Today would be bus day and pet store day.
I got up about 5:10 and got ready for the day.
After PARC Shannon noticed some blood on the floor as I went upstairs from the PARC door. It was from RORy’s foot. It seems as we found out later to be a puncture from her stay with the other dogs. We are treating it now twice a day both with soaking her foot and pills. She just loves those, not!
Rory and I went down for breakfast at 7:00 and then waited to go on the bus at about 9:30 with Rick. The bus trip went well but she kept turning around when we entered the bus looking behind us for Rick and Barb. Some things I noticed about the bus ride:
* They don’t announce the stops or if they do (we hear something over the speaker once in a while) it is very distorted and not understandable.
* The seats are very nice unlike the seats on most of the buses at home.
* They drop you off and just sit there and you have to walk up a hill and wait for it to pull around. That seems silly to me and also to Barb.
We got back around 11:00 or so and took our dogs out to PARC. Barb brought me a crate to try with Rory.
At lunch we sat at our normal tables but it would be the last time for the majority of the retrains as they would be leaving in the morning. Lee and Harold left on Wednesday with Joel leaving on Tuesday.
After lunch we went to the pet store. That was very much uneventful.
We stopped and got a treat on the way home and then it was time for “Touch the Tony”.
Tony is the security guard that Rory is afraid of. She growls and barks at him when she sees him in the building. Lucas Franck suggested we play a game with her using clicker and make Tony a target. He called it “Touch the Tony”. It was pretty funny.
So, we started by any time Rory looked at Tony we would click and treat. Then she had to touch his hand and then we would click and treat. We did this for about 10 or so minutes and she was wagging her tail. After PARC we did it some more but this time had him stand and move around a bit but keeping the focus on fun. We will continue this process to see if we can manage to break her fear of him. She is getting there. She only quietly barked when we left dinner, which, dinner description is next.
After the first week we moved into the small dining room (it is the second one past the larger dining room). The purpose of this is to simulate a restaurant type atmosphere. The Seeing Eye staff eat in the larger dining room so we have to work through the area to our assigned seats.
Anyway, for dinner we came back out to the large dining room and ate with our original classes since the retrains would be leaving in the morning. That was fun indeed.
We had no lectures this evening so we played, soaked Rory’s foot, I did some emailing to work and called home to talk to Keri and the boys.
I went up before PARC to see the gang in the common lounge. Dawn was looking for me so I went to see her.
I called Karen after PARC and wished her a safe trip.
I went to bed and listened to the news and tried to sleep. Rory made this difficult as she kept moving around in the crate making life quite interesting. Suffice it to say, I am quite tired this morning.
More to come on day 20. Today is Country Work and escalators.
Stop announcements? Welcome to Jersey, boy. We don’t announce no stinkin’ stops! LOL! This is the bane of our existence, these bus drivers who wave the union rules at us and say the union says they don’t hafta. Ha ha, in NYC, they changed the union rules. Now they hafta. But it’s almost a moot point here now. Bus, subway, and rail stops are all announced by some fancy automation system that seems to know where they are and when to announce the stop. Possibly GPS is involved, for the buses anyway.
Wouldn’t ya just give a million dog-biscuits to get into Rory’s head and find out why she didn’t like Tony? Glad she’s working through it. Interesting behavior modification training, that clicker stuff.
Well, welcome to day 20, another cold one, relatively speaking. Bet when you packed to come east, you never expected crummy weather like this. Guess what, neither did we!
Keep up the great work!