Got just a little bit of progress made tonight. Scraped the majority of that grease and grime off the engine with the possum watching me the whole time again. I have a lot to do this weekend, but I'm hoping to atleast get the block cleaned the rest of the way by the weekend and hopefully slap some paint on it.
Also pulled most the brackets and stuff to take in to work to clean before painting them. Should be pretty basic and bland, similar shade of blue (gm blue) block with black brackets. I thought about going with yellow brackets/pulleys, but I'm not so sure about that yet.