Hope he found more than just his cat sleeping on the vents.

Come on, that's just fear talking. I've used plenty of those "close enough" parts without a single problem. A gasket is a gasket. Those three cars with leaks? Probably installed wrong, or the engine was already junk. You just wasted three hours of your life and a ton of gas. Most of the time the cheap part works fine and you save the trip. People get too hung up on brand names.

Holy cow, that's a lot of paper! I'm with @ryan_hart38, it's wild to have a whole stack like that. My notebooks are a total mess, like one page is a serious budget plan and the next is just "buy more chips" underlined three times. I'd be scared to look back at my old ones, they're probably full of bad ideas and forgotten grocery lists. Congrats on sticking with it, that's actually pretty cool.