House Of Joy

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.