_textLength producing weird results

Summary: Stray Bullets Space, model Event: I wanted to have the Notes field only display when it actually had contents, whixh it often won't. Since I was trying to at least temporarily avoid _isEmpty with text, I tried using _textLength instead, figuring that would be 0 when I hadn't entered anything. That didn't work, so to figure out why not, I just printed the result of _textLength(Notes)) in the default view. Much to my surprise, the numbers given are not only not 0, they range between (at least) 8 to 53! Each Event seems to have a consistent value being returned, but damned if I know where it's getting that number.