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TheCabin - We even make j00m0m r33t
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madcow |
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December 29, 2008 ,
7:44 pm |
A week from today, I embark on a life-changing adventure.
In an ideal world, I would have started this blog six months ago. I would have chronicled the application process, the evaluations, and my hesitation about committing to a new way of living. But alas, the road to Nowhere is paved with good intentions. But I’ve journaled most of my major life experiences in some form or other, and a quest of this magnitude certainly needs to be chronicled. Even if nobody else reads the story, I’m sure it will be useful to look back on a few years down the road.
So, the story so far. I had been considering a guide dog for a couple years now. For many blind and partially sighted people, the greatest promise of a guide dog lies in increased mobility. For me, this isn’t the primary motivation, although I think I’ll be surprised and impressed by the mobility assistance the dog will bring me that I’m at this point not even aware I needed. Instead, the deciding factor for me was emotional. This isn’t really the time or place for me to launch into a deep psychological self-examination, although I will try to relate things I’m learning throughout my training to my past experiences. Suffice it to say that I deal with issues of trust, attachment, leadership, and relationship. I’m not expecting a guide dog to be my panacea, some sort of miracle cure. Much as I’d like to, I’ve come to disbelieve in quick fixes. But my little experience with the guide dog process, even now, has shown me that the experience will provide me with a great opportunity to work on all these facets of my life.
After deciding I was ready for a dog, the next step was to choose an organization where I’d train and through whom I’d get my dog. There are actually several guide dog companies throughout the country, and while they’re all similar they also have important key differences. I won’t go into the ins and outs of my research here, though I’d be happy to share my thoughts at some point. Through word-of-mouth and my own investigation, I decided to apply to Guide Dogs for the Blind (GDB), based in San Rafael just outside of San Francisco. Judging from my interactions with them thus far, I feel confident I made the right choice.
Then there was the application process, which should have been simple, but like so many other things in my life I made it needlessly complicated. Mostly I just dragged my feet on assembling the requisite medical records. But once my heart and mind was made up, everything fell into place. That’s just how the world works.
Part of the application process involved an extensive home evaluation and mobility assessment. A trainer from GDB’s Portland, Oregon campus asked me a battery of questions about my routine, my energy level, and long-term life goals. We then hit the road for a mobility evaluation