Author: Joe

Dined at Chuck E. Cheese yesterday. Went on my lunch break with brave co-workers: Jen, Sean, Geoff and Brittney. We had our lunch club meeting there. It was pretty cool actually. Jen brought coupons so we got a good deal on pizza and an ample supply of tokens for gaming joy.

At first it was a bit awkward, apparently they don’t get many adults with no accompanying children to spend their lunches there. But once we figured out the system of ordering pizzas and getting some find beverages it wasn’t too bad. First I challenged Geoff to a race in Mario Kart. Sadly after a few laps I broke the steering wheel, a steering wheel 507 error to be specific. Turned the wheel way too hard and from then on remembered that most of the games are designed for children and I should take it a bit lightly on them.

Skee ball was fun. Very difficult for me to break. Though I’m not very good at it, but once I figured out to roll them a lot softer my score began to go up. The bear hunting game was great. You shot bears with a shotgun light gun. Not sure why poor bears were the target in this game, but it was really fun. Sean had the high score and was a natural bear hunter. Though we were both guilty of shooting innocent cubs on a number of occasions.

Everyone seemed to have a good time. I was afraid that we’d really seem out of place and want to leave early, but we used up all the tokens. Pizza was terrible so in the future you might want to BYOP, but playing arcade games on a lunch break turned out to be quite the adventure.

The Shepherd and I decided to take a random road trip today. After a few minutes of research courtesy of roadsideamerica.com we decided to visit a dinosaur statue, a huge champagne bottle as well as a freak show museum.

We drove up Route 9 in hopes of finding all 3 landmarks. Driving wasn’t too bad, we really needed something to eat, so that was the first mission of the day. After driving by numerous diners and what looked like other fine eateries we randomly pulled into Sweet Jenny’s Restaurant, Ice Cream Parlour and miniature golf.

It was like a log cabin inside, with lots of Elvis photos about the place. I ordered a Porky Pig and was glad I did. One of the finer sandwiches I’ve ever had. If you’re ever in the neighborhood I recommend you stop in and get one.

A few minutes later we then drove by the dinosaur statue. We didn’t stop and take any photos. It was a terrible let down. Nothing impressive about it at all, but at least we were able to locate it and got a good sandwich as a result. A few minutes down the road was the giant champagne bottle, which there’s a couple of across NJ.

We then departed towards Seaside Heights in hopes of finding some freak show museums. We were able to navigate to the boardwalk all right, but it was really, really cold outside and decided to abort the mission. It was a very creepy atmosphere on the boardwalk, and I got heckled by a carnie so it’s best we got out of there while we still could. Cops were everywhere, never seen so many in such a small empty area.

While the landmarks were somewhat of a letdown, the food was exceptional and this was another fine random adventure.

We just had our holiday gift exchange at work today. This year I thought it’d be cool if we had such an event, so we tried organizing a little event. Jen (the Admiral) and Sean (the Commandant) and I formed a holiday gift exchange committee with the sole purpose of organizing the world’s greatest office holiday gift exchange ever.

We got a little daring and went with a gift swap versus going with the traditional Polyanna style exchange. It went really well, with every participant having had a good time. I initially got a punching bag and Hamilton Mall gift certificate that was later taken from me. But in the end I wound up with a massive inflatable moose head. It’s awesome!

The gift swap was really cool, and I have I feeling we’ll do something similar to it again next xmas.