Team Challenge Fundraiser - The Waiting Room - Rahway, NJ

In case you missed it, I have been known to run a race or two. I have also been known to do stupid things to raise money for a good cause. With the help of the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America, I get to combine those in Team Challenge. Team Challenge, like Team in Training, combines training for an endurance event with fundraising for a cause. I chose Team Challenge since my mom has suffered from ulcerative colitis for the past 20 years. You can read more about that here.

To help raise the money, three of my teammates and I held a fundraising even at the world famous Waiting Room in Rahway, NJ. A bar featured once before on Pics of Me in Front of Stuff was gracious enough to host our fundraiser.
Essentially, we raffled off several prize baskets raffled that had been donated by local businesses. Luckily, many of our friends and co-workers came out to support us for the evening. It is pretty easy to support your friends by eating, drinking, and being merry.

One of the big events of the night was the pushup challenge between Kate 'Flex' Vogel and me, using the name Beefsteak.

I will leave it to you to imagine the outcome!

Grave of Unknown Woman - Rahway, NJ

Do you know why they put fences around cemeteries?


People are dying to get in.



Do you know why I tell such lame jokes?


Me neither.


Clearly, the proprietors of the cemeteries in central NJ are not locking their gates because I seem to keep wandering into them. Fences make good neighbors, but they are only useful if you lock the gates to prevent riff-raff like me wandering in.


Do you think Anthony Bourdain or Samantha Brown or Bridget Marquardt got their starts posing in front of the resting place of random dearly departed or calling themselves riff-raff? Probably not and neither did Dhani Jones or Andrew Zimmern. Maybe I am gunning for fame on basic cable in the wrong way - there is no show called World's Sexiest Grave Sites or No Dead-servations and hopefully there never will be. Unless Travel Channel wants to pay me to star in those shows... I am listening Travel Channel.


But enough about my desire for being followed by a camera crew as I spout bad jokes and self-deprecation around the globe, I am here to talk about something far more important - me visiting random crap in and around NJ. Most recently my meandering has taken me to Rahway, NJ home of the pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co., Inc. as well as the childhood home of Carl Sagan. Featured in Weird, NJ is the grave of an unknown woman who died in 1887. The unknown woman is the victim of a murder which, even after 200 years, remains unsolved. The victim, described by police as a young woman in her early 20's with blue eyes and brown hair, was found frozen in the mud on Rahway's Central Avenue early on the morning of March 25, 1887, her throat slashed and her face badly beaten. She had worn a feather-trimmed green dress, yellow gloves, "foreign good shoes", jewelry, and a fur cape, and had been carrying a basket of eggs. The locals of Rahway raised money for a gravestone and her remains have been found in Rahway Cemetery ever since. Unfortunately, her identity has never been found to include on the grave marker and it probably never will be. I doubt the Rahway Police Department spends much time on 200 year old cases.

In death, the poor woman's grave serves as a landmark for publications like Weird NJ or blogs like Pics of Me in Front of Stuff to feature. Though a unique achievement, I am sure it is one this poor woman never hoped to achieve!

Picture with a pseudo-quasi-celebrity...

Celebrity is a bit of a stretch for this photo-op...


Holli the K-Rock Girl pictured below between Gabe, me, and a looming Andreas, is featured on 92.3 K-Rock's website. There are pictures featuring her in a bathing suit and you can learn that her favorite drink is coffee and her she has leftover Chinese in her refrigerator.


But then again, if you look hard enough you can find photos of me in a bathing suit on the internet and I can tell you right now that my favorite drink is beer.


What I really mean to say is, it was a busy weekend and I did not find an interesting place nearby to be featured in picsofmeinfrontofstuff.blogspot.com so this will have to do. This photo comes from the Waiting Room in Rahway, NJ which can be a very interesting place after a Grilled Chicken Deluxe (think delicious chicken sandwich) and some Sierra Nevada IPA.


I am sure Holli is much more interesting than any old historic landmark anyway.

Geocaching - What nerds do when they want to go outside!

Maybe the title is a little harsh, but I did take a break from my chemist job to use my GPS and find a plastic container next to an abandoned lot...





Yeah, that's my nerd coat right there.


For those of you who don't know, geocaching is essentially treasure hunting with a GPS. On geocaching.com there are a plethora of lists of caches and their coordinates. A geocacher (usually a nerd like me) can download the coordinates to their GPS and then go look for the cache's hiding place. Once the cache is found, there is usually a log and often items to trade. In this instance, I left a Sponge Bob Cachepants pathtag and took a mini-teddy bear. The idea is the next cache I find or the next nerd who finds this particular cache will trade more items.



Essentially, it's a modern treasure hunt mixed with a swap meet. I like to compare it to real-life World of Warcraft. Though I do not play WoW, the idea of going on a quest to search for treasure seems pretty comparable between the two. That and the nerds...


Regardless of the nerdiness level, geocaching is a good excuse to go outside and see exotic locales like Rahway, NJ...

At least it was good excuse to get outside!