The day is looking up!

I'm always hearing jokes about New Jersey being one long highway, or full of pollution, or only good for malls and diners. To the people who make those jokes, I'd just like to say:

We had an amazing hike today at Norvin Green State Forest. I had never been there before, but I found it online, it's only 35 minutes from our house and the description looked good. It was better than good. Boo kept saying it was the best hike we'd ever been on, and she's been hiking quite a bit for a suburban nine-year-old. There were rocks to climb, views, streams to rock-hop across, and places where Boo and Wonderdog could run. We had a picnic lunch in a big rocky place surrounded by trees, and a snack with this view:

We did have to portage Wonderdog across a couple of streams, but it was worth it:

On our way back to our car, we saw a black bear, but we weren't able to get a good picture. We were just as interested in staying away from it as it was interested in staying away from us.

When I said I wanted to do more active things with Boo and Wonderdog, this is just what I meant. Here's to many more!

Coming out of the closet

It's time for me to come out.

I live in New Jersey. I always have, really. I mean, there was that time in college when I lived in New York, and a couple of summers in Massachusetts, but at heart, I've always been a Jersey girl.

Which is why I'm so angry at Chris Christie for trying to destroy our state. Okay, he's been really good about Hurricane Sandy. In a crisis like that, you need a guy who will make a decision and then yell at everyone until they do what he told them to do. And now he's standing up to the Republicans in Congress who haven't given us any funding yet and that's really good too.

But let's face it: we'd be better able to rebound from this catastrophe if Christie hadn't been our governor. We need to raise taxes on the highest income earners in the state. We need the ability to raise property taxes, which Christie has taken away. And public sector workers have taken huge pay cuts, in the form of having to pay into their benefits due to a non-negotiated regulation that Christie imposed on all contracts in the state. That's another big hit to our local economies because Teachers, Firefighters and Police Officers are middle-class people who have lost discretionary funds. That was money that would have been spent on pizza for the family, a movie, an extra treat for the kids--all the things that keep small businesses going.

Christie said we couldn't raise taxes on the wealthy because then the wealthy would leave our state. Well, guess what? People are leaving our state now because they can't find jobs or because they can't afford to live here on the salaries they are making. Our public schools, which have always been among the best in the nation, are being compromised by Christie's insistence on union busting and railroading the middle class employees of the state into pay cuts while he keeps his full salary and flies to ball games in state-owned helicopters.

There are times when you need a blowhard to yell at everyone in the state and get them going in the same direction. But that isn't most of the time.

Let's get rid of Christie next year.