July 14th, 2023

This morning started very similar to the previous morning in that I got up at 6 AM and got Eve taken care of at 7. When she was taken care of, I went up to breakfast. After breakfast, as a class, we had an obedience session which consisted of much of the same skills from the previous day, except there was a dog in the room as we were completing these exercises, which did make things a little more challenging.

Once our obedience session was completed, we were instructed to go back to our rooms, and wait for further instruction, as we were dealing with a thunderstorm this morning. It was a good thing we didn’t go out right away because shortly after returning back to our rooms, the power went out for a short period of time.

At about 9 AM once most of the storm had passed, we were instructed to grab our stuff and load up into the vans for training for the day. Once arriving at the satellite campus, I went second on this day. When completing routes on this day, we completed the same route as we had been doing for the last couple of days, but I definitely had more confidence with this route. I had so much confidence with his route that at one point my instructor said, “Do a wait, I want to try something.” Doing a wait, means to have a dog stop.

At this very moment, I had a lot of thoughts running in my mind, some of these were “Umm, ok what’s next?” “What did I do wrong?” but the most pressing one was “Wait, could he be doing what I think he’s doing? Could he be potentially removing his support leash shortly?” Sure enough, the last thought was correct. I also had thoughts of if this really is happening and can I really do this on my own? But, yes, I could. When this happened, I felt extremely free because it meant that I had full control of the commands given, and the movements within the leash and harness. 

After this support leash was removed our route went extremely smoothly, except I was still losing the leash from time to time. When this continued to happen, I realized that I was going to have to use a different Biothane leash when working, which only has one layer of Biothane instead of two. Before this other leash could be introduced, we returned to the lounge to have lunch and recap about our routes. 

After lunch, I went second again. Being that I was using the leash with only one strip of Biothane my route went so much better. Once we finished our routes for the day, we re-capped our routes and then headed back to campus.

When we arrived back on campus, we gave the dogs food, water, and a bathroom break. Once this was all done, we had downtime until dinner. Usually during this downtime, I would call my parents or other close friends that were following my journey, but on this night, I actually chose to do a yoga session with a volunteer. It was honestly refreshing to do a session like this after such a really hard week. What made it even better is that most of my classmates participated as well. 

After the session was over, we all headed up to dinner with our dogs.

Once dinner was completed, we took our dogs out and gave them water. We took them out one more time at about 9 PM before going to bed.