Halloween and Choir Concerts

I'm afraid I wasn't terribly original with Prada's costume this year for Halloween. She went as a K9 unit, and a friend and I went as psi-cops from the old Babylon 5 tv show. Thanks to a briliant suggestion from my roommates I'll do better next year, though. We'll go as The Devil Wears Prada. The UAH Honors students hosted a costume party down in the Multi Purpose Room of Franz where Prada made her debut. I opted to leave the harness off for almost the entirety of the party, as I wasn't really in need of a guide and the overwhelming majority of the students present wanted to pet or play with Prada. As the crowds increased, though, I took her upstairs and left her in my room so she wouldn't get too overwhelmed by worshippers. While she is quite social it is easy to cause dog guides, especially shepherds, to feel a bit panicky in such close proximity to too many friendly people. Too much of a good thing, I guess.

The soft crate works absolutely wonderfully as a bed and hideaway for Prada. As a place of necessary confinement purposes (i.e. I go somewhere not appropriate for her to go such as a pool area with an intensely high chlorine concentraiton) it leaves quite a bit to be desired. While Prada doesn't particularly care for being shut in the crate she never complained too much about the hard crate back home, but the soft crate...well, a friend of mine told me his dog guide tore a hole in his crate's door to get out. I always enjoyed bragging to him that my shepherd would just slide a claw or paw between the two zippers and open the crate instead of destroying it. She would then greet me at the door of my room, not having gotten into anything. I usually leave her nylabone with her for entertainment purposes and have never suffered property damage during her escaped periods. However, while I left her in the crate to go rejoin the costume party downstairs Prada discovered a problem with her usual escape route. I had been curious to see if I could get her to stay in the crate so I improvised a lock by unbending a paperclip and using it to secure the two zippers together. This, apparently didn't pose much of a problem to my child, as she simply removed the entire zipper from the door. I can zip it up all I want to but the seam that held the zipper to the front wall of the crate has been quite thoroughly ripped out. Once again Prada met me at the door when I returned. So now she has a $120 bed, instead of a $120 confined space. If I settle here permanently I'll have to invest in a hard crate, I think.

Choir concert last night, congrats to UAH Concert and Chamber choirs! They (we) sounded fabulous. A friend reviewd the performance and when he finishes that I'll have him send it to me so y'all can see a bit of what we did. Prada did not attend, either on stage or in the audience. Having been made quite paranoid by the TSE trainers' stories about dog guides that like to sing along wiwth their persons, and knowing that Prada is quite vocal, and very restless (she's still a puppy!) I decided it'd be better for her to stay in my room. maybe next year she'll have settled down enough to join the audience. Someday I'd like to take her on stage with me, show her off a bit, but that's a ways out, I think. Let her age and settle down a bit.