October, my favorite month of the year usually, sucked majorly.

During the first week of the month, I took my fourteen year old car to VIP in Presque Isle to get its yearly inspection. Just like last year, VIP failed it and I had to pay to get it fixed. Originally the total cost to defog one headlight and to replace the [u]perfectly good[/u] brake lines with new ones was to cost me $245. Well, after they slashed the brake lines, they had a [i]little[/i] problem reattaching them. Add one more hour of labor and I ended up giving them crooks ~$350. A new record! They still wouldn't pass it because, get this, my rocker panels were rusty. Uh, hello, it's an old car in a state that salts its roads during the winter. Of course there's going to be rust. To make matters worse, VIP wouldn't do the work. I asked my college roommate, a NASCAR fan and all-around car expert about what I should do, and he told me about a place that would do the inspection in less than an hour and probably look past the cosmetics. The results of which I'll get to later in this diatribe.

In the same week, I noticed my glasses starting to feel loose again. I had them fixed while I was working in Bangor over the summer, so they shouldn't be doing that kind of crap. I thought I fixed the problem, put them back on my face, and they instantly broke. The piece that holds the glasses onto my right ear snapped off at the base and I couldn't tape them or superglue them back on. I wasted three bottles of superglue trying to fix them and ended up leaving superglue residue on one of the lenses as well as bits of my thumbflesh on the frames.

Due to not wanting to put up with a lot of BS for being swindled from the family, I went down to Bangor and spent the week I had off with my grandmother, one of the most awesome people I know. She helped me out with my problems by helping me pay for new glasses (the old ones were too destroyed to salvage) and some bondo for my car. I was thankful for that, seeing how VIP practically wiped me out for money. I also spent a few nights with my brother over at NESCOM and played Pokemon Battle Revolution and Spore for the first time. I was quite impressed with the school in general and it seemed so much better than the purgatory that EMCC was.

After my vacation was over, I had a new pair of glasses and the bodywork of my car done, with huge thanks to my dad who did an awesome job on it. I took the car to get it inspected last Wednesday and it passed with no fuss and no extra fees.

Halloween as a whole really sucked too. The day before, I went to a dance dressed as a whoopee cushion and won fourth place for best costume. I lost to a plug-and-socket couple, a girl dressed as a game of Twister, and somebody who dressed up as Optimus Prime. I was not impressed because it was judged on the amount of applause each person got and I figured I had it won since most of the crowd were my "friends". Nope they all turned traitor on me. The next day I wore my costume to my two classes and to my College Dems meeting. In hindsight I probably shouldn't have. I couldn't keep a straight face throughout class because the thought of an anthromorphic whoopee cushion talking in Russian got me giggling. That and hardly anybody else on campus dressed up. Ugh!

And finally on my mope train, I think I'm going to drop my Medieval European history class because I didn't do so hot on my last test and I haven't started on my final project which is due in like three weeks.

My Spring 2009 schedule looks pretty good though. I have United States Environmental History, Modern Russian History (Khruschev through Putin), French History and Politics, Elementary Russian II, and Honors Seminar: Genocide and the Holocaust. The environmental history replaces the Ancient Egyptian history I wanted to take, but oh well. If I didn't replace it, I'd be at UMPI until Spring '10 instead of Fall of '09.