In the interest of getting over the “First Post hump”, here’s the story of my first upgrade install on  a car.

When I was about 4 years old, I got one of those Bigfoot PowerWheels trucks, like this:

Well, more like this, really:

I LOVED that truck.  To this day, I still swear that the Power Wheels Bigfoot was the beginning of my obsession.

At any rate, like any reasonable 4 year old automotive enthusiast would do, I decided that Bigfoot would do much better with a full size car battery than the tiny little battery (6 volt, in retrospect) that it came with.  I knew that there was a battery in my Mom’s car, and that her car was WAY faster than my Bigfoot.  So I pulled Bigfoot into the shop and began prepping her for upgrades.  First, I wiped Bigfoot down and made sure she was shining, then I stole the little scented tree out of my Mom’s car and taped it to the windshield.  I then proceeded to disconnect and pull the battery out of Bigfoot, just like I had seen my folks do to charge it a hundred times.  Next, I popped the hood to grab the battery out of Mom’s ride.  And then it all fell apart.

As it turns out, Mom didn’t appreciate me taking the battery out of her car to give Bigfoot some much needed boost.  Nor did she appreciate the giant scratches I caused all over the core support, headlight, trim, and bumper from dragging the battery out.  And of course it was about this time that she came out to see why I hadn’t been bothering her for quite some time.  The result was… familiar.

And thus concludes the story of the first time I got grounded.  I lost my “license” to drive Bigfoot for two weeks, but what’s worse, I never found out just how much faster Bigfoot would have been…