Seventeen months ago, I drove a BMW i8 from Los Angeles to just north of Seattle. My journey ended at the RainSong Guitars shop, where I ordered a "Black Ice" cutaway acoustic-electric. It showed up in August of last year. Since then I've played it between three and eight hours a week. Let's call it two hundred hours total. In all conditions, across the country, dropping and banging it, killing string set after string set, sometimes letting it sit in the California sun where it got too hot to touch and other times (like today) letting it sit in my trunk for a full day's worth of ten-degree weather.