Weird.

I finally, finally switched my car registration to Maryland from DC. I went online to the MD motor vehicle administration (MVA) website to find out just what documents, etc. I'd need for the switcheroo. And let me tell you, that website was damned confusing. I went through law school and passed the bar -- which means I've had to read some really BAD writing and complicated documents -- but I couldn't figure out for certain if I needed to get my car inspected to register it.

Turns out I didn't, but I did anyway.

That is, to cover all bases, SM took the car in for an inspection. The last thing I wanted to do was arrive at the MVA sans everything I needed. The car, a lovely 1988 Toyota Corolla, failed the inspection. We were not surprised -- not because the car is in crappy shape (it isn't) but because, duh, it's 20 years old (five more years and I can register it as an historic car!). We had to get something like $1600 worth of work on it. Things like a new front axle. Who needs that? Cars have two. Isn't one extra? Two new wheels. Fix the driver's side window which didn't roll down properly. Brakes and other trivial pieces of equipment as that. But, the place fixed it up very nicely and quickly (and it does drive much better now), and off I went to the MVA this morning.

And here's what was weird... when I went to listen to the radio on the drive to the MVA this morning, several pre-set buttons were fixed to what seemed to be Christian rock or other "inspirational" stations.

Yeah, it soooo wasn't me.

What happened to my classic rock and NPR?

I can only assume that when the garage was working on the car, they had to disconnect the battery at some point. That's reasonable. Then when they plugged it back in and were working on other stuff, maybe they wanted to listen to some tunes. Also reasonable. And that's when my radio was despoiled. At least three of the six buttons were set to stations that, well, are of no interest to me.

Oh well.

I managed to correct one of them for the drive back and will have to fix the others later.

And it turned out that since my car had previously been registered in MD and gone through inspection then, I didn't need to have it inspected again (never mind that the first inspection was in 1994). But I'm glad I did it because it caught things like, um, a bad axle, two bad wheels and other not-so-fun stuff.

Happily also, the visit to the MVA was almost entirely a painless process. I got my new tags, a duplicate title (from the first registration) and now we're all officially back in Merry-land!