Just wanted to let everyone know that I finally got this solved. And thanks to everyone for the help. There were several issues pointed out in this thread that helped me to build a more solid UTF-8 compliant app.
So... the MAJOR problem I was having was in the jQuery code itself. It was the reason data was being stored as %u55DC (and things that looked like that). I got some code from a site that had some precautionary escaping going on. Once I removed the escape() function I started to see things being stored correctly. Thanks again! Chris.
