends and relations. They were heading out for their family Christmas in CA the next day, so I left early to give them time to pack.
The drive home kinda sucked... it was raining pretty steadily, I managed to make the same wrong turn in the opposite direction that I had made going to Alex's house (thank goodness for the GPS, or I would be in Maine by now), and couldn't find reliable sources for Vault Zero soda along the NJ Turnpike. But I made it back... 14 hours and 450 miles later, and fell asleep reading the Totem manual.
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