wired in hoboken

What a day. Following the advice of my native guide (the lovely and street smart Dawn Eden), I didn’t come into The City today: temperatures were forcast in the hundred-somethings, so it wasn’t a great day to pound the paving stones of the concrete jungle.

No problem, my son and I will just go to the Liberty Science Center. But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, before all of the above, I awoke to find zero hard-drive space on the server which serves this blog. Was it hackers? Aliens with shrink-o ray guns? Inflation? Corporate raiders? No, just backups run amuck. Easy to fix, just delete the backups…well, at least most of them.

And then on to the science center. Now begins an odyssey on the perilous seas known as the New Jersey highway system. I feel uncharitable toward that highway system at the moment. And I believe my feelings are reciprocated by the highway system. It has special nets which can winnow midwesterners into odd, backwards places, like a filling station which is part junk yard, part swamp, part alternate truck route and 100% the wrong way. I drove with a laptop on the passenger seat beside me, Google maps consistently giving me hints just too slowly (Thanks to a slow cell connection via Verizon). I seethed as I drove for two and a half hours to move a mere 30 miles across the Garden State, like a the lowly Hoosier pawns we were.

But there is nothing for weariness like 50 minutes of air-conditioned IMAX. Tom Cruise narrated the new International Space Station. Something about those reclining chairs that just smoothes away the potholes (it wasn’t Tom’s voice, I assure you).

So we closed down the Science Center, and as we took to the New Jersey Turnpike our luck changed for the better. Shortly we were ensconced in the food court at some mall (was it the Newport Mall? Who cares), eating from Sbarro’s and some Mongolian Wok type place. We finished just in time for The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl in 3D.

After the movie we moved almost without effort over to the Hoboken PATH station, parked, walked to the Hoboken Panera, bought something, sat down at two laptops and the rest is blogging history.

Funny how we get connected to the Internet. I hated this town for a while this afternoon. But now, with a little caffeine, and nice fat link to the Information Super Highway, I’m thinking New Jersey can’t be all that bad afterall.