Name: Joe Fisher

How young are you? 31

Physical description:
About 5'9", 185lbs, black hair, brown eyes, Italian complexion. I like long walks on the beach, moonlit dinners...wait, what are we talking about again?

Where is home?
I currently live in Lake Hopatcong, NJ. I grew up on Staten Island, NY and moved to NJ when I was 26 to take my first "real" job. Up until then I had worked at my family business - an auto parts store called The Parts House. I was a manager/counterman. I really love working with people, and would still be working there if Intel hadn't offered me gobs of money to work for them. I still fill in at The Parts House from time to time. It’s always good to see the old salts from the neighborhood still coming in for parts.

Family information:
I have a beautiful wife, Liz, who understands and encourages my various hobbies/obsessions. When I came home with an 8" jointer in my truck a few weeks ago, she hardly batted an eyelash. I spoil her rotten, but she deserves it; I'm a lucky man.
No kids yet, but we have a very needy cat, which is pretty close. She thinks she's a dog - greets us at the door when we come home, likes belly rubs, guards the house against intruders.

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Do you have a website?
Yup, sure do.

Vocation:
Ever since I can remember, I worked at The Parts House with my dad. When I was 26, I had proposed to my now-wife Liz, gotten offered a job at Intel in Parsippany, and decided it was time to get out of the family business and off Staten Island. We move to a deluxe apartment in the sky - ok, it was a rented walk-up condo in Wharton, NJ - and I took the job at Intel in March, 2001. I have been working here as a computer programmer since. We just changed hands and are now known as Dialogic.

Shop Overview:
Ah, the shop. After our landlord sold our condo, we went house shopping. We looked at this little raised ranch in Lake Hopatcong. It was nice in front, on a narrow 40' wide lot. Walk in the front door, check out the house. Not bad, about 900 square feet, full basement, good enough for the two of us. Then we went out the back door and I saw it.

There, shining at me in all its galvanized glory, was the Holy Grail of male house hunting: the giant garage. I gaped, slack-jawed, at the 35x33' steel building with a gigantic 20' door. When I opened the door, it seemed to whisper, "You're home." It's got more square footage than the house and dominates the back yard. "We'll take it."

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After having my tools rolling around in that giant open space for a while, I divided the garage in half and built myself a proper workshop. This basically doubled the amount of storage I had for that half of the garage, since I could now put stuff on the “roof”. It also kept me from getting sawdust all over the things the missus stores in the rest of the garage 

The work area is 16’ x 22', while the wood room is 16’ x 8'. Yes, I have a whole separate room for wood. I'm considering moving much of that wood into overhead storage in the workshop and converting it into a dedicated finishing room.

My workshop currently has the TS smack in the center of the shop with the DC line running along the floor to it. There's no room for my bandsaw or new jointer, I trip over the DC line, and my workbench/assembly table is against the wall, making clamp use an adventure. This weekend should be rearrange time.

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