Pachinko

When I was young, my father found a Pachinko machine at a yard sale or flea market.  It worked, but there were almost no balls with it.   To have it work properly, you needed the exact size metal balls or they would get caught.  He found a place to order them from (how did people find out these things prior to the World Wide Web?) and then we had a working machine. 

I'm not sure what the goal was overall because we just played again and again and there was no real win or lose.   It was fun though.   Years later I went to Japan and went into a Pachinko parlor.  I got some tokens or put in some Yen and tried to find a machine that wasn't that expensive, something that was futile because there wasn't a thing I could understand on any of the machines. 

I must have picked poorly though because instead of having an opportunity to understand how the machine worked, my money was gone only a few balls later.   Thus ended my experience with Japanese Pachinko machines. 

The Children and Dinner time: We used to have to eat very early for the children.   These days they can wait until later for dinner or they can eat early.   I remember the days when we had to eat dinner by 5:00 because the children would be in bed two hours later.