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I did it. I put off the decision for a while, but in the end I concluded that one of us who built the Formula SAE car had to give it a good home. I wasn't going to leave it to neglect...or worse. The UP shop technician dropped it off this afternoon. I haven't been very productive since.

There's plenty of work to do on it. In our rush to finish it, not all the metal parts got painted, so one of my first tasks will be to clean up the corrosion and paint all those bits. At the same time I need to get an ECU for it, repair a lot of the wiring and control cables, and replace a few other assorted parts. One of my eventual goals is to make new fairings, as the existing bodywork was made for minimal aerodynamic function and not given much attention for appearance. I might also consider restoring the engine to its stock configuration. Some of the modifications required for competition substantially limited horsepower.

Of course, now that I have a project that will beg for copious amounts of my time, I'm sure Murphy's Law will see me with a job again in short order. I guess from that perspective, I can count buying the car as an investment in my job search. In fact, I have an interview this coming Monday in the Everett area for a company that makes tooling for the aerospace industry. The company president woke me up Sunday morning to do a brief phone interview. That part seems a little weird to me, but the work sounds interesting.

Getting the car makes last nights dumb mistake a distant memory. I drove up to Mt. Hood to go night skiing only to remember as I turned into the empty parking lot that they're only open for night skiing Wednesday through Sunday. The worst part is that it wasn't just me. I also subjected two friends to the pointless drive up and back.