Last Updated on: 25th September 2013, 10:24 am
Well, I survived the first day. This morning was an interesting start. Amy had a seizure and Jill had to yell for help. I was in the shower when
it happened. I miss everything.
Frank’s cool. He can speak many languages. So he makes a point of speaking to the kitchen ladies in Spanish or some kind of philipino dialect. I like Frank. He seems nice. We don’t like Dave. He creeps us out, Autumn and I. We locked our door and he rattled it this morning! Gotta go to the dayroom. I wish Autumn would come.
They’re taking meal orders. mmm ravioli and chili. or some tuna salad or salad with blue cheese. we see Tamara and now Audrey and Jessica. Wow everybody loves gdb. Ooo Mike Delross. Uh-oh code of conduct time. god communication protocol again? ug. Ooo! Yoga tomorrow. I just met Sue…Sullivan, and Laurie. She’s a sweetheart. Man they take care of us, shopping, checking the mail, all that good stuff. Man there are a lot of churchies.
We have our leashes now! Heehee! I feel like such a non-newb. Tamara has a chihuahua. All these extra dogs. Ooo now we have Juneau the rug. I did my first heeling. And the damn slip collar. Live rings, dead rings, aaaa! But I think I got it, just one feels right, and the other one feels W R O N G! The way it works is there’s this collar, and you have to slip the chain through one ring and the other ring goes onto the leash, and you have to put the collar on the right way or you have no correction room. It’s hard to explain but I think I have it. Wow don’t mess with Carmen. She ripped Juneau’s head off.
In day room. waiting for puppies that aren’t our puppy. I got to heel a puppy. His name was Morgan. He was a wild one, I had to give a lot of corrections just to get him to heel. Man I can see how I let Babs away with murder. Now I got to walk Tania. What a cool dog. I didn’t have to give her much of a correction at all. But my corrections are all off kilter. Too hard when they should be softer, too soft when they should be harder. Silly Tania got her paws all caught in the leash. What a cutey. It’s hard watching them leave with the puppy. They even have an O and M! They have everything!
Sad news! Amy’s going home! She had a seizure and you have to be seizure-free for six months before you can come here, I guess, and boom! she has to go home! I don’t get that. Seizures happen and you never know when, so how can you get excluded? Plus, people get seizure dogs, so it’s not that you can’t take care of a dog. What the hell? so we’re chipping in to get her a stuffed puppy and we’re brailling a note. I feel like crying, I have to figure out a time to go see her, the poor woman. I really liked her.
I’m going to have to use ye old communication protocol real soon I think on David. He’s always in our room. But he is nice. He’s just uber annoying, and he’s never gone. I know his room-mate is Bernard, so who wants to go there, but e gads does he have to be all over Autumn? Gonna have to think a bit to figure out how to approach it. He really is not a bad guy, I don’t think he’s evil or anything, but he creeps me out. We even locked our doors because we were afraid of him. And he rattled our door, I think it was a joke, but oy yoy yoy.
Amy gets to stay! she gets to stay she gets to stay she gets to stay!
Gotta talk to her later.
I just did some obedience work with juneau the rug dog. Now I correct too hard. Damn you Babs what have you done?
Ok, so much to catch up on. Where do I begin? We ran over with Laurie from admissions and got Amy a stuffed dog. Then we ran back and went to the downtown lounge and we all walked around holding the end of this PVC pipe thingy that they called a modified sighted guide tool. They took the other end and then we read traffic and aligned with it. I apparently rocked, which is a miracle because my instructor used to say “I don’t want to have to line you up like a chess piece.”
Oh, I forgot to mention we got a tour of the downtown lounge, and how cool is that? It has:
A kitchen with a water dispenser. Here I was buying a water bottle.
Computers that apparently have minds of their own because they spontaneously forgot they had authorizations. Oh well, they will heal.
A TV room, and I think that’s about it.
So we came back from that, brailled out Amy’s note and put it in the bag, and oh my the fun began.
