Well, it's official, I always thought I might not be parental material, and now I realize I might have been right. A bit of back story is in order I suppose. Lately whenever we leave the kids together playing invariably one will start whining / crying about something. And it's usually because one of them has done something that's upset the other. Don't get me wrong, there are times when they can play together and be sweet to one another, but more often than not one will do something to irritate the other. Sometimes it's something minor like "he pushed" or "she took my toy and won't give it back" or something along those lines. The same old same old I suspect (but have no direct firsthand experience) that most siblings do to one another.
So today when we got back from church Ginger and the kids were going to go over to Ken and Karen's to see Amanda for a play date. The kids had gone out to the garage to get into the car and Ginger was in the library looking up a restaurant to order pizza so she could pick it up on the way over. So then I heard Quinn crying from the garage. I started walking towards the garage and I could hear him crying still and a little louder, and all I could think of was what in the world are those two doing to each other now. So imagine my surprise when I opened the door and Quinn was crying outside the car and he had his finger stuck in the car door hinge that was closed. My heart literally sank. And then I completely freaked and I do mean completely. I moved and opened the car door and got his finger out. Luckily it was just tip of his pinky, but it was already bruised and now Quinn was really crying (and to be honest at this point, who could blame him). I yelled for Ginger and then I started having what I can only assume was an episode of post traumatic stress disorder.
See, back when I was young (sometime around sixth grade) I did something similar and shut my thumb in a car door. The difference I guess was it wasn't just the tip of my thumb, but at the joint and I was old enough to know to open the door myself (unlike Quinn who claims he wasn't able to reach to the door handle). Oh yea, and in my case my thumb started bleeding. Profusely. To the point where I had never seen that much blood exiting my body before. I ended up needing several stitches and the whole incident apparently scarred me much worse than I would have thought since seeing something vaguely similar happen to Quinn totally freaked me out. Luckily Ginger maintained her cool during the whole incident and was the voice of reason. And later she did comment that I was uncharacteristically out of it during the incident and that she had never seen me act like that before.
We called the pediatrician and they told us that since it wasn't bleeding that it might be fractured or it might be bleeding under the nail and we needed to monitor it to determine whether we would have to take Quinn to the hospital to drill through the nail to relieve the pressure. We gave Quinn some ibuprofen while we were waiting, and after a while it didn't look any worse and Quinn was actually able to slightly bend it. So not hospital visit yet, although we may revisit that tomorrow depending on how it looks. It took over an hour for Quinn to completely settle down and be back to his somewhat normal self. I think it also probably took that long for the ibuprofen to kick in.
Since then though I have been completely racked with guilt over the fact that I didn't react faster when I first heard him crying. Realistically I wouldn't have gotten there more than maybe 5 or 10 seconds earlier at most. But that doesn't change the fact that now I feel like I really dropped the ball on this one. Luckily Quinn has seemed pretty chipper for the rest of the day. He eventually felt well enough to go over to Amanda's for their play date and Ginger says he was very active there and didn't complain about his finger hurting during the visit. I went ahead and went to work for a bit while they were gone and then the whole group went out for dinner to Coastal Flats. When I saw his finger at dinner it did look like the bruise had spread a little and gotten a bit worse, but still wasn't taking up the entire fingernail yet. I'm pretty sure with this amount of trauma his fingernail is going to completely fall off at some point soon.
Normally I would have led the post with a this picture of Catherine who looked really cute in her dress she wore to church (at least in my opinion). Too bad the events that followed made it hard to focus on the positives of the day.
Since Ben has busted my chops a couple of time now about lack of posting, I figured I would explain. First, it was only two days of no posts. I think that's allowed. I've been nursing a cold, but that's not the reason. You can blame Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. It's a Wii game I got for Christmas. It's a first person shooter. I think it pales in comparison to the Quake series, but it's good enough to keep me interested I suppose. This is the first Metroid game I've ever played, so one aspect of the game that I found odd is the character has the ability to morph into a small ball. And this is seen as a good thing. The main character is female and I don't even want to think about the contortions required to get into the shape of small foot tall ball (or maybe I do want to think about it, I'm torn). I don't know if this trait is logically explained in some previous game, but for now I'm just going with it.
