Yes, this is very normal for NJ, it takes them FOREVER to do anything. I'm assuming that MAYBE I'll receive my NJ refund by the summer...possibly.

This I totally agree with. If I'm under the weather, and I can't work that day, I'm not schlepping to my doctor and wasting his or her time by begging for a "note".

Learning how to do things and deal with reality when you're "not feeling it" is part of life.

No, they shouldn't "get" them. They should take them under the guise of something else, as it's an important life skill to master. Like, for example, getting "sick" on the same day that you start square dancing in PE class.

They all stink. But I've always had a special, deep hatred for Rt 1. All of it.

I do not brake for "stuntz".

Yeah, sometimes getting it removed is pretty easy and not especially expensive, but sometimes it isn't. It can be relatively simple, it can also be a nightmare.

Can we "conserve" when the bill is due too? Oh, I see.

I took the defensive driving online course. It was really easy and really dumb, but it wiped out two points. Totally worth it.

I once ran over a cinder block on 287, it fell off a truck. Tire, rim, the whole nine yards.

In 2004 I bought a new car, and in the first five weeks I lost three windshields. My insurance company was not pleased, nor was I. None since then, either. The dumbest one was when a guy towing a tiny boat neglected to secure his fishing tackle, and a lead sinker bounced out of the boat directly into the center of my brand new windshield.

Video game arcade. It was sort of like a little casino, but with video games, when they were all the rage.

I do remember this, and I believe Weird NJ covered it in an old issue.

I worked there back in the early to mid 1990s. Place was packed at this time of year, super busy. It was easily the king of Central NJ malls in its day.

The first time I learned this, I was dumbfounded. Mr. Outerbridge...what are the odds on that?

New Jersey certainly has a rich and colorful history. For example, Laurence Harbor wasn't named for a harbor operated by a guy named Laurence, not at first. In 1821, Ireland banished and exiled all males named Laurence, insisting they had to change the spelling to Lawrence, as per the king's decree. The Laurences fled the mother country on tall ships, and sailed up and down the East Coast seeking refuge, finally settling in a small cove off Raritan Bay. The bay harbored the Laurences, thus gaining its name. One of those Laurences actually did settle in the area and operated the local harbor, which added to the confusion somewhat.

It's rarely mentioned outside the Old Bridge area, but Cheesequake State Park owes its unusual name to the long forgotten Cheesequake of 1856. In September of that year, a rare ea'easter blew through Raritan Bay, making landfall in Laurence Harbor. At the time, the area was dotted with highly productive dairy farms, renowned for their cheese-making capabilities. They manufactured so much cheese, they needed to erect huge cheese silos in which to store it. Some of these cheese silos stood over three hundred feet tall, and were visible for miles, often serving as navigational aids for local sailors.

The ea'ester made landfall with punishing winds, and the cheese silos, not built to withstand such an onslaught, began to topple like dominoes, crashing into the earth with tremendous thuds, which were mistaken as earthquakes by startled local residents. These residents came to refer to the incident as the "cheesequake" and "the cheeseocalypse". As salvaging the cheese was deemed impractical, the land owners opted to simply cover the cheese with dirt and garbage. Although it wreaked havoc on local lactose intolerant marine life, the aroma was mostly gone by the mid 1880s. The dairy farms, which moved west decades earlier, lay fallow, until Theodore Roosevelt set aside the site of the "cheesequake" as a nature preserve, which he visited frequently to go clamming in the park's fertile, cheese-nourished mud banks.

Local legend has it that very late on moonless nights, you can visit the site of the silos and still hear the anguished cries of those cheese-entombed workers. The Cheesequake of 1856 led to vast, sweeping reforms in both the cheese and silo-building industries. A small bronze plaque marks the site of the tallest silo and lists the names of the seven hundred and thirty-two souls who lost their lives that day in New Jersey's worst-ever cheese-related disaster.

There are more like six. Northwest Jersey isn't much like Northeast Jersey, and the Delaware Bay part of NJ isn't like the rest of South Jersey, either.