activerecord utf8 special characters odd behavior

Since upgrading to Rails 1.2.* my ActiveRecord has not been acting properly:

When I perform a .find and give a UTF8 string as a conditional, the select statement gives me the following:

SELECT * FROM albums WHERE (name = 'Medúlla')

When I perform a .save on a model UTF8 and other characters ( . ! ) get stripped out of the query:

INSERT INTO albums (`name`) VALUES('Medlla')

The database encoding is set to utf8 in the database.yml file. character_set_database and character_set_system are both set to utf8 in the mysql database.

Thoughts?