EDIT: The problem turned out to be that while backups are made every night, I was trying to restore to a point in time that had not yet been backed up. I would have realized this sooner if I were scripting the restore, but because I was using the GUI it simply chose the most recent log file and didn't bother to notify me that the chosen log file didn't actually contain the point in time I was specifying.
After I made a current backup of the db and transaction log then it worked perfectly.
Having said that, I still don't understand how the record with time of '2013-11-27 12:52:08.240' was restored in the scenario described below. But for now I'll just chalk that up to being something screwy with the application recording an incorrect time.
I am once again befuddled by SQL Server's (in?)ability to restore to a specific point in time.
Sometimes when I've tried this in the past it would seem that SQL Server restored to a point in time near where I asked it to but not quite where I specified. I chalked this up to being a misunderstanding on my end since I know the dates recorded in the database originate in the application and therefore may vary ever so slightly from the time that the records are actually written. The variances were actually a little more than 'slight', but this is still the best explanation I could come up with.
Around 12:55pm today I restored a database back 30 minutes to 12:25pm. Now when I do a query on the log and sort by date/time I see a record with a date of '2013-11-26 18:21:49.200' followed immediately by a record with a date of '2013-11-27 12:52:08.240' right next to each other.
So my first observation is that all of the records from the beginning of today up to the time I restored to (12:25pm) are not there. My second observation is that there is a single record at 12:52pm which is 27 minutes AFTER the time I tried to restore to (way, way to large for a slight variance in time between when the application picked a time and when the record actually got written).
Has anyone else run into this? I have no clue why this would be happening and would appreciate any help in figuring out how to backup my databases in a way that they will properly be restored to a point in time when I need to since this is the whole reason I switched to using the Full Recovery model for backups.