We were all in Amy’s room to give her her gift. She gave us all hugs. She is the coolest woman. I have to have a long, long, long chat with her. I have much to learn, she is the wise one. Anyway, when we were all in there, this dude charged in and started talking to us all really fast. I can’t simulate it except to say that he reminded me of Rain Man when he goes “two minutes to wapner…gotta get my boxer shorts…K-Mart.” So he’s going at us really really fast, and we realize that he was one of the continued assessment dudes. Oh boy. I think he’d confuse the dog. I can just hear it. Juneau left right sit down stay. Holy crap what am I supposed to do? So we’re all doubled over because he’s so hillarious. And we all vowed that before class was out, we would watch Rain Man because of him.
And then stuff started to go straight to hell. Not in a bad way, but a look how immature we can get kind of way. We started nicknaming each other. Amy became seizure Augustus because that’s what she named the stuffed puppy that we gave her. I became rubber gills..well..long story time. I said that the Ottawa school was held together by spit and rubber bands, which made Autumn laugh and laugh and laugh, and then I said I was stuffed to the gills after eating Chili and pear crisp, and she thought that was hillarious. I was going to be Canadian fish, but she thought rubber gills was funnier. Ok, so we’ve got Amy and I. Frank became drank because that’s what they wrote in his braille card at our seat assignment. By rights, I should have become Crin, but I’m not complaining. A few braille mistakes won’t kill me. So Frank is now Drank, or Jrank depending on what it says. This guy is hillarious. He’s so easy to make turn red. Now, the rest of them took longer. Autumn became Heave ho because…long story. David decided to show his assholery in more vivid colour today by attempting to football tackle Autumn for no good reason. Oh yeah, this dude keeps dropping change all over our room, which could get us in trouble when puppy comes. Oh, we spoke to him, it’s gotten us nowhere, and now this apparent physical violence is not sitting well with me. Autum and I are coming to see the instructors. Anyway, I called Autumn a human projectile because he was threatening to throw her over the entertainment centre. So then I said something about heaving her, and I was like, not heave like puke, heave like heave ho! So she’s Heave Ho! Jill is Rec because…long story again. When we first met Matt, AKA Rain Man, he said something about not liking the south because there were way too many red-neck evangellical christians out there. And we said something about someone and Jill said, “Oh lord!” and the way she said it, it sounded like she was one of those. So she’s now Rec. Ok this is mean. Sylvia is now crash because she fell today pretty good and messed up her wrist. Carmen is Ave Maria because she sings all the time. Meredeth is smoky the bear because, oh my god our innocent little Meredeth smokes! I saw Bernard, who we now call snooze, getting a smoke from her! Yeah you can guess why we call Bernard Snooze. Al is Mouse. And David? Well? He’s Pizza Booky. He was Booky because he was being a book nird and not talking to anyone, so we called him booky because it had a double meaning, and then he ordered pizza, and so we called him pizza booky. He’s also been known as Jingle bells because Matt called him that when actually it was one of the staff’s puppies going by. He was called Elvis because he can do a pretty good Elvis impression and did he have another nickname? I don’t think so. So we have now nicknamed our class the class of oceans 11. We don’t know what happened to no. 12, but oh well.
What else can I say? Oh! Two things.
1. Everybody here loves dogs, I mean not just likes dogs loves them. Has puppy raised them, has career change dogs, I have never seen a more dedicated group of people from the admissions staff right down to the kitchen staff. Um, wow.
2. I had a little interview thingy with all four instructors where they asked me if there was anything else they needed to know when it came to matching me with woofer. I said I liked working with the second puppy better because she didn’t require a lot of correcting. They all had puppies in there and the whole room smelled like woofer. I asked them questions about how to prevent the dog from licking people’s coffee cup, and the chewing thing, and they said they’d give me a gental leader! I love these people.
So, Wednesday will be the beautiful day. Now, must transpose this, and fall down to sleep.
