Abuse of State Property

Last weekend a friend of mine swapped out the engine in his VW Rabbit. It is from the mid 80’s sometime, has been modified to run on vegetable oil, and more information is available on his blog at www.blahblahblahabouttherabbit.com. He borrowed a barn at another friend’s house in the county and got together a crew of folks to help him with the swap. Many tweets are available about the swap as well as lots of pictures on Facebook. Being mechanically minded I was asked to document and blog about the event and just provide moral support.

The original plan was to spend the evening Friday and then the day Saturday helping, um, er…I mean watching the swap. However, as with most plans in my life, things changed.

Some other friends, and yes, I know you are shocked that I have friends, were going to be in town and wanted to have dinner with us. These are actually Heather’s friends. She was Eric’s nanny when he was first born and her husband is a state trooper. Sorry it took 3 paragraphs to get to that part. So Friday night we had dinner with them and then in a complete abuse of state property he and I went out to the engine swap.

We drove up the driveway with the light flashing, which were rather blinding in the country darkness. As soon as the confused engine swappers opened the door I came on the loud speaker saying something like, “Come out with your hands up. We have the barn surrounded as an automobile chop shop. Please bring your VIN paperwork with you and come out with your hands up.”

A good time was had by all. Then Saturday morning I was planning to go back out to the barn to check on progress however we had a major internal DNS glitch on our networks at Faith so I spent most of the day working on that instead of watching them work on the engine. I did eventually get out there in time to see them fire it up and start some testing.

I’m looking forward to serving the great people of the state of Indiana again in the future and answering questions at the inquiry.