Dogs in the Garden

Last night Darrell, I and the dogs took a trip to the Olive Garden. We were invited there by a fellow UTSA student / Service Dog trainer. There were originally supposed to be six of us there however 2 couldn't make it so it wound up being four. There was Dana (the SD trainer) and her friend (Rebecca), they both actually use service dogs so they both had one, and Darrell and I with ours. It was very interesting to see another side of the service dog world (apart from just Guide Dogs).

Dana's dog Storm is a Malinois and she is trained for Mobility Assistance, Medical Assistance and Medic Alert. Rebecca, who is from out of state handles a huge Doberman, his name is Rex and he is trained as a Dog Guide, Mobility assistant and Hearing Alert.

We sat there talking and telling stories for quite a while, poor Rebecca has had some major issues with some airports lately; hope the flight home is ok! Bob did amazingly while under the table, he tried to get up a few times towards the end of dinner but settled back down very nicely. He didn't even try to get in the faces of the 2 new dogs he has never met before. I was very impressed with him I didn't even need to stand on his leash - he was just good ;)

When we were done with our stories and finally made it outside to relieve the dogs we sat (stood really) out there talking (in the nasty drizzle) for at least another 30-45 minutes. When we finally took pictures the dogs were pretty tired out and spacey (well at least Bob was). But we made it home, they ate and were happy and both slept very well through the night lol. I only have the pictures that Dana emailed me at the moment because I took my small camera to dinner and just can't find my card reader lol. (Me and my camera issues :/ )

P.S. if you are more interested in service dogs in general or would like to ask Dana or Rebecca any questions, Dana runs a website called Service Dog World there are lots of discussions and pictures and stuff of service dogs so if you would like to join there is the link ;)

So here they are - hope you enjoy ;)

Here is the first group picture we tried - In order from the left thats
Rebecca with Rex - Me with Bob - Darrell with Egypt - Dana with Storm.
You can tell how tired was Bob at this point - he's all schlumpy. 

Same order just a better-ish picture - now you can see our feet lol. 

Here is a funny picture Dana sent me - Rex has climbed all the
way up into her kids' car seat! 

Sammy and My Mission

So there is a lot that has happened the past couple days. I took Taxi back to GDTx Wednesday morning and about an hour later, my mom, sister and I went up and visited my grandparents for the holiday. We came home on Thursday mom left to go back up to my other grandparents. Erin and I had a pretty boring New Years, but I'm ok with that. It was kind of funny because once the Fireworks that Fiesta Texas blows off started I thought it was thunder lol. Anyways, Darrell came home on Friday and we had a last minute wedding to go to this morning. The wedding was between my Uncle and his ex-wife. They had been wanting to reunite for a while and decided to just go for it while most of the family was together for the holiday. It was really spur of the moment but everyone had a good time ;)

At the wedding I met my Aunt's Mom who was asking Darrell and I about service dogs and such. Apparently one of her grandsons became a quadriplegic a few years ago and they were asking about info on service dogs for him. However they don't know exactly how to go about it. I know though that some of you can help out. I already gave her the information for Texas Hearing and Service Dogs in Austin but other than that I'm not sure who else they could look into. So here is our mission - help me out so I can help them with info.

Ok, now on to Sammy. After the wedding we headed home and once we were changed and cleaned up a bit we headed over to GDTx to pick up Sammy. He's a 16ish (maybe lol) month old golden retriever. He is  very sweet and pretty mellow. We had the dogs meet at GDTx and Egypt doesn't seem to mind him much. Not too much to say about him so far but we'll have him till Tuesday evening so hopefully there will be something interesting to report. So yeah. Thats about it so far. Here is a pic of him, he doesn't really look into the camera but he's very pretty so yeah. Maybe he knows that a flash is going to go off in his face, Egypt knows that so she doesn't like looking at the camera sometimes either lol.

This is a cute picture of Egypt I took up at the River House - Thats where the wedding was.