Lame Brain & NJ Quirks

I am a bona fide lame brain. I lost my cell phone somewhere in NJ. I have been calling around to every restaurant, shop, and motel we visited there on our last day or so. Nobody has seen it. It's no where to be found. I hate to spend money needlessly. Spending money on a new cell phone just because I lost my other one is pretty high up there on the wasteful list. It really upsets me.

On a much lighter note, here are some quirks about New Jersey that caught our attention. It's definitely a unique state. First, NJ does not appreciate left-hand turns when you're driving. They minimize them as much as possible. When driving down a road you may notice that there is a very long, defined median down the whole road. This median breaks only for another street that intersects perpendicularly. You are not allowed to turn left at those intersections, and you most certainly cannot perform U-turns. There are many signs along the road that direct you to "Make all turns from right lane". There are designated U-turn/L-turn areas before each major road. These places allow you to cross at a stop-light so you can get going in the opposite direction you were traveling prior to your U-turn. As you can imagine, these can be quite spread out along the main road, and you may find yourself traveling a very long way before you can turn around. Also, if you miss one, you got it: drive a long way further to find one again!

In keeping with their mentality that fewer turns are better than many, there are designated entrances/exits to businesses. These businesses will share the entrance with many other businesses. You'll find a large lot of signs all together, indicating that you are to turn at that entrance for where ever you are headed. This can be a problem, when once you get off at the right entrance, you can't even see the business! It's hard to know where to go at that point since the business may be pretty far away from their sign. Very frustrating.

NJ gasoline was very inexpensive compared to our FL gas. When we arrived, the average was about $3.11/gallon. That compares to our local price of $3.52 when we arrived back into town a couple days later.

And the last funny thing we noticed about NJ had us laughing up a storm. We drove on 2 major roads through Wayne, NJ. (Given their policy about U-turns and L-turns, we drove those 2 roads a LOT trying to make sense of everything!) Well, driving those 2 roads so much, we began to notice that every other business, it seemed, had incorporated the State Road # into their name. Here are some examples: Golf 23, Fuelco 23, 23 Nails, 23 Deli, Spa 23, Dodge 23, 46 Ford, etc. I could literally go on and on, as there were that many businesses taking the name of the road they were on. We just found it amusing. I hope you do too. We even went to Golf 23 and drove some golf balls one evening. I'll post pictures of that later. Right now, I have to go order a new cell phone.

Wordless Wednesday, Not!

I was going to use this picture for my first "Wordless Wednesday" but I could NOT go without saying something!

My son C found this on our back porch this afternoon. It's up high on the screen enclosure. He had crawled from the bottom all the way to the top, where he tried to make a U-turn apparently. No, it's not our pet corn snake! I believe it's the corn snake that we found a couple weeks ago, and turned it loose in our wood pile, which sits just a few feet from where he is seen in this picture. We were hoping he could help with our field mice situation. (We've found 4 mice drowned in the swimming pool in the last several weeks.)

I think this snake is stuck, and I fear for his life. I keep trying to figure out how I can get him out of that tight spot, but don't think I can. I tried really gently, to slide him out of the tight bind. It didn't seem to be working so I stopped. Maybe he can somehow wiggle his way out? (When I was a kid, my step-brother once tied a garter snake in a tight knot in a tree. He was surprised to find out later that the snake had gotten himself free.) He was still there after several hours from when he was discovered, so we'll wait and see if he's still there in the morning.

This Struck My Funny Bone

I think I've said it before, but I never know what I'll run across around here. I walked into my husband's and my bedroom the other evening and this is what I found on our bed. It's a mechanical duck! A duck decoy. C is into duck hunting. It just struck me funny and I snapped a quick picture of it.