I am keeping my blog over at Multiply these days preparing for the demise of 360, but still no reason not to cross-post entries here. Not that I'm likely to blog any more often there than I do here, which is once every month or two at best...

2008 is here at last. I can certainly say I am not sad to see 2007 go. I had such high hopes for 2007 after a bad 2006, but 2007 was literally a nightmare from day one. Within a month, 2006 was looking like a banner year as the wheels came off 2007.

2007 wasn't completey bad... I made a couple of wonderful new friends, I had a great run of "The Odd Couple" (after a disastrous start), and I found a new job that is far less stressful. As far as the bad... well, there's no point in bringing it up because it is all behind me now and I would prefer to keep it there. Somehow I know that 2008 is going to be a fantastic year. (Uh oh, do I have any wood to knock on?)

Wishing you all a wonderful 2008!

All my life I've wanted to own a pinball machine. I've been fascinated with them as long as I can remember; I was constantly trying to build my own with straight pins, rubber bands, cardboard and marbles. (Oh, my mother was constantly on me about using up all her pins!) As a small child I loved going to get my hair cut because the barber had a pinball machine, and since that was in the early 70's it would have been much like the machine you see here.

This is a Williams Fan-Tas-Tic; all of the guides call it a 1973 model but all of the art copyrights are 1972. It's in pretty good shape for a 35 year old pinball machine; mechanically everything is fine except for the player 2 score sticks at 8,000 points occasionally. (Note to self: When playing against someone else, always be player 1.) It needs a really good cleaning and a little woodwork on the backbox where the plywood is delaminating.

You can see a bunch of photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/celamantia/sets/72157602156258082/ where I'm documenting the condition it's in and potential portions that need restoration work.

So I was on my way out to lunch today, and as usual I started pulling my car keys out of my pocket as the elevator door opened. This time, though, they slipped out of my hand and fell into the gap between the elevator and hall... right to the bottom of the elevator shaft.

I just stood there looking at the shaft in disbelief as my mind raced to find the appropriate expletives for such a situation. What's more, I could see through to the bottom of the shaft, and right where I dropped them there's a small grate on the floor of the shaft, and of course no sign of the keys. They'll probably never be seen again.

I did get lucky, though. My niece has been borrowing my car a lot lately so I had my car keys separate from all my other keys and the flash drive on my keychain, so all I lost was the key and the car remote. Of course it'll be about $50 to replace the remote, but better than losing all my keys! Then again, if it was all my keys they probably wouldn't have fit into the gap in the first place.

I went in to have my wisdom teeth removed yesterday. They put my IV in and in fairly short order I was woozing out. Suddenly there were a lot more people in the room (it was seamless to me but apparently I was out) pumping drugs in me and huddled around an EKG machine. Seems that the moment they put me out my heart rate doubled and soon after that it was skipping every third beat. Since my wisdom teeth weren't actually bothering me and it was just a preventative measure to remove them, they cancelled the extraction.

So my regular doc will probably put me on yet another round of drugs... like I'm not a walking pharmacy already.