I'm not a big fan of the controls though. In Quake you could strife and you would use the mouse to turn left and right and look up and down and would shoot at the middle of the screen. In Metroid you move forward and move left and right with the nunchuck and the Wii control is used for free look and turning, but you shoot not in the center of the screen, but where the Wii cursor is. Since your turn rate is limited it's a bit like playing Quake using a joystick (which I hate to admit that I actually did initially for the longest time until a thorough butt whooping by a keyboard player made me see the error of my ways). It may be possible to adjust the turning sensitivity, but I haven't looked into it too much. If you played a lot of Quake the controls can take some getting used to. Plus the storyline is a bit lacking. They try and give the impression that you have free will by letting you go anywhere, but in all locations other than the current objective area you'll run into limits of how far you can progress without the proper weapon to clear the way, and you only acquire the weapon as the overall story objectives are cleared. Sadly even though the play style is not quite to my lacking I still find myself being sucked into wanting to finish it (I attribute this somewhat to my potential obsessive compulsive nature when it comes to playing video games at times). I had even planned on going into work for several hours a day this past week and only made it in one time (this is not only because of the game, but the kids and a puzzle we're working on that's been insanely difficult).
So aside from the Metroid I should play catch up on what's been going on around here for the past several days. Ginger's family left around lunch time on Thursday and my Mom left later that night also. The kids have been pushed to their endurance limits I believe in getting so little sleep lately. At this point Quinn seems to be on edge constantly. Part of that though is because I think he got used to getting his way a lot when everyone was up, and now that they're gone he's having trouble readjusting to fact that Mom and Dad rule the roost. Catherine got a hair cut yesterday although being a guy I really didn't notice a difference (I included a picture of her and Quinn below, you can see if you notice it's shorter). And several of the new Christmas toys have already been broke (just minor pieces on the Playmobil castle and something else).
We also had Ben come over tonight and we were planning on going out to dinner. Which the kids were excited about since that meant they were going to get to play their new Nintendo DSes. Quinn even asked if we could go where it would take the longest to prepare the food. Turns out everywhere had a 90 minute to two hour wait though, so we ate at home (although we let the kids play the DS while they waited, that's what the picture above is from). And since we stayed in we got some quick lessons from Ben on the Mac user interface (which I must admit is lightyears ahead of Windows). I also got to hear all about his new job in which he gets to do lots of coding (I'm jealous). I scattered a couple of pictures of ornaments throughout the post. I would be interested to hear which one people like the most. I'm partial to the second one myself.
The subprime mortgage crisis hits close to home today as default loans cause low quality icing to be used in the creation of the Gingerbread house resulting in the roof collapsing.
Got my car back. Will and Mary drove it back up on Thursday. They even got it cleaned. It's cleaner now that I suspect it's ever been since I first took over driving it. In fact, it's so clean at the moment that I almost feel bad when I just toss some trash over into the passenger seat. Mind you, it doesn't stop me from doing it, but I feel bad about it ever so briefly.
We got Ginger's computer online via the wireless network. Had to go out and buy a new network adapter from Best Buy that had a mac logo on it (so it cost about twice as much as the other adapters). We had tried going to the Apple store to get a Apple brand card for it, but the model that we have is apparently odd in that no one at the Apple store knew exactly what it would take to get it online. We got suggestions of buying and Airport Extreme card, and then having to possible purchase an antenna which we wouldn't be allowed to install, but then they said they weren't sure that would even work. So I eventually flat out asked what could I buy that I would be assured would connect it to the network, and no one knew. Lovely. Once we got the card getting it on the network was a pain since the wireless router is downstairs connected to my dead computer. And I have the thing locked down so that only specified mac addresses can connect and no changes can be made to the router wirelessly. So I ended up having to move that up to the laptop, then spend a couple minutes trying to guess how to log onto it and what password I would have used. Eventually I got in though and configured it to accept the Mac, and while I was there I configured it so the Wii could connect too. Although having the Will online is significantly less exciting than I thought it would be.
