Stereo!

Things are getting worse in the garage, AKA the site of my future intervention.

Yesterday I installed a TV on a shelf. But it had no working remote, and it wasn’t hooked up to cable or a DVD player, and I needed to add a radio tuner. So today I was forced to go to Home Depot and get a universal remote (eight dollars more than I budgeted, but it looked cooler than the cheap one), six shelf brackets, and a bunch of screws. I’m going to take my mom’s old JVC shelf system (what remains after I gutted the CD part in order to rescue Mahalia Jackson), stick it on the wall, and add my much-loathed Panasonic DVD changer.

I looked at stereo receivers online, figuring I should be able to find something I could get delivered for fifty bucks, but the cheapest new ones were all at or above a hundred bucks. Then I realized I hadn’t checked the old modular shelf system for inputs. Praise be, it has RCA sockets for a VCR. I am cooking with gas.

I dread the installation. I have to cut and install three shelves in a very congested area, and I get to breathe lots of concrete and wood dust, for which I’ll pay the price later. Respirators may keep you from overloading your lungs, but they’ll let you get enough crap into your body to make you congested.

I also scored two jugs of kosher Coke from the grocery beside Home Depot. So I have that going for me.

Life will suck for the remainder of the day, but at least I’ll get that miserable DVD changer out of my bedroom and get the old stereo off the garage floor. I don’t know who designed that changer, but the remote is one hundred percent counterintuitive, and you actually have to keep the manual nearby in order to use it. It’s a horror for regular use, but it will be acceptable in the garage.

The Coke is chilling. It’s time to go out there and suffer.