Day One - Getting the car in the garage

This is the official first day of my admittedly foolish journey of fixing my 1999 Mazda Miata. The engine was determined by the shop to be essentially dead. From what I've learned about the symptoms I experienced, I'm pretty sure I have spun bearings caused by driving without enough oil. I don't know how extensive the damage is, but my curiosity is getting the best of me. I want to do an autopsy of the engine,  but what I really want is to have my car back. My options are few. The most practical is to do an engine swap, which is what I'm going to attempt to do. The hard part is going to find a replacement engine. After searching online for a replacement, I couldn't find a re-manufactured engine available. I also looked into getting a salvage car to extract the engine out of that, but who knows what condition it would be in? Another option is to have my engine rebuilt. (That's not something I could possibly do, but I could see if there are any shops that would do it and how much it would cost.)

Anyway, with time on my side, I'm going to do the work of removing the engine out of the engine bay. Hopefully I can get a replacement in a reasonable amount of time. While I'm waiting, I may do some work assessing the damage and see if it's worth having it rebuilt. I may not have a choice if I can't find a suitable replacement. I can't really make it worse than it already is.

After cleaning out the garage to make room for the car, I checked the spark plugs. The first three I took out looked to have normal wear. The fourth one removed was completely covered in oil. There was oil all over the insulator and terminal nut. The spark plug wire also had oil contamination in the seal. How did this spark plug ever work? It never misfired as far as I recall. From what I can tell from what I read online, this seems to be a failure of the valve cover gasket.

Anyway, the only other thing I did today was remove the hood, to make working on the engine easier. The next thing I'm going to work on is to start labeling the pictures I took of the engine compartment so I know what I'm getting myself into. Then I want to remove the valve cover to see the state of the gasket and confirm  its failure. I may remove some other components if I have the time and will. Perhaps the radiator and the air intake parts.