Once we got everything networked the next task was consolidating all the iTunes libraries Ginger has on the computers in the house onto the Mac. I think that task is done. And we moved over all her data from the old computer, so now she has almost no space left on her drive (she still has 17 Gig free, but considering we started with a 160 Gig drive it didn't take us long to get down to only 10% left).
I will admit that even though the folks at the Apple store were at a loss for my particular problem, the couple of people we talked to in the store were very knowledgeable. We even got an answer as to why the tape player interface we have for the iPod in the car results in massive feedback from our cell phones when they're communicating with the cell towers (at least I think we got an answer, I won't know for sure until we test it out and it actually works).
Christmas morning started way too early for my tastes. The kids were up and going before 6:30. The sun wasn't even up yet, I still don't know why they woke up, other than I suspect Quinn had to use the bathroom maybe and then that was the end of that. Then it was a matter of getting all the adults up and going.
The kids did their usual whirlwind of destruction method of present unwrapping. A couple of gifts managed to distract them from the thought of opening more presents however briefly. This year we evidently decided we needed to singlehandedly keep Playmobil in business. Quinn got a Playmobil train set, Catherine got a Playmobil hospital and my Mom gave the both the Playmobil castle. These were the big ticket Playmobil items. They both got several smaller items also.
Once the kids realized that we weren't going to be opening all the Playmobil immediately and spreading the hundreds of tiny pieces all across the room they got back to the business of tearing through other presents until they got to the stomp rockets.
Much to my surprise this small $12 present captured their attention enough that we had to immediately go outside and try them out for a bit. It was a tad cold out though, so I didn't let the kids stay out for more than 10 minutes before hustling them back inside.
My Mom got some pictures of the kids (some I took and some professional ones also) and a copy of volume one (of one so far) of my blog book. When they hear that I got a 100% increase in sales during December I suspect I'll soon be on the New York Times bestseller list.
I'm pretty sure other people got some decent presents, but I got completely distracted putting together a puzzle ball I was given, so I didn't notice a lot of what the other presents were.
Both kids got a Nintendo DS and three games from their grandparents (that would be three games apiece, not three to share). Catherine's DS is pink (of course) and Quinn's is red. I'm not sure the DS was Catherine's favorite present of the day, but it was definitely the one that held her interest more than any other. From then on every time I saw Catherine she had her head buried over the DS using the stylus to play some game. Now the kids normally don't get to play video games, but Ginger apparently made an exception for today since it was Christmas.
My uncle Frank, aunt Mary and my cousins Will and Jo Beth showed up just before lunch.
After lunch we introduced my uncle to the Wii where much to Will's chagrin he beat the snot out of Will at the boxing game. I will say I suspect Will's controller was once again defective since he bequeathed it to me and I was also soundly beat by Frank (that's our excuse and we're sticking to it). I did managed to get a knock down in and lasted until round two, but the end result was eventually Mii on the ground.
At some point when we were downstairs playing the Wii all Ginger's family decided that since they had been up so early they were going to go nap. So they missed out on another round of present opening. We were trying to get done quickly so they could leave because Jo Beth has work tomorrow and wanted to get back home at a decent hour. After another yearly rousing round of what crazy thing will Frank buy this year it was time for them to go. We tried doing a big group photo before they left, but we only took a couple shots and neither turned out particularly well.
Too bad their car wouldn't start though. So next thing we know they're all back inside and sitting around waiting on the locksmith AAA was going to send over to try and get the car started. If you think a locksmith showing up on Christmas would take a while, you would be right. So during that time we played some more Wii. This time was had Mary play, who managed to get a higher Wii training age than any age I had previously seen (she scored an 79). Although once she played regular bowling she did okay (not good enough to beat Quinn who stopped by and offhandedly bowled a 201 to beat everyone there). Eventually the locksmith did show up, but wasn't able to fix the problem and claims the problem is the ignition has gone bad. So I let them borrow my car for the drive home and now their car is sitting dead outside our house (I think I got the lousy end of this Christmas gift).
As I was up late writing my blog entry for yesterday I happened to notice something outside my window.Hope everyone has a Merry Christmas!
