It started out with Vespa and I getting to the hall to find it filled to the brim with kids. I was pretty sure I'd got the right day, but as I was the only one there I thought I'd better phone a friend and check. Just as I was phoning loads of Guide Dog pups turned up and the Puppy Supervisor too. It turns out the hall had been booked for the kids until 11 even though our class has always started at 10.30. It then started to drizzle.
So there we were with 7 GD pups of varying ages having to sit outside in the damp and wait. Not very patiently I might add. And that goes for the Puppy Walkers as well as the pups.
When we eventually got into the hall the PS decided, as we hadn't had a get together since our June class, we all needed to be informed about every single thing happening for GD's at the moment. Then I was told that I'd have Vespa with me for another 7 months (pups usually leave around 13/14 months, but because of a huge backlog it's now going to be 17 months) and then I was ceremoniously given a lovely framed photo of my gorgeous Odi. That all took over half an hour.
 |
| Odi looking gorgeous |
Just over one hour after the class was supposed to begin we started to do some training. By this time Vespa (and most of the others) were far too hyped with having had to lie down and not play with each other for all that time to fully focus on what they were supposed to be doing.
Vespa did ok under the circumstances, especially with the biscuits-on-the-floor-and-being-made-to-sit-by-them-and-not-touch-them exercise. This is one of those exercises that Vespa's particularly brilliant at and everyone was smiling and nodding approval at us as he went through his paces.
Then the PS wanted to arrange a date for us to meet up, which took another ten minutes and a lot of her seeming to not believe me that he was doing pretty well and, apart from training with the spray collar she'd just handed to me so he doesn't eat cow/sheep/rabbit/horse poo that he finds when on a free run, he didn't really need much to work on. And anyway she needed to show me how to use the collar which would happen when we meet up so we didn't really need to talk about that.
I left, clutching my Odi pic, trying to feel that the morning hadn't been too much of a waste of time. Meanwhile Vespa was exhausted after spending most of his morning being forced to lie down and not play with other pups, so I suppose it paid off in the end. I had my writing course to do and was hoping to break the back of the next assignment, but sadly this is one of those assignments that just isn't resonating with me, so Vespa being a good boy and sleeping for the majority of the afternoon didn't really help me much at all.
But the great thing is that Mountain Man put Odi's pic up on the wall and so instead of writing I spent my time staring at her pic. I'd kind of forgotten what a pretty dog she is as I've kind of got used to the big black bruiser look.
And so in the end, all that frustration seemed definitely worth it.
No comments:
Post a Comment