I finally had a chance to get my car over to the shop on Thursday to have them diagnose the noise that cropped up when I was driving home from Alice's on 11/14.
It turns out the noise was a blown header gasket. I ended up having them replace both header gaskets and the problem was resolved.
The strange thing was that header gasket on the left bank of the motor is the one that had failed, but the noise seemed to be coming from the right side of the motor. I first suspected that a header gasket had failed, but the noise it was making certainly sounded like a problem in the valve train.
I'm happy that it wasn't anything serious. The biggest surprise was that the mechanic that was working on my car noticed that I was barely getting to 3/4throttle the way the linkage was adjusted. It was a different car when I took it out for a spin today.