Most of our out of town guests arrived today. We now have Ginger's parents, her brother, her grandmother and my Mom here. Tomorrow we're expecting my uncle, aunt and cousins. Nothing says the holidays like a house full of people and more cookies and cakes than you can shake a stick at.
All the present are now wrapped and aligned along the family room. There simply wasn't room under the tree itself for this many presents.
When we first moved in the room designated as my office didn't have a working cable outlet. Because of that there was a cable wire that stretched halfway across the basement to the cable modem, then there was a network wire going from the cable modem across the rest of the basement to my office where the where our firewall / router was. I believe Ben was here at the time when I first set it up. Ginger made some comment about not wanting this to be a permanent setup. I assured her it wouldn't be and that I would have it taken care of in a week, two weeks max. Ben gave me this sideways glance that basically said "Riiiight." Once Ginger was out of earshot I believe Ben said something like "That's going to be there for a while". Well, it took a while, but I'm finally to the point where I can soon move it.
See it wasn't too long after that (I'll admit it was more than two weeks, maybe a month or two) I checked out the cable outlet in my office. I could see the hole the wire went down from the storage room. But the hole was about 25 feet away from where I could see into the space between two support beams. The space between the beams was about a feet wide and vertically there was about 9 inches of space. So there was no way I could crawl that far down the shaft to where the hole was (in addition to the space being too small there were nails sticking out of the floor above). The wire was also apparently stapled or connected somehow and I couldn't just reach in with something and grab it to pull it out.
About eight months ago I had borrowed a line tracer from Matt at work. After using that I knew the cable wire in my office went through the ceiling, across the roof of the bathroom along the wall of the storage closet and then across the bathroom ceiling again back into the downstairs guest bedroom. Basically those two outlets were connected to one another and nothing else and thus didn't work (at least I couldn't locate anywhere else they might be connected to something else). But the secret was I knew the wire was accessible now from the storage room.
After the trip to Home Depot yesterday I had some cable wire and connectors. So today I got that wire out from behind the wall in the storage closet and cut it. I took one of the split off connections from the cable and stretched it over to this new area and added in a splitter (I eventually ended up having to run the wire that I had unconnected over to this new splitter also). The end of the story being that after almost three years I have finally gotten cable access in my office and will soon be able to move the cable modem (just need to find an open outlet first, I'm sure that won't take long though).
Well, looks like today Ginger has contracted whatever it was that Quinn had. At least she's not throwing up though (knock on wood). So that just leaves me that hasn't gotten it yet. I feel like dead man walking. I know it's coming and there's nothing really I can do about it. And hey, two whole days till Christmas. If I haven't already gotten it I can just see getting whatever it is right on Christmas. That would just be lovely.
So we didn't really do much today except hang around the house. The kids are still fascinated with the idea of playing chess. Both Quinn and Catherine have been playing the chess game on the new (new being relative) mac computer. Today Quinn discovered the hint button under the menu options and now has been playing using that a lot. Quinn has also been pushing hard for us to play the four person chess game. We may end up playing that some tomorrow. And while Ginger was taking a nap Quinn hacked into the mac (ok, there's no password) and found the Dora game. The Dora game was a Christmas present Ginger let them have yesterday since this sickness stuff has them trapped at home all day. The other thing we did today was to start working on a puzzle. It's a pretty simple Santa drinking Coca Cola one with only 500 pieces. I could have finished it tonight, but I don't want to be accused of taking over the puzzle or being a puzzle hog (I tell you, one time years ago you take a piece and hide it so you can put in the last piece and you never hear the end of it).
As far as the new mac goes I'm having a lot of trouble determining what I need to buy in order to get it on the network. It's not just a matter of buying a wireless network card or adapter, I have to find one that has drivers that support the G5 mac using an older version of Mac OS (10.3.9). I'm dreading the thought of actually having to drive to the Mac store which is in Tysons. And I'm dreading that for a couple of reasons. The first and most obvious is the crowds. Going to Tysons Mall two days before Christmas? Ugh. The other reason is I suspect that they won't tell me if there's a cheap solution out here (like someone has drivers for a chip in a card that's cheap) and I'll have to buy all kinds of overpriced stuff.
