resumed "Dogalogue"

Grandma, that's a really cute term, it's a keeper!
Ok, how do weekends work at TSE? Saturday morning everything is normal until lunch time. We eat breakfast, a route, a lecture, then we eat.  During the afternoon the second route and lecture are replaced by visiting hours/free time.  Family and friends came come by to a restricted section of the campus to visit with their trainee, see the grounds, meet the dog and the staff. I have a friend up in NYC who rode the train down to see me for a couple of hours—that was really nice. He and Prada are great friends now :) After visiting hours are over things return t o normal until Sunday morning. At 0530 hours local time on Sunday morning Prada went through her usual routine to wake me up--obviously she missed the memo that it was Sunday and therefore w e got to sleep in till 0630. Everything slides forward an hour on Sundays.  The staff will drive students that want to attend church into town, but for the first Sunday the dogs have to stay back due to handler inexperience. After lunch we have visiting hours again, and my friend joined me for another enjoyable afternoon, then the schedule returns to normal and we start all over again.

After our lesson on Saturday instructors began taking students out in small groups around the Leisure Path for a quick tour. This is a short 1/3 mile path with some benches along it and a couple of gazebos set along it. It can b e used for practice, exercise, a place to get away and/or hang out so many of us spent time out there during our break.

Today, we started a new route, a little bit longer and more complicated.  We ran it again with occluders (for those of us with residual vision) in the afternoon. What makes a route more complicated? Obstacles and intersections. How many tables and parking meters can we not run into? Not to mention planters, people, bike rack parking thingies...Today I almost ran over a WP (wobbly person) that turned out to be one of TSE's major donors! Prada pulled an excellent avoidance, though, and we missed him with plenty of room to spare.
(and…apparently back then I was really fond of asking rhetorical questions!)

Today we got a more detailed lecture on the process of training a dog to recognize traffic checks and avoid moving cars. It's a series of instructor/car contact, dog/car correction, dog/check praise drills run until the dog understands “moving car=bad”. Because dog guides cannot understand “death” and “injury”—they only have present consciousness—but they do ride in vehicles a great deal trainers have worked for years to develop a method of teaching dogs to avoid moving cars without creating a phobia of vehicles in general.

Bryan says we have our solo on the "Elm Street Route" Wednesday morning, should be fun!