I’d been sick just before Christmas. I swear it was because my immune system wasn’t prepared for Middle Eastern germs: a co-worker, an Indian Muslim, went on his pilgrimage to Mecca right around our Thanksgiving. He came home coughing and hacking and sneezing all over anyone and everyone – and he and I have cubicles in the same area, a narrow corridor that leads to the back door. I was able to resist his germs for a while, but I finally succumbed about one and a half weeks before Christmas, was really sick the weekend before Christmas, and was finally feeling better around Wednesday.

I have a Christmas True Story to share with you:

Christmas Eve day I started to install a new car radio in Geoffrey’s car, a gift from me that I was able to get by cashing in some Credit Card “points”, something I’ve never tried before. The stereo is last year’s model but a lot newer than the one Geoffrey had, with new features including a USB port in the front so he can plug in his iPod or anything else that has music on it, and listen to his own music. The one he had was dying a slow death: the display has been out for a long time, and without the display it was impossible to tell what was going on, and if you hit the wrong button and changed settings, you couldn’t tell what you’d done and couldn’t fix it. I knew this would be an appreciated gift, especially if it was installed for him.

I tried to prepare: I knew the new one should “fit”, I’d checked about that before I got it. But there’s “fit” physically and “fit” electrically: I had no faith that the connector coming out of the car would be a match to, or even slightly resemble, the connector coming out of the new radio. An internet search for “1998 Subaru Legacy Outback radio wiring” provided me with a list of colored wires coming out of the car as part of the radio wiring and what function they served. There was a similar diagram on the new radio, so I figured it would be a piece of cake, match function to function. I’ve pulled the radio out of my truck, that had been no trouble at all.

I hadn’t bargained on the Subaru dashboard. I poked and prodded it for a while trying to find the way in, but it was not yielding it’s secrets that easily. Another internet search yielded a detailed report of how another poor sap managed to get in there on the same model and year, so armed with that information I returned to the car.

He’d removed the A/C stuff, then the cup holder, which allows you to pull out the faceplate around the radio, storage area, and ash tray. However, when I looked at the cup holder area, I figured he’d done a bit more than he needed to do, and started there instead.

I had to open the cup holder all the way. Once that is pulled out all the way, you have access to a couple of screws. I unscrewed them (with a bit of contortion – this is NOT an easy car to get around in, especially with a stick shift) and removed the cup holder. Those screws also held in the top of the faceplate, so progress was being made.

However, the next thing that needed to be removed was the ashtray holding assembly. It was attached at the bottom of the faceplate, right next to the stick shift, with the screws going upward into the box in which the radio was housed. Have you ever attempted to unscrew a couple of screws that are pointed up when you have about 4 inches of play between the screws and the ground (well, not the ground but the shift housing) with the shift between you and the console? I struggled with that for at least an hour, trying all kinds of regular and jury-rigged tools (a Philips screw-head bit clamped in a wrench and held in with electrical tape was my most creative), and no joy. It was a Phillips head screw, but I could barely get my hands in there to place the screwdriver correctly. Pretty soon I was starting to doubt if I was even turning it the right way.
Finally, I tried a straight-head short shaft screwdriver, and finally felt a good “bite”. Sheesh. But, it got those stupid things out. Yay, now I should be able to get to the radio!
But nooooo. The cigarette lighter assembly was built into the faceplate. It did NOT want to come out of the hole in the rest of the dash, and the lip of the faceplate that hooked into the rest of the dash wouldn’t move enough to allow it, or come out with it in. It had a couple of wires attached to it that if they disconnected could drop into the bowels of the back of the dash, never to be recovered, so I didn’t want to remove them or knock them loose. Finally, after another 15 minutes or so of wiggling, twisting, pulling, analyzing, and repeating over and over and I still don’t know what I did, it popped out.

Now I could get at the housing box the radio was housed in. Six screws later (four in front, 2 about 7 inches in the back, and which I knew I would never be putting back in) I finally saw the wiring harness.

The connector wasn’t a match to the new radio. Not a big problem, though it sure would have been nice if it had been that easy. It hadn’t been a match to the old one, (an after-market radio that Geoffrey had had installed when he first bought the car) either, so there were a bunch of spliced on male connectors that I could use with the new radio, we just needed the female connector parts. Geoffrey went off to Radio Shack to pick them up. I didn’t have the wiring diagram from the old radio to use for reference, and there was such a mess of tangled spaghetti in there, I pulled all the old ones off to be able to see what was what.

And I discovered that none of the existing wire colors corresponded to any of the colors I found in that first search on the Internet for 1998 Subaru Legacy Outback radio wiring.

I tried, lord knows I tried, to approximately match them. I probably spent another half hour or so trying to get red-with-green-line to be “well, it’s red, but that looks like a black line but maybe it’s really DARK green”. Some might have been right, but most just didn’t make any sense. I was again stymied.

Back to the computer.