Quinn seems better today. Still not back to 100%, but definitely seems to be on the mend. Although that cough he's had is now worse than it was before. I suspect it's the same thing Ginger had that I also have. I still haven't completely shaken the cough myself and I think I'm entering week four now. Catherine apparently complained today that her stomach was hurting some, so I don't know if that means she's already worked through the virus or if it's just about to let loose.
Ever since Ginger started playing with her new Mac computer the kids have been fascinated by the chess game on it. So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised today when I got home and the kids were having Ginger teach them chess on a board. If nothing else it'll be something interesting to do with them over the break for a bit.
First, a bit of clarification. Since people seemed to think I didn't like Bourne Ultimatum let me say that I liked the movie, I just didn't like the movie. I didn't think it was bad, and it was a good popcorn action flick (even if I didn't have any popcorn during the movie and had brownies instead). I just didn't think it was as good as the first one.
Moving on to today. I picked Quinn up from school this afternoon and we attempted to go to the mall to purchase some Christmas gifts for Ginger. This turned into a complete disaster. Ginger was looking for some metal espresso scoop from William and Sonoma, and we were in the store for like 40 minutes. First they couldn't find it, then they said according to the computers they had it in stock and they would go look for it. Then we didn't hear from them for like 30 minutes. It did kind of irk me when the woman that was helping us eventually came out and was looking for stuff for other people. At least tell me you didn't find it. Then they couldn't find out if any other stores had it either (although at this point would I really believe their computer inventory system even if they said another store did have it?). So the whole trip ended up being a complete waste. All of which means Quinn and I still need to come up with something buy Ginger.
And tonight was bitter sweet. I watched what will probably be the last episode of Journeyman. Since the writer's strike is still in full swing and NBC didn't exercise the option to pick up more episodes it certainly appears as if Journeyman is out of time. It was a fun series while it lasted and at least it didn't end on some cliffhanger and even managed to give the series a minor bit of closure.
At ballet class this past week Catherine's group gave a mini performance and Ginger recorded it. Since I don't have a computer at the moment capable of video editing this is just the raw video she captured (if people want to see shorter / edited videos I will gladly accept donations towards a new computer). In case you can't see where I'm going with this I'm trying to say the video is long (over six minutes) and anyone not family probably has no interest in watching it.
Sunday night when Ben was over we all watched The Bourne Ultimatum. It's a continuation of the previous Bourne films, which Ben been told us are nothing like the books. The film has a lot of action sequences and Matt Damon does his impersonation of a Terminator robot throughout the movie as he keeps taking serious hits and yet still gets up and keeps on going. He's like Jack Bauer in that sense. There's a lot of action sequences, and stuff happens fast and and you have to really pay attention. The film has some negatives though. Bourne lives his life off the grid, but they don't explain how he got independently wealthy so that he can buy all this stuff using cash all the time. They also use the fast panning shaky camera shots a lot. I don't know who decided that shooting style was all trendy, but they need to have some sense smacked into them (in case it's not obvious, I'm not a fan of that particular style of filming). Seriously, are they saving that much in the budget by not having a stabilizer for the camera? Splurge a little people! The other thing that irked me some was there's a lot of "I knew you knew I knew that, so I did this" type of stuff going on. I don't mind anticipating someone's actions, but anticipating the fact that someone will anticipate an action and then doing something that counters that bothers me since you're relying too much on the person doing the anticipation to not be an idiot. I mean let's face facts, some of these folks are government employees, they're not all going to be the sharpest tools in the shed. The other thing that kind of bothered me is that it's really obvious sometimes when they're using a stunt double. You'll see Bourne driving a motorcycle and the scene will deliberately not show anything higher than his waist. That's to be expected in a film with this many action sequences, but it was still distracting at times.
Overall if you like straight up action flicks with lots of shooting, stuff blowing up and car chases, you might like this since there's always one of those things going on in this film. I will say I liked the first Bourne film (Bourne Identity) a lot, and I personally don't think either of the follow on films have lived up to that first film.
