We have been looking for a dog for a while now, and we have a number of criteria:

• nonshedding (both for allergies and as a realistic recognition of the frequency of our floor cleaning)
• non barking
• large enough not to be a little floormop yappy thing
• small enough not to knock over a child in the rush for dinner
• preferably an adult dog (we’ve had enough of wiping up poop and getting up in the middle of the night, thanks)

Friends of ours have a beautiful labradoodle named Mocha. She was owned by a breeder, and was being retired from the puppy-making business. She’s calm, socialized, house-trained and non-shedding. That was all we needed to know. We emailed the breeder the day after we met Mocha, and found out that they had another dog due to be retired.

Meet Diva:

She’s almost 6, she’s an F1B Medium Labradoodle, which means her mother was a standard poodle and her father was a medium labradoodle. We went out to meet her this afternoon, and she’s a sweetie. 6 is a bit older than we were thinking, but she’s a beautiful dog, and she took to the kids very easily. She readily went to everyone, even Rachel, and she was gentle and calm the whole time, even with our mob around her.

She has this wonderfully curly woolly coat, that’s currently clipped short for easier maintenance (she had her last litter a little over a month ago). Here’s a picture of her with her brand new pups. It’s a terrible photo, but ask any Mom to look at the pictures of her a short time post-partum…

She’s due to be spayed at the beginning of January, and a few weeks of recovery later we should be going to pick her up.

Yay!

We’re planning on keeping her name. I know she’s going to rule the house, so Diva seems appropriate.

We just dropped A LOT of money on a program called Rosetta Stone to help teach french to the kids. We bought the Homeschool Edition, with Levels 1,2 and 3 French, and the Audio Companion CDs in a bundle. (And it was a bundle, let me tell you.)

I looked around on their website, and there is a tonne of information on how to use the Homeschool Edition on a network with “SMS”, their management program. It allows you to track users and lesson progress, and allows users to log on on and use the software from any machine on the network. The explanations and instructions are very clear, and are updated as of a few weeks ago. Yay! We have a home network and a number of machines around the place, this will be great!

Rosetta Stone French comes in the mail. I open the box. I take the CDs downstairs to install on the server. I look in the box again because there is no SMS disk.

I call tech support. I wait 10 minutes. They tell me that it’s all built in now, I don’t need a separate SMS install.

I try again. I beat my head on the desk. All of this beautiful documentation and none of it seems to match what’s on my screen or in the box.

I contact tech support via email. Their submit form is VERY broken, so it won’t allow “return” characters in the explanation of your question. I have URLs and references and multiple questions, and it takes me literally 10 minutes to figure out why this form won’t take my request. The error message I get cunningly neglects to mention that CR’s aren’t allowed. Grrr.

The response I get is this:

Hi [MrPages],

Rosetta Stone Version 3 Homeschool edition is not network-able. I apologize for the inconvenience. You may install the software on two computers.

Let us know if you have further questions.

Um. Hang on a sec.

I reply with a list of articles that seems to contradict this directly.

Hi [MrPages],

Those articles are for the Version 2 product. You have the Version 3, the newest Homeschool product. Version 2 is no longer available for the language you are studying as a homeschool version. The Version 3 Homeschool product is not compatible with home networks. I apologize for the inconvenience.

If you would like to return your product, please contact Customer Care.

I reply again, pointing to documentation that specifically mentions version 3, pointing to the fact that none of the documentation is labelled as version specific, and indicating my displeasure at the removal of functionality without any documentation of such, and in fact, with documentation out there that contradicts the removal.

Then I get this wonderfully concise summary of the issue:

There are two versions of the SMS, Version 2 and Version 3. There are two versions of homeschool products, Version 2 and Version 3. The Version 2 homeschool product works with both versions of the SMS. The SMS and Version 3 do NOT work together. The Version 3 product is an entirely different setup, and is not capable of networking.

So. You’ve used the same version numbers for two separate products that used to be bundled. Now they aren’t bundled, the old version of one works with the new version of the other, but the new version of the same one won’t work with the new version of the other.

Thanks. That’s brilliantly clear. Wonderful marketing, guys.

And, like suckers, we kept the program because it’s still the best way to learn a language. It’s so frustrating to be stuck in a position like this, trapped by incompetent documentation and marketingspeak into accepting less that we ordered. And just smiling and taking it.

Rosetta Stone, you have a good product, but you suck at customer service.

We’ve been stressing for a long time about this.

The way our house is laid out, you can see almost every wall on the upper floor from the front door. There is a place in the living room that you can see the living room, front hall, hallway, bathroom, kitchen and dining room walls. There is no place that is a clean break between all these walls, so they pretty much all have to be one colour.

Choosing this colour has paralyzed us for a long time, but now that the new front hall is primed and ready for paint, it was go time. So we did it. 3 trips to Home Depot to pick up paint chips resulted in nothing but more choices, so MrsPages decided we’d hold a Survivor/American Idol showdown. She bubble sorted every single colour chip from the paint store. Then she cut swatches of all the colours we’d been looking at and stuck them on our largest white wall.

Then we started voting chips off the island.

We stood in the afternoon sunlight, a good distance away from the wall. We decided that no matter what we thought of a chip, if the other didn’t like it, it was gone. One vote was enough. They decreased in number, quickly at first then more slowly.

It all came down to a few shades of taupey brown, two shades of light blue and two shades of more dramatic green. We both decided that the blue just wasn’t us. The taupey browns were similar to a colour that we put on a wall as a test a year or so ago, and we decided we didn’t want to go there. So green it is. Behr Tint 410E-3, “Rejuvenate” green, that is.

Here’s the colour, and the action in time-lapse. The first frame is the huge pile of chips we started with. The black marks on the right side of the wall are a triple-light switch without the cover on and the hole where the alarm system wire goes.

[edit - pics of the painted ex-closet area are here]