I sent Rob this info earlier because he was asking where to get cider and doughnuts. Now it's here for all! I should also have mentioned that Verhage's cider is unpasteurized, which makes it better, in my opinion. Travis is currently using some to make hard cider.

Verhage Fruit Farms

My commentary: Verhage makes their own cider and you can sample some right there. Sometimes you can watch them make the cider as well, which is also very cool. I mentioned Verhage's last year (fresh squeezed apples) . They have decent homemade doughnuts as well, though I've never been able to get iced doughnuts there. They're mostly the cinnamon/sugar variety, which are good, or the plain cake kind, which are not really my thing. It's possible that they make iced/frosted doughnuts there and they're just never available when I'm there. I don't know. They also have a giant jumpy pumpkin thing for the kids, hay rides sometimes, train rides (for kids), a gift shop, and a concession stand sort of thing that serves up concession stand sort of food.

They don't have a website as far as I can tell. This has some info:
http://www.michigan.org/travel/detail.asp?p=G5233

Address:
8619 W. Michigan Avenue
Kalamazoo, MI 49009
Phone: (269) 375-0153

Gull Meadow Farms

My commentary: Gull Meadows has the best doughnuts ever. Get the iced kind. They are best when they're fresh. They do not make their own cider as far as I can tell, but they sell some. You can do u-pick for insanely high prices and they have a very large entertainment complex for the kids (also at insanely high prices). It's bigger than Verhage's, if you care. They do Plainwell Ice Cream as well, and have a very large gift shop.

http://www.gullmeadowfarms.com/
http://www.gullmeadowfarms.com/directions.html

Address:
8544 Gull Road
Richland, MI
Phone: (269) 629-4214

Apparently System Restore rolls back files all over your hard drive, not just Windows System files. This was news to me.

Last week I discovered that any video files I played in Windows Media Player all showed in very light grayscale. I still have no explanation as to what caused this, though I believe I only installed ReSharper and some Windows Updates (I sort of blame the updates, though that's unsubstantiated). I could go on about how it's nonsensical that Microsoft hasn't provided a downloadable install package for WMP 11 on Vista (the one available apparently only works for XP), which makes the only real recovery option to re-install Vista, but I won't. This post is about System Restore.

So, to fix my WMP issue (as well as some weird dual monitor video display issues that seem to have begun about the same time) I was forced to employ System Restore. In doing so, I learned that it actually rolls back all of your files to the state they were in at the time, except those in My Documents and those with document-like extensions: DOC, XLS, etc. Although SQL is included in the filter and that seems quite programmer friendly, CS is not. Yes, we know what that means. I soon discovered that I'd lost a few days of coding.

In the end, I decided to restore back to where I knew my code existed, copy it off to a flash drive, and then restore back up to when my computer worked.

I could have sworn restore kept telling me that my "files would not be affected" throughout the original restore, but on closer inspection (during one of the two restores I did to get my code back) I saw it was saying this:

Ah, I see, Mr. Microsoft. My documents have not been affected. Because I am a good Windows user and keep everything relating to my user in my Documents folder (in Vista it's "Documents" not "MyDocuments") and, of course, anything that's not in there, but is a "document" would have a standard document-like extension. I think EXE/DLL extensions might get rolled back even in Documents as well--you'd have to check the link below. Honestly, I don't know how they'd do that restore differently, if they're trying to roll back your machine entirely. I just think it's a false claim to make that user data will be preserved. It'd be more user friendly to me if I got a little warning letting me know what to back up before continuing.

This article explains what System Restore does in more detail than most people would care: Understanding System Restore

This is an XP article, so apparently System Restore has been this way all along, and I just never had to depend on it like this before. But, the few people I mentioned this to were also surprised, so I thought I'd write up a quick post. Hope it was helpful.

Ok, working on that backlog of vacation pictures. For your amusement, here are a few of me out in the lake on the day we had some bigger wave action.

Here is me practicing my Chadrick Mahaffey pose in the water.

For explanation, see the smallish photo in the leftbar on Chad's writing journal One Byte at a Time. Now, no disparagement meant on Chad's photo or its clever tie-in with his blog image theme. I approve of all of this. I just find it amusing to emulate the Chadrick Mahaffey pose. I suppose it could be named something as well... like the Chadrick Mahaffey Big Wide World pose or some such thing.

Anyway, after posing a few too many times, I got doused. Here is me practicing the Chadrick Mahaffey Big Wide World pose slightly submerged.

In retrospect, I'm facing the wrong way, and my arms are too YMCA, but I did manage to hold form, and I am underwater, so I think that's an interesting twist.

Good times.

I picked up this book while we were at the library for the summer reading program celebration thing. (Where the kids got digested by a huge dinosaur, by the way.) I also got a new (to us) Clarice Bean book by Lauren Child (of Charlie and Lola fame). Always good stuff.

Anyway, I highly recommend where i live. I suppose I wouldn't even be mentioning it here if I didn't. It's literature for children. Poetic prose, is what I'd call it, as it often blurs the line between poetry and prose. Personally, I think good prose dips into poetry just enough so that you can appreciate the craftsmanship w/o distraction from the story. The form this book takes lets the author elegantly do more than that, sharing short poems or poetic prose about Diana, the protagonist, whose father loses his job, requiring the family to move to her grandfather's house.

From the description on the dust jacket you'd think it'd be a sad sort of book about kids dealing with grownup issues, but it's very lighthearted as well. It's not a long book at all. Probably a 15-20 minute read if you savor it a bit. I think it's a bit over my kids' heads, but maybe good to read to a 5-6 year old. I enjoyed it myself, just because it's so well done.

Oh, almost forgot. The illustrations by Matt Phelan are just as much a part of the book as the story, and they complement each other well.

Can you read that without thinking "Top of the muffin, TO YOU!"? I know I can't.

So, anyway, new Pepsi products arriving today, hopefully, to replace the Coke and the Barqs. Pepsi Direct makes us buy 3 items at a time (boo!), so we're sort of stuck with buying a lot of Dew at one time (which is the syrup flavor we mostly want), finding another supplier, or suffering with two non-Dew Pepsi products. The pop-ocracy of Cole has chosen, purely for the benefit of our loyal subjects, the latter.

I've done my best to pick the flavors that will cause the most people to say "Why did you get that?" and "You should get X." (Where X is of the following set: { any flavor but what we have, a flavor that is not available in BiB form, a flavor that no more than two other people in the building enjoy drinking }) That is, of course, always my true goal in soda flavor selection--sowing dissatisfaction and malcontent.

If there is any amount of noise over the (likely temporary) loss of Coke for a flavor which I will not reveal here but could be considered somewhat Coke-like (though not as tasty, in my opinion) then I'll bring back Coke later. This is just to mix things up a little.

Don't get all worked up. Consume your brominated vegetable oil. It does a body good.

Well, not really.

Use Alt-D to select and highlight the address bar and then type in your new URL of choice.

There's a full list of such hotkeys in the Internet Explorer 7 Quick Reference Guide.