I missed out on seeing the kids tonight. I started getting a migraine at work before coming home and by the time I made it home it was getting to be unbearable. So I downed some extra strength Excedrin, sequestered myself to the bedroom, doused the lights and slept for almost four hours. I'm still not feeling 100%, but at least now I'm able to function. So my plan is to grab something to eat, put up a quick post (using material I wrote over the weekend) and then head back to bed.
I watched Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End the other night. I know what you're thinking, but JamesF, you have to watch Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest first (what's that? You weren't going to say that? And add to that you couldn't care less and have already closed the browser since it's another movie review? I can see that point of view I suppose). Well, I watched Dead Man's Chest back when it was released over the summer, but evidently never wrote anything about it (I know, shocker). Now I know based on user review polls that people didn't like these two movies as much as the first one, and that they liked the third one the least of all. But I have to say I found all these films to be highly entertaining. I will admit to having an issue when I started watching At World's End since I couldn't remember all the minute details that occurred in Dead Man's Chest, but it doesn't take much to get back up to speed.
It's pretty obvious they filmed Dead Man's Chest and At World's End at the same time. And I imagine this worked out well for them, because even though At World's End didn't break box office records like they were hoping it would the movie still made some serious money (yes, it barely recouped it's production cost of 300 million domestically, but it made almost a billion dollars worldwide). Now think about that for a second. At World's End cost 300 million dollars to make. Three hundred million dollars. Add to that the 225 million it cost to make Dead Man's Chest and that's over half a billion dollars to basically tell one story. That's quite simply an insane amount of money. Was it worth it? I'm not sure the end product looks like a half a billion dollars, but I will admit I thoroughly enjoyed the movies. The movies are fun and don't take themselves too seriously. You get your money's worth too, both movies are long (for movies these days anyway) since Dead Man's Chest is two and a half hours and At World's End is almost three hours. And hey, Johnny Depp really does a good job with the role of Captain Jack Sparrow.
Now being a movie about Pirates there's a lot of backstabbing and double crosses going on throughout the movie. In fact I can see how people might have had some trouble following it seeing as how in At World's End alliances change every couple of minutes. I don't know why I was surprised by this, but from watching some of the out takes it's obvious that a lot of the movie was green screened. Given the shooting local would be out on a boat, this makes sense. And I think it's a testament to how good of a job they do with the backgrounds that this never really occurred to me while watching the movie itself.
I would say the Pirate movies definitely fall into the big blockbuster category. They're big over the top epic stories with dashes of humor thrown into the mix. I think unlike some block busters though the story that's being told isn't too bad either. Sure, it's completely unrealistic, but it plays within it's own set of rules and does so very well. In fact, I would say the only thing about the movies I didn't like that much was Keira Knightley. She's too wafer thin for my tastes, and while she does a decent enough job acting at being tough, she's simply not really believable in the role. But that's about the only real flaw I have with the movies. Oh yea, if you left and didn't stay until after the credits of At The World's End then you missed a minor scene. It doesn't add much to the story, but it does end up putting more of a traditional Disney spin on the movie.
Ginger's parent's headed home today. But not before Ginger, the kids and them went out to lunch at Coastal Flats. Since they were also going to be going shopping I decided to skip this outing. And I will add that while Ginger and I went to my company's holiday party last night, Ginger's parents took the kids out to eat. And people think I'm making it up when I say Ginger's Mom likes to eat out when she's up here.
The other big event of the day was moving the 60 inch rear projection television from upstairs to the basement. To assist in this Herculean effort I enlisted the aid of Ben, who was coming over to drop off the Mac computer of his we're buying. Our first idea was that we were going to take the TV outside, around the house and into the basement. And I even spent about an hour outside before Ben came over taking apart the sliding door to the basement. Then once Ben was here we revisited the idea of taking the TV down the stairs. Mind you, it was just the two of us. Somehow that was the course of action we decided on and since it was my TV I felt like I should be on the bottom since if it fell and crushed whoever was on the bottom it didn't seem fair that it would be Ben since it wasn't his TV. Believe it or not the idea of taking pictures of this event was mentioned, but I didn't like the idea since the pictures could have simply been a reminder to me of how I made such a foolish decision and had paralyzed or killed myself. Somehow (and I'm still not exactly sure how to be honest) we managed to get the television down the stairs and no one was injured (although there were a couple of times I was sure I was about to slip from the weight and thought the whole thing was going to come crashing down on me). Now that the television is in the basement, I've decided if we ever sell the house that TV will be conveying to the new owners. I don't want to deal with moving that thing again. And now that I've said that, you just watch and see if it doesn't up and die on me just to spite me and I'll be force to move it again.
