Miscellaneous 2013 Wrap Up

Okay, I have four photos left in my "Pinball 2013" folder, so I'm clumping them all in to this one post.  At the end of last summer, by best friend Gabe passed through town.  Here he is putting up a pretty good score on my Medieval Madness:

In November, my wife and I moved about three miles, from Oakland to Alameda.  We now live about five blocks from the Pacific Pinball Museum!  Alameda also has some pretty cool antique shops.  Claire and I were wandering around one of them when we saw this backglass from Strange Scinece.  I think it was like $100.  Cool... but not that cool.

Around Christmas, my sister Galen was in town to spend the holidays with her husband's family, who live in San Jose.  We decided to all head to the Winchester Mystery House, which is one of my wife's favorite attractions.  Claire and I made a trip there a few years back and there was a little arcade.  Sadly, this has now been transformed into some sort of office space.  Luckily, the Theatre of Magic machine that used to be there was now in the gift shop!  This has become one of Claire's favorite machines, so she easily got a replay.  We left the credit for the next person to come along.

Now that we live so close to the Pacific Pinball Museum, we have been going in a lot more.  For a while we were playing the five or so coin-op games that are in the lobby, but in the new year, the PPM started offering a membership option, so we signed up for the "couples" option and now we can go in and play the machines as much as we like.  Over the winter holidays, the PPM was packed! Here is a shot of the front room, which is usually pretty empty.  When it's this packed you can only imagine how full the back rooms were:

The Pacific Pinball Museum has a campaign going on right now to try and set up in the empty Alameda Carnegie Library.  It's a beautiful space, which would more than triple their capacity, so if you can, please contribute!  It really would be "the Smithsonian of Pinball!"