Blessed-Family Blog

We went to Brentwood on Saturday 6/14 for some family fun picking fruits. We visited 3 farms: Baccini’s for peaches, Chan’s for strawberries, Nunn Better for cherries. Overall, it was a good experience, however, we think Brentwood farms can take a few lessons from Casa de Fruita and Napa wineries to make a “richer” experience for themselves and the visitors.

We had brunch at Perkos Cafe and Grill (7 of 10). The place was ranked as the local top favorite cafe every year. The food was ok, price was higher than what I’d expect to pay at a ‘farming town’ (about $50 for 4 people).

Baccini’s peach picking was fun & delicious (7 of 10)

• This was the first farm we visited, it was on our top list based on the U-pick map. We were hoping to pick cherries, but they ran out already, and only had peaches left. We went in anyway, it was fun. The peaces were juicy and delicious. We picked a bunch and it only cost about $10. There was no minimum.
• The people were nice. We asked about cherries, they were kind enough to direct us to “Nunn Better” at the other side of the town.

Chan’s Fruitstand did not stand a chance (2 of 10)

• On the way to “Nun Better”, we stopped by Chan’s Fruitstand since they had nice big strawberry signs which sounded fun.
• As we got closer, it did not look very friendly… minimum 2 lb per person, “no stealing”, blah blah blah. We were turned off from the negative ‘rules’.
• If we don’t even know how the strawberry looks like and tast like, how can we promise to pick 2 lb per person? Strawberries rots quickly, how can we consume 8 lbs in a couple of days? We left without trying.

Nunn Better is better (8 of 10)

• We finally got to Nunn Better. There were lots of cherry trees, with lots of ripen & sweat cherries within reach. There are also many ladders to reach to the higher branches. It was great.
• We ate a bunch, had a spitting contest. We also picked a lot so we can took some back to share with church friends and coworkers. Everyone had a great time.

Brentwood - Overall, Brentwood farms can take a couple of lessons from Casa de Fruita and the Napa wineries. Why stay at the bottom of the “fruit-chain?” Here are some ideas/suggestions:

• target families with kids
• make it educational for different age groups with some informational stuff like: different types of cherries, growing process, etc.
• make it (more) fun
• make more money with some value added services: how about some water; some place to wash the fruits; nice restrooms; a cup of coffee with fresh fruit pie; cherry, peach or strawberry icy drink on a hot day; fruit jams, fruit cakes, fruit … (think Casa de Fruita)
• link multiple farms together (like what we did) and make it a whole day “experience”

Overall, it was a fun day picking cherries and peaches at Brentwood for the family.  The area can take a lesson from Napa or Casa de Fruita and make it a richer experience for the visitors.

Got a nice 15% off coupon so we decided to check out the Willow Street restaurant. We sampled a variety of dishes:

• Hawaiian pizza
• Willow Street Burger
• 2 pasta dishes

The price was reason consider it is a nice restaurant at a prime location (Westgate, San Jose). Sunday special burger (served on pita bread), and pasta dinner deal with 1/2 salad, 1/2 pasta and desert were excellent deals for the recession. The only problem was the taste was just ‘average’, all dishes were kind of ‘bland’.

The highlights were:

1. fries that came with the Willow Burger, it was deliciously fried with garlic, parsley, and salt. It was great, but I can only take about 10-15, it got a little too oily.
2. the chocolate dessert, all of us agreed that it was very good.
Score: 7 out of 10
Price: $53.29, dinner for 4, 2 soft drinks, with 15% off coupon, including tax & tips
Address: 1554 Saratoga Ave, San Jose
Web: willowstreet.com
Phone: 408.871.0400

It’s the the Memorial Weekend, Weekend Girl needs a pair of new heels for the wedding next week, we armed ourselves with a $20 off Macy’s coupon and a Macy’s extra 20% off for one day card and head to San Jose Valley Fair.

Approaching the freeway exit, you’d already know it would be busy, the cars were backed up on the freeway.  The parking lot was packed and lots of cars circling around hunting for a precious space.  As usual, we were very blessed with a parking space almost the closest from the Macy’s.  Walking into Macy’s, you’d never know we are in the middle of a recession.  Lots of sales going on, and lots of shoppers.  The famous Macy’s quality selection is great, but I am sad to say salespeople were rare commodities.

We finally found a “Nine West” shoe we liked, but we could not find anyone to get our size, so we went to the cash register to get help. Cashiers said they are “not allowed” to help us to get shoe for our size.  When I asked him to get a salesperson to help us, he said we need to hunt them down ourselves.  This is really not the famous Macy’s service we’d expect.  We waited for quite a while, and finally gave up.  We went down to the “Nine West” store down the isle, but they don’t carry the size we need for the style.

We made our way to Nordstrom at the other end of the Valley Fair Mall (most of the smaller shops in between do not carry the small shoe size we need… don’t they realize many Asians have slightly smaller feet?).  At Nordstrom, there were even more shoppers there, and there seems to be twice more shoes on sale.  Furthermore, there were 3-4 times more salespeople around, and a manager with a microphone paging available sales person whenever someone needs help.  Two or three stopped by and asked if we needed help while we looked for the right style.

When we found the style we wanted, we were able to get someone to help us quickly.  Of course, at the grand total of $175, the price was about double of what we would have paid at Macy’s, since we needed it for the wedding we are attending next week, it did not really matter if it was on sale.

On the way back to the car, at Macy’s, we picked up a pair of ear rings matching the shoes we got at Nordstrom and used the 20% off coupon (the $20 did not qualify), and saved about $5.

We had a need, and Macy’s brought us to the Mall, unfortunately,  there were not enough sales staff to provide adequate support, and Nordstrom won one this time.

It’s not my norm to be complaining about a product but I feel I really need to let people know about my negative experience with the 500 GB Western Digital NetCenter Network Hard Drive.

It started off to be an excellent choice for our application, I was really proud and happy that I made the choice.  It is high capacity external disk drive at a very reasonable price.  It plugs into the home network, and very easy to install, use, and share files within a family network. We used it for a while as a family central back up, photo album/media server. We set it up so on different nights, each of our computers do incremental back up to this system automatically every week.  It’s not very fast, but it seem to do the job.  Since it plugs into the network instead of USB port, it does not depend on any other computers to be available to work.
However, after a while, we started getting disk errors, especially during backups when large GB size files are being written to the disk. This started intermittently but after a while, it becomes consistent.  And, even smaller photo files are failing.  I tried to research ways to run check disk or to avoid hitting the bad spots, it was fruitless.  People seem to have similar problems also.

During the Christmas holiday, I finally went tot he Wester Digital support site and file a bug. I got a non-informational confirmation response almost right away, but I did not get any help for over 3 weeks. I wrote back a couple of times but there was no response until today. (see below)
I finally received a response saying “There are no diagnostics to check the drive or the file system of the NetCenter. Additionally, there is no way to reformat the drive either.”

I am very upset that there is no diagnostics to check the drive or to reformat the drive. This nice looking device is really useless to us when it can’t be used reliably.

References:

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/28670/75/

==================