...there's no place like the Turnpike

A displaced Jersey girl who adjusted to life in Kentucky just in time to head back home.

Monday, June 30, 2008

Flashes of a young jerseyaikidogirl

I don't know why this came back to me suddenly.

You know how little kids will obsess over a movie and watch it over and over and over and over?

When I was seven or eight, that movie for me was the live action musical version of Peter Pan. I used to watch it two or three times in a weekend. Sometimes, two or three times in a day. I knew the words to all the songs and would sing along quietly if my sisters weren't around.

I don't know what caused the obsession and I don't know when or why it stopped.

I do know that it was gone by the time I was 22 and was watching Center Stage every Saturday.

Sunday, June 29, 2008

Childhood Revisited

For whatever reason, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory has been on TV a lot lately. The mildly creepy Johnny Depp one and the old 70s Gene Wilder one. It's the old one that got me a little bummed.

The problem with watching things that you enjoyed as a child when you're an adult is that the jaded adult eye kind of ruins the magic of it all. I'm not just talking about how fake things look or the inability to suspend disbelief. I am talking about the other themes that you suddenly get.

With Willy Wonka it's not just the drug-trippy nature of the whole thing or the horrible things that happen to the children. It just all seems...bad. Every detail is suddenly harder to take. I found myself thinking that Grampa Joe sounded drunk the whole time.

I remember a night my freshman year of college when we all piled into someone's dorm room to drink hot chocolate and watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I don't know who started it, but suddenly we turned it from a happy childhood tale into a tale of racism and the man keeping Rudolph and the inexplicably gay wannabe dentist elf down.

It was depressing. I'm afraid to go back and watch Song of the South.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Part of the herd

Have you ever noticed how people's moods tend to feed off of each other?

I'm not just talking about how one giddy person can make everyone else silly or how when one person is in a snit the whole office goes down hill fast. Other emotions are catching, as well.

What got me thinking about this was tonight at aikido practice. I don't know who started it, to be honest it might have been me. But I do know that we all had really long days at work and we were all kind of tired. We got going (just three of us and the instructor) and for some reason we all settled into this really intense rhythm. No one cracked a smile for about 15 minutes. We were all staring each other down.

It was scary.

Monday, June 09, 2008

Robbery near the highway

This is not just another rant against rising gas prices. It's been done to death. This is a rant against a more subtle way the gas stations have started to pillage our bank accounts.

Around here, the new trend is for gas stations to recoup the cost of running your credit card by charging six to ten cents extra per gallon for the privilege of paying by credit card. This pradctice annoys the living daylights out of me so I have been trying to swing my business over to the few remaining stations that don't do this.

As though they know what I am thinking, the gas stations have gotten more clever. I pulled into what I thought was the cheapest station in the area yesterday. It was only after the pump was in my tank that I noticed the (much smaller) sign informing me that it was ten cents more per gallon to use a credit card. This was, of course, after the man had already run my card.

I doubt that central New Jersey is the only place in the world where this is happening. Where is the outrage? Imagine the rioting in the streets if the grocery store or a department store started charging people more to pay with a credit card.

Friday, June 06, 2008

Safety first?

I returned from a week at a conference to learn that there'd been an "incident" with my co-op student.

She's a nice kid. Really bright, really eager and really careful in the lab. So you can imagine my surprise when I got an email while I was away telling me that she had burned herself.

Apparently the story is that she reached across someone and passed her arm near the open flame of a bunsen burner. It's something I've done million times myself. It never even really gets that warm, and I've certainly never burned myself. But when she did it, her disposable lab coat caught fire. It melted to her arm and that's what caused the actual burn.

Let me explain this again. We don't get permanent lab coats for temporary employees. We give them thin disposable ones. I always knew they didn't do a good job of protecting you from spills and things. You know, what you'd expect a lab coat to do.

Permanent lab coats are also flame retardant. Not only is this not true of the temporary ones, but it appears they are more flammable than regular fabric or human flesh or, possibly, some low grade fireworks.

Who makes these things?

Thursday, June 05, 2008

the prodigal blogger returns

I admit it, I've been a slacker. Big time.

In my defense, I was on vacation (more in a minute) and then I had to travel for work. But now I'm home.

We went on a Mediterranean cruise for eight days. It's always been my dream to go to Santorini and it was the most beautiful place I've ever seen....ever.

I'll write more about it soon. For now, I owe the poor boy that I left for the week some attention.