Days 17 and 18 at the Seeing Eye

Monday was solo day for the Elm Street route.

I got up pretty early and got ready for the day. In the morning Barb and I went out on the first trip and it rained for most of the route. It went very very well. I told her what actions I would take at each corner and ran through the route rather quickly.

We returned for lunch and I was going to do the solo later in the afternoon after she took care of the other students.

The afternoon came and off we went. On the first block she bumped me into a 4H family member (I think it was the father). I re-worked the incident and kept going. Things went well including a very aggressive traffic check from Tom Pender right after a natural traffic check. Rory ran all the way back to the curb. I think she has Tom figured out. Thank goodness there are no more routes.

We got to the final crossing and this is where things kind of went wrong. Rory has some issues with dog distractions and due to this fact we veered into the street to the left. Luckily, there was no danger and we reworked the issue. Then I ran into some sidewalk construction that was going on in the afternoon which made for some interesting navigating to our final destination.

Overall Barb said that the solo went well. It is best that we find these issues out now and not later when we get home.

After dinner and a lecture on going home Karen and I spent some time playing with the iPod Touch. Rory saw the security guard sitting behind the desk and started to bark at him. We went and got Jim (another instructor who actually trained Jacinda my last dog) and he worked with me to try and determine the issue. Rory was afraid of the security guard. We had him feed Rory some treats and this seemed to resolve the issue somewhat. We did more on this later on day 18.

I got to bed about 9:30 or so.

Today, Tuesday I got up at 5:15 and got ready for the day. I did obedience and groomed Rory in the morning. I left at 9:15 to begin freelance work with Lee. This was going to be a fun day. We were going to work on street crossings today (I wonder why ;)).

We first stopped at a bakery on the route and picked up a doughnut (courtesy of the Seeing Eye) and we then got started. We crossed many many streets each with different complexities (lots of traffic, very wide crossings, angled crossings, islands, etc.). It was a bit tricky but she did awesome!

In the afternoon we were going o go out to eat at Friendly’s. It is a ice cream and burger place. So, at lunch I didn’t eat on the campus. We left at 1:00 and did a partial South Street route and had to workaround a very large truck parked on the sidewalk coming back to Maple after turning left after the crossing at South Street. The trip went well. Lee and me soloed it with Barb watching.

We then went to go eat. I had a burger and fries and many others had ice cream type stuff. It was a lot of fun.

We got back in time to PARC our dogs and head in for dinner.

Before dinner I worked with Tom, Barb and the security guard to see what we could do to get her to not be afraid of him. You see he is dressed in all black and he is a very large man (quite tall as I understand it). She did quite well outside but did bark at him as we re-entered the building. We will continue this effort on Wednesday with the use of Clicker and we will see how it goes. This should be interesting. Now a security guard will become a target :).

I then went down for dinner and again didn’t eat. I wasn’t hungry.

We had a lecture on dog attacks and for many it was a tough discussion.

On Wednesday we will be doing bus work among other things. The retrains are about to go home (some left today with some leaving on Wednesday and the rest on Thursday). I have to stay the extra week.

More to come on day 19.

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