About another half hour later I stumbled upon what seemed the right info: a diagram of the connector itself coming off the car with the pins numbered and their assigned function detailed. Yippee, it didn’t matter what the wire colors were, I could just match to the pins! Even better, the functions seemed to make sense in their ordering - right front speaker positive, above right front speaker negative - so I was pretty certain I’d found the thing I needed.

I wired it up. Geoffrey had been popping in every once in a while to check on the status and help with the stuff that didn’t require contortions, and he was there for the maiden launch. We turned it on. And it WORKED! Well, one of the connectors had worked loose so one side of the car speakers weren’t working, but we found that, fixed it, and now I just had to put everything back together.

I screwed the radio tight into its housing, shoved the wires back in the dash, put the radio housing in, screwed it in. I didn’t even bother trying to put the 2 in way in the back - that would only have been possible with a magnetized screw driver, which I didn’t have. They would most likely have ended up being one of those “what’s that metallic rolling around noise” and the housing was solidly in there. I was on a roll.

I got the cigarette lighter back into its hole (no small feat). Victory was just a few screws ahead. I went to put the top of the faceplate in place…

Arrgh!! Crutchfield’s had said it would fit, it’s supposed to fit!! The radio was about an eighth of an inch wider than the faceplate hole.

I had started this at around 10:30 in the morning. It was now nearly 7 in the evening. I’d been doing all this in the unheated but not as cold as outside garage, by flashlight and a 60 watt bulb in the ceiling of the garage. The flashlight was going dim, and the ambient light was gone completely, I could barely see. My brain (and body, from all the contorting) was fried. I could not see a solution. I suggested to Geoffrey that we shave out some of the faceplate inner edge, but he wasn’t too thrilled with that idea.

I still had to bake a carrot cake – I’ve always made a carrot cake for Geoffrey for his birthday (November 22), but what with my dad’s issues after getting his pacemaker, all of which coincided with the birthday, we’d deferred the cake. I promised it for Christmas, instead. I wasn’t about to renege on that promise.

So we left the radio for the night, half installed but working enough that Geoffrey could set it up to his liking and play with its features: HD radio, input from a flash disk or an iPod, other stuff new. He kept saying “It’s so nice to have a working display!!” The simple things in life…

For the rest of the evening we brainstormed as I baked. Geoffrey’s theory was that the radio needed to be set further forward in the housing. I didn’t think that would work, it was just too wide, and the same width all the way back. Geoffrey pointed to an inset ridge in the old radio, and thought that was where the frame needed to sit. I had my doubts, as I didn’t remember a similar ridge in the new radio. We went to bed without a solution as far as I was concerned; Geoffrey was pretty sure he’d solved it.

The next day was Christmas, so we had to defer the radio project for a while longer. I needed to cook, Geoffrey to go up north to break my dad out of Rehab. That went pretty smoothly, all in all – they’d been working on getting him steadier on his feet and back to using a walker, and I’d told the PT that we had some stairs, so they’d been working him on stairs for a few days too. So getting him in the house was a lot less of an ordeal than Thanksgiving – the stairs were taken slow and steady, and we got him in with barely any fuss at all. A cane was really all he needed all day; though we did bring his walker along too, he never really used it.

He enjoyed the dinner, and the fire in the fireplace, which I’d gotten going after Geoffrey left; it was burning merrily by the time they got home. He wasn’t as thrilled with the movie we chose to put on after dinner. A year ago he may have enjoyed it – “1941”, a Steven Spielberg comedy with John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd in it. But after this last time in the hospital, his brain seems to not be able to keep track of too much, and this movie has a bunch of sub-plots that it skips around in. His verdict at the end was: “This movie sucks!”

Oh well… with his chair near the fire and toasty warm, he stayed awake through most of it, so it at least kept his attention. If I had put on one of his favorite movies, “Donovan’s Reef” or “Broken Arrow” (I think that’s the one), or any one of about 10 movies he watches over and over again, he’d have snoozed through most of it. 

Around 5PM he was getting antsy to get back – he was worried about something, whether it be the idea of me driving in the dark or some issue he might have been having that he wouldn’t tell us about, I’m not sure. I talked him into calming down long enough to have a sliver of cake(I’d made it with sugar so I didn’t want him to have too much) and a glass of milk, which he enjoyed and ate with gusto, I packed him a sandwich and some grapes on the theory that he’d missed dinner, then we bundled him up and I drove him home, getting him back to his bed around 6:30 or so. He told me to call him to let him know when I got back; I tried, but he wasn’t answering the phone. I think he’d fallen asleep and though he was wearing his hearing aids he doesn’t really maintain them and I think the battery was dead – I’d been yelling myself hoarse to communicate with him all day.

While I was gone, Geoffrey’d pulled the radio out again, and tried out his theory. It didn’t work.

But, with a fresh, well fed brain, he realized he’d been on the right track: it didn’t need to go forward, it needed to go BACK in the housing, so it would be flush with the frame. By the time I got home, he’d put it back together, including the dreaded upside down screws in the ash tray (it was easier than getting them out, he could use his fingers to start them) and the radio project had been finished.

A nice Christmas, all in all. 