Two Treasures

I picked up a bunch of weird stuff during my California trip. Here I’ll show two of them.

This LCD Star Wars pinball game cost me $15 which wasn’t bad considering it was new. A glance on eBay tells me I wasn’t ripped off. The guy that sold it to me made mention of treating it carefully since the plastic packaging had become brittle but of course I was going to open it!

And here it is! Note the poor sticker affixed between the buttons, as if after they made it they realized they forgot to brand it! You’ll also see that the only Star Wars evidence in the actual game screen are the droids on the backplate…

The batteries had of course leaked (it’s 24 years old!) but not seriously and it was an easy clean. I popped two more in and:

It has flashing lights, a vibration function and very, very poor gameplay! Also the game itself has nothing to do etc Star Wars, and I imagine the others in this like (such as a Barbie game) play identically 🙂

A curiosity though, already in a box never to be played again!

Following on, I also bought this for $5 at an amazing antique store in Gilroy:

A European Panini sticker pack from 1983! Panini made gazillions of sticker sets for just about every sport and licensed brand you can imagine and sadly they barely distributed outside of Europe. So I never got any Dark Crystal or E.T. or Pope John Paul II stickers in my youth…

The ‘original’ art stickers in this set are strange and difficult to look at for long periods, but most of the stickers were from the cartoon;

I bought this in the hope of sending you all some He-Man nostalgia via future postcards but the adhesive is too weak after 35+ years and these will therefore remain as priceless additions to my collection 🙂

Oh and even though this post was just supposed to be two treasures… here’s some of the rest of my purchases:

Home Improvement

Our driveway was in bad condition, cracked and uneven. It was 25+ years old and past time for a new one. Last week that’s exactly what happened!

Many large trucks and a small army of men turned up to work. They started by removing the old asphalt with a bulldozer:

Then dumping the gravel substrate:

Which was flattened by a roller:

Then came the new asphalt, edges first:

Then the main portion layed down by a machine:

And flattened again with a different roller:

Lastly a final liquid asphalt coat:

And after a total of about 2.5 hours, it was done:

We haven’t used it yet since it’s halfway through a weeklong drying/setting process, but it looks good 🙂

It was hellishly expensive, but what home improvement job isn’t? It should last longer than we are in this house though, and what more could we ask!

Six Flags

We went to Six Flags New England today, an amusement park a couple of hours away with lots of rollercoasters.

That’s their Superman ride, which was awesomely tall, fast and thrilling. I rode it twice, and laughed like a child both times.

That’s the Batman ride, with lots of inversions. It wasn’t scary or too jarring, just fun, and after I did a test ride KLS took my word and had a go. She liked it but not enough to go on another big coaster.

So I rode the big ones alone, and we went on the smaller ones together. Ironically it was one of the little ones – Catwoman’s Whip – that gave me motion sickness 🙂

Our visit was free! Kristin’s work had given us passes which included parking, admission, a line-skipper and a meal. Even better than a trip to the amusement park is a free trip!

The park also has a big waterpark attached with lots of innertube rides. We rode a bunch of these as well before I hit my head hard on a concrete wall while on a lazy river and ended up in the first aid house for a bit! Right now, hours later, I’ve still got a big bump on my head…

It was a fun day though. If we get free passes again next year I’m sure we’ll visit again 🙂