Notes from Maine - 2026/04/19
We’ve had a busy week. Mom arrived on Monday, sore from the long car ride. My brother was kind enough to drive her up from Virginia after he went for a visit down here. Mom is free to stay until she needs to return for my niece’s graduation from college.
Mom hit the ground running up here, immediately wanting to know what she was supposed to work on. Fortunately, her early Mother’s Day present arrived that same evening. She has been hinting loudly that she needs another pinball machine at her house. I don’t think that she’s fully bored with only one, but there’s a saying with pinball machines—they multiply. My friend alerted me to a very cheap, and very broken, machine from 1977.
A lot of people might be offended to receive a broken and dirty gift. Personally, I enjoy fixing them nearly as much as playing them. I must have inherited that from Mom because she feels the same way. She spent a couple of days tearing down the machine and we catalogued all the burned up parts so we could order new ones. I’ve never seen a machine with so many melted solenoids. There has to be a major malfunction on one of the boards but I haven’t looked at those yet. The head to the machine is locked and the seller dropped the key somewhere in his driveway. I have to drill out the lock at some point so I can repair the boards.
I’m so thankful for all the resources we have now. Schematics are readily available for anything old enough. It can be difficult to find an exact schematic for a new TV, but those are nearly disposable at this point. They’re not made to last decades, so fixing them is like chasing a lit fuse. But for older stuff, one can usually track down a full set of schematics, and often a repair guide, in a matter of seconds. In the pinball world, Gottlieb is the rare exception. If you want a schematic for a Gottlieb machine, you have to call Steve Young in New York and pay him to send you one (they’re actively copyrighted). Steve is an amazing steward of pinball knowledge and his business is the reason a lot of these old machines are still up and running, but you have to establish a relationship with him before you’ll get anything. He sends the parts and you send a check back with the invoice. There are no electronic payments or credit cards involved. It’s all invoices and checks.
After taking apart and cleaning her new pinball machine, Mom turned her attention to the yard where she has been cleaning up all the gardens. Plants are just beginning to wake up in Maine, so this is a great time of year for raking and weeding. At least that’s what I hear—I personally don’t have any experience in that area. Albert (dog) was helping Mom today. Every time she bent to pick up another stick, he would take some out of her hand and helpfully drop them on the ground again.
On Tuesday we went to the dump and got rid of some more junk from the attic. I had a bunch of cardboard that needed to go as well. I’m getting low on low-hanging fruit for my weekly dump trips. The decisions will become difficult soon. There’s a snowblower in the shop that I have no intention of using. I might as well give that away. It’s a shame though—it’s a wonderful snowblower. At least it would be if I ever bothered to tune it up. I think the carburetor needs a serious cleaning.
I had a lovely conversation with some people from Buenos Aires this week. They want to implement some pinball code I wrote back in 2022 on their machine. I publish all my new pinball code free for anyone to use, but they don’t have easy access to some of the parts needed. The phone call was to help steer them towards alternative parts they can find locally. I hope it works out—they seem like really nice people.
Fortunately, they speak English very well. With my Duolingo training I could ask all about how their grandfathers play basketball, or how much rice an elephant might eat, but my ability to discuss integrated circuits and low-pass filters is definitely limited in Spanish. I’m so indebted to all the people who gave their time and effort to help me navigate the learning curve and get halfway decent at working on these machines. I’m glad to offer that same assistance to others when they ask, although there are usually much more knowledgeable people to answer any particular question.
We had the most amazing thunderstorm on Thursday night.
It woke me up out of a deep sleep and I tried to stay awake as long as possible to enjoy the noise. Consciousness would just start to slip away when a flash would make me open my eyes. I tried to count, but I would nearly be asleep again before the thunder hit. It rattled the metal roof above me. It reminded me of when they give you anesthesia and ask you to count down from one hundred. Next thing you know, you’re waking up in the recovery room. It was like that except each fade out was only minutes instead of hours.
Albert doesn’t care anything about thunder and lightning. I’ve only had one dog (George) who even noticed thunderstorms. He was a lanky Great Dane and he would pace during storms. George had a lot of character. My father once said that George gave him the finger when Dad asked him to come inside. I believe it to be true, even though I don’t understand how George physically pulled that off. I don’t think about him too often—I miss him too much when I do.
