Many are called, few have chosen to pay $300 for a moving Dalek head

As the title indicates, yesterday I got the email offering the purchase of a Doctor Who Wobble Head kit. Of course, I had already talked myself into buying it, so without much ado (other than finding a browser that the site worked with, newly downloaded Firefox 3.0 not being among them) I plunked down $290.75 and eagerly await my booty.

That not being chump change, I feel like I should actually install it promptly. This has lit the fire of righteous fury under me to create a work area in which I could actually do the work necessary without injury. That means the timetable for the swapping of my wife's and my work areas suddenly has a deadline, and I work great with deadlines.

So let's throw shame to the wind and turn the camera towards the parts of the basement that I usually aim it away from. On the right is my wife's work area. In all fairness, this was briefly organized, and over time has become a desperate cry to be featured on one of those HGTV house cleaning shows. And after it became slightly messy, anything even vaguely craft-related was just tossed in, sort of like compound interest for disorderly spaces. Note the exposed sewer pipe in the background... if that isn't a blog post that's just waiting to happen, I don't know what is. Not shown: The partially collapsed drop ceiling!

On the left is my personal superfund site. And this is after some organization earlier in the year... it used to be worse. And while my wife's area is a collaborative effort, this room is pretty much all me because I'm the only one who can squeeze into it without knocking down precarious piles of stuff, thereby blocking the escape route. So you can see this is a mighty labor that even Hercules would pale at. Say, speaking of the labors of Hercules, maybe I can clean my wife's stuff by breaking the sewer pipe and the resulting river of filth would carry away the mess.

And of course it wouldn't be a blog post without a few new purchases. Here's a mostly populated Pin*bot playfield that I got a few weeks ago. It's pretty thrashed cosmetically, but I figure if that's a problem I can move everything over to the unpopulated playfield. Getting this was kind of a pain... the guy who sold it to me was in California and had never sold a playfield before, so he lacked the basic shipping skills, namely accurate pricing and the acquisition of cheap boxes. The original shipping estimate was $140, but I asked if he could do UPS which should be ~$70. He said fine, so I bid and won. Then he sat on it for a few weeks, during which he said he was trying to get a box. Finally he bought a $15 box, which I called bullshit on and suggested he go to a bike store where they'll give you bike boxes for free (like I said, he was new to this). After much haggling, harsh words, and a few angry tears he finally got it to UPS and they wanted to charge him an oversize box fee... hello? Measure the frickin' box BEFORE shipping! So he cut the box down to size at UPS and shipped it for $75. When I got it, it was basically floating free in the box with a handful of styrofoam appliance packing pieces inadequately protecting it. I could reach into the box and touch the unwrapped playfield. I wanted to kill the guy. By dumb luck it did arrive in reasonable condition, but I think I'll be buying my playfields locally from now on.

This just arrived this week, bought from the guy who sold me the non-working "100% working" WPC display board a few years ago. It's the base and functional parts of Rudy's head on Funhouse. The picture was terrible and the description was practically non-existent (the title was "Funhouse pinball Rudy part" and the description was "You are bidding on a Funhouse Pinball rudy parts". Seriously.). But I won, and it actually turned out to be better than I expected. It's got the jaw piece, the kicker, and three of the four coils. If I could get the jaw motor and gear box, that's really all I would need to play the game, since the face and eyes are all just eye candy anyway.

I don't expect to be buying much for a few months, since eBay season has come to an end and the wobble head has put me either really close to or slightly over my debt ceiling of $1000. So it's as good a time as any to get organized so I can prepare for the new fall season, when I'll have to sell a bunch of boodle to return to solvency.