July 24th, 2023

On this day, I got up at 6 AM and fed Eve at seven. After taking care of everything we both needed, I headed up to breakfast. Once breakfast concluded, we were instructed to wait for our instructors to come get us as we were going to individually do some indoor work in harness. 

When it was my turn, my instructor and I also ended up switching out Eve's collar as we realized that what she was previously using wasn’t working too well. After this collar was switched out, this gave me the ability to complete indoor tasks, such as targeting doors, buttons, ramps, and a whole host of other things. I was also given the approval to work her indoors in harness. Prior to this I was always instructed to heal her when indoors. 

Once the indoor activities concluded we were given a lecture on pilling, teeth brushing, and ear cleaning. After these exercises were completed, we headed to lunch.  Once lunch concluded, we grabbed our stuff and headed to the local mall in order to get on a bus to go to a Walmart.

Riding the bus to this Walmart was a bit of an adventure. Four students and two instructors got on the bus to head to Walmart, while the other instructors took the van to Walmart. While on the bus, a few of us experienced an interesting guy that wanted to feed our dogs Cheez-Its. We politely had to tell him no and went on our merry way. We were all kind of weirded out by this encounter. 

After getting off the bus, we were split up between the four instructors that were with us that day. I ended up working with my main instructor. Before proceeding into the Walmart, he asked me if I needed anything which I didn’t. So, he said, “OK, I need birdseed.” I had no idea why he would need such an item, but I was like "OK.” Then later on in our lesson he said, “You know what else we should get?”

Me: “What?” 

My instructor: “Silly string” 

Me: “For who?”

My instructor: “One of the other instructors.” 

Me: “Umm… Ok” 

We then went to Customer Service to see where the silly string would be located. Because we were in an area where Walmart was hard to come by, the person who tried to assist us, didn’t speak that much English, but pointed us in the right direction. Unfortunately, this Walmart was out of silly string. This was not the end of this adventure, though.

After a Walmart adventure, we went to Haagen Dazs to get ice cream. Then headed back to campus in order to feed our dogs and give them a bathroom break.

After the dogs had a food and bathroom break, we had downtime until dinner.

After dinner, we took the dogs out before heading to our night route.

At about 8:45 PM we loaded up into the vans in order to go to the same satellite campus where we did our traffic check on Friday, in order to complete our night route. 

During the night route, I went second. Overall, this route was extremely easy as I had done it in the past, but it was also difficult, because I realized at this point how much night vision I didn’t have, and how much I would have to trust Eve in her judgment to keep me safe in dark and dim situations. 

An example of this was when I was crossing an intersection, and gave her the command forward, but I didn’t realize how much I had veered until I got across the street. At this point instead of being lined up with the ramp to go up the sidewalk, I was lined up with a curb. I didn’t realize this until Eve had put her front two paws on the curb to let me know that there was a step up. At that point my instructor laughed really hard, because he was trying to warn me how much I had veered, but I didn’t listen. From there I did what I needed to do best, which was to tell her to go right so that we could line ourselves back up with the curb cut and go on our way. 

Not only did I have this encounter of veering, but as we were peacefully walking during this route, a spider had decided to make a web in a matter of 20 minutes that my instructor ended up walking into due to being about a foot taller than me. We both knew that this spider had taken 20 minutes to make the web as my instructor did not encounter this with his previous student.

After completing the route, we all got back in the van and headed back to campus to get ready for bed as we had a full day of instruction the next day.