Once the TV was all situated Ginger set it up and hooked up all the cables. While she was doing that I headed outside and reconnected all the pieces of the sliding door I had taken apart. After that we felt we had to test the television out and hooked up the Wii to play some. At this point Quinn hadn't tried any new foods and was going to be missing out. What all the adults found amusing was as Catherine, Ben and I started playing Quinn started yelling to Ginger "Mom, I need something new to try right now!" Ginger headed upstairs and fixed him a jelly sandwich. Now I know you're thinking how could that possibly be something new, but the child has steadfastly refused to eat a anything with jelly on it in the past. But lo and behold when tempted with the sweet sweet desire of getting in some Wii play action he ate a full fourth of a jelly sandwich, with no gagging or making faces I'm told (I didn't witness this for myself as I was downstairs at the time getting the snot beat out of by Ben on the free fall game in Mario Sonic Olympics). I plan on offering it to him as something he can eat a couple more times and having it qualify for some Wii play and I'm hoping we'll have added something new to the child's diet. I have to admit, getting him to try new foods this way is so much easier than before where it was a huge battle for everyone. I wonder if I could sell our story to Nintendo for advertising purposes in exchange for some free games.
Yea, I know. I said I was going to try and put up the pictures from Friday today. Gonna have to push that back some as too much stuff is happening today.
Ginger's parents are up visiting. They're here to baby sit the kids tonight while Ginger and I attend my company's party. Today though we decided to head inside the beltway to the church we used to attend when we lived in Arlington. Before we could do that though we had to have lunch, which we ate out because Ginger's Mom is up and that's just what you do. Although to fair, they were here last night and they ate dinner at the house.
Back to the church though. The pastor of the church loved trains. I mean really loved them. So every year around the holidays they would have a couple of rooms they referred to as the "House of Joy" that were filled with train decorations and they open it up to the public. Back when we lived in Arlington the Quinn would insist on going over every day sometimes. Well it's been a while since we were there because Quinn had almost completely forgotten about it (I couldn't tell if he remembered it once he was inside and saw it or not, but I think he did at least vaguely). But even though he didn't remember it that didn't stop both of them from being crazy with excitement once we got there.
Quinn was in train heaven as he was allowed to control some of the trains. Besides blowing their whistles (which he would do multiple times) he could also control their speed.
Both kids really loved the figure eight track with the ridable Thomas the train. They did a really good job sharing access to this as they would load it with presents and drive the presents around the track and deliver them.
For some reason this building model was Ginger's favorite. Don't ask me why.
After the train exhibit we stopped by Ginger's cousin Susan's place. She recently attempted to uninstall McAfee and had somehow gotten the computer so that it could no longer connect to the internet. Since I work with computers everyone thought apparently I would be able to fix the problem. Survey says ... [X]. First McAfee wasn't really uninstalled. The registry was riddled with references to it. And second I don't know what was going on, but it looked like McAfee might have replaced a library for socket communications or something and now that McAfee was in a semi removed state that library was no longer working. The network card was working, and could tell when it was connected to the router, but it couldn't communicate with the router at all. Pings didn't work, it wouldn't connect and get an IP address, nothing network related was working. So I wasn't able to fix it. Anyone out there have any ideas? I will add that I think the lookup or something might have been hosed because when I would try and ping the router I was expecting to see something like "Pinging 192.168.1.1 ..." where it would echo the IP address I entered after the ping, but instead it would print "Pinging [non asc char] ..." So that definitely seems like some lookup library call wasn't working correctly.
