Ronin

I take my garage seriously. More seriously than most, I think. When I moved in to the house we live in, I installed pegboard across 3 walls, with GFCI outlets on their own breaker peeking through. I installed a phone in my garage. I built a massive custom cabinet that holds 24 Rubbermaid totes. I am going to be painting the floor of the garage this summer with epoxy. I'm a garage nerd. Mrs. Neubauten finds that incredibly sexy, even though she doesn't say it.

Last summer's garage project was to install a set of speakers in the ceiling, with the speaker wire running in to a cabinet over my workbench. I put an outlet in the cabinet as well, to run a small stereo. The problem was that the speakers were 8-ohm and the little stereo was only designed to push 4-ohm. Needless to say, I killed the stereo. My wife was delighted.

I had an old receiver laying around that I figured would work in my cabinet, but it was a little too big (1.5" too deep, to be precise). So I cut a hole in the drywall. That bought me 3/8". Then I pulled the cover off of the heatsink on the back, which gave me another 1/4". Finally, I snipped off a couple of fins from the heatsink. Voila!

Now all I needed was something to play CDs with. Knowing that Ruth would kill me if I took the CD changer out of the living room, I decided that the only really reasonable solution was to buy an expensive gadget. My step daugher got an iPod for her birthday from her aunt, and it occured to me that maybe that would be a good solution.

I went in to the house and "borrowed" her iPod. I had downloaded iTunes a few days earlier for her, so I figured it would work out for me too. The interface is incredibly intuitive. It only took a couple of minutes to create a "Tom" playlist and populate it with some of the most dark and grating music ever created in Germany.

Having slapped my music together, I went to my "cables - audio" tote in the garage and grabbed a stereo to RCA adaptor cable (told you I was a garage nerd). Minutes later, the not-so-soothing sound of Einstruzende Neubauten's "Der Tod Ist ein Dandy" was pouring out in to my garage, much to my wife's chagrin. I was astounded by the sound quality. It occured to me that German industrial music is meant to be played in rooms with concrete floors.

So I was hooked. I started paying my boys 10 cents/CD to rip all of my albums to the iTunes library. God bless cheap child labor. So far they have managed to transfer 35 of them. I also ordered an iPod from Amazon. Since I believe in always getting the most powerful power tools available, I went with the 80G. It should arrive this afternoon. My garage and I are stoked. My wife...not so much.
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