What with the country being full and all, not everyone can live in a place with spires and multiple staircases and a greenhouse on the roof. So I live in a house pretty much exactly like 80% of my neighborhood, which was designed just short of my standards (e.g. there is no natural light or ventilation to the bathroom).

My idea of a garden is similar: a garden should be thorny and green, full of spiders and butterflies and hidden corners and brambles and berries, and in the summer should be full of floating seeds and scent, and in the autumn it should smell all wet and rotten. It should be a place where fairies live, not the pink flowery sort, but the hard-as-nails sort who have to scratch out a living in the woody undergrowth.

Since I have this bathroom to fix, and since it’s a bit hard (i.e. we don’t know how we are going to get clean while the facilities are all ripped out) I’ve been spending a lot of time in the garden.

I’ve been going completely against this direction, looking after the lawn in the prescribed manner, digging in poo and sand to improve the soil, and buying interesting things from garden centres to put in.  I’ve even straightened the edges of the lawn to line up with the paths.

It’s the sort of garden that I should despise, but I’m loving it more and more! A LEGO garden to match my LEGO house.

After fiddling for ages trying to get the bezel off from around the stereo so I could slip it out of the DIN hole, I decided to just go ahead and remove the fascia from the dash.  I learned two things:

1) fords really are easy to work on!  Pull off some knobs, remove ashtray, remove three screws, and the fascia is off!

2) The bezel doesn’t remove.

The car’s wiring for the stereo finishes in two neat connector blocks - one for speakers and the other for power and shenanigans like an electric antenna.

The stereo’s connector consists of an extremely neat connector block having all power and speaker stuff all in a tidy package.

Unfortunately, between these two was a morass of bullet connectors, two fuses, and an immense black box with a coil in it (I think it was an RF suppressor or some such).  All this was gobbed up with electrical tape and shoved in the gap behind the stereo.

Having removed the passenger door panel (7 screws and a clip) and checked the passenger speaker and wiring, suspicion fell on this eldritch horror from beyond the nether pit of the dashboard.  So I pulled it all apart, untangled it, reconnected it all nicely and then…

Then the difficult bit: getting it all shoved back in the space behind the dash.  It was physically very close to the can of worms analogy.

Anyway, it’s all wrestled into place now and we can listen to the radio on both sides of the car now!