Friday December 29, 2006 was one of the last days of 2006 and Pete and I have been off work all week for the holiday.  Neither one of us went out of town, so we have been hanging out working on the Jubilee pinball machine and doing the occasional bike ride when we get a chance.  And, this happened to be one of those days where we did a short bike ride just to get out and stretch our legs a little. 

The temperature was in the low 40s, which is very nice for this time of year.  It appears our very mild winter is going to continue into the New Year.  We are bound to get some snow sooner or later, but not any time soon with temperatures in the 40s.   

I had taken the liberty of doing some cabinet touch up painting on the Jubilee and Pete was curious to see how it came out.  Plan was for Pete to ride over to my house, check out the pinball machine, and then we would ride to Buddy’s for lunch.  I had some time to kill the past couple days, especially in the mornings.  Everyone in my family likes to waste half the day by sleeping in until 10:00 or 11:00 am in the morning.  By this time I am ready for lunch.  A day or two ago in the morning I got out Diane’s craft paint and mixed a few colors together to match the cabinet paint and I fixed all the really bad areas on the Jubilee.  It turned out quite well if I do say so myself.  Not perfect, but a whole lot better than it was and if you step back a few feet and look at it from the right angle it actually looks really good.  Plenty good for who it’s for.  This is an expression Pete and I like to use when we joke about the quality of a repair.  On a game that we are not keeping ourselves we joke that it really doesn’t matter how good the repair is because it is going to end up with a stranger anyhow.  Well, this is really a joke, because even though we always say “Plenty good for who it’s for” we really do take a lot of pride in making the game look and play great.  I would say the few games that I have sold look and play better than most of my games after they get the full tune up.  I just never seem to take the time to give my keeper games the full tune up.  I always tell myself no hurry on keeper games, I can tune those up anytime, and in reality I never do get around to them.  

Pete was late coming over to my house so finally I called him to see what was holding him up.  Pete likes to sleep in as well I thought maybe he forgot we planned to ride this day.  When I got Pete on the phone he was upset.  Apparently when he took his bike out of his garage for the ride to my house he noticed he had another flat tire.  His streak of bad luck with flat tires continues.  After he got done cussing out his tire he told me he would be over as soon as he got it fixed.  I think he repaired his last couple flats by patching instead of replacing the tube.  This time he was planning to replace the tube and really give the tire a good check to make sure there isn’t something stuck in the tire causing the reoccurring problem. 

About 45 minutes later Pete showed up in a better mood, he had gotten his flat tire repaired and the short ride to my house refreshed his attitude.  He came inside to check out the paint job and gave it his approval.  Then we rode the short distance to Buddy’s on the north east corner of Walton and Squirrel.  We ordered our usual lunch that we seem to always get when at this place.  We split a small antipasto salad while we waited for our small pizza show up.  Neither one of us were in a hurry this day so we just took our time.  The restaurant wasn’t busy and we watched sports center on TV as we ate our lunch.  

I joked with Pete during lunch that he would probably have another flat tire when we went outside for our ride home.  Pete knew I was joking, but when you have a rash of flat tires you start to assume the worst.  Luckily both his tires were fine after we finished our lunch.  I actually breathed a sigh of relief as well when I saw my tires were fine.  I thought I might jinx myself by joking about Pete’s tires so much.  The ride back to my house is short and fast.  We were back in short order. 

Pete did do some updates to his web site recently and he added some pictures of the Jubilee game that I have been writing about the past few weeks.  Click on the following link to get to the pictures of Jubilee on Pete’s site. 

Following are the statistics from this ride, 10.2 miles total, 22.0 max, 58 minutes of ride time with an average speed of 10.8 mph.
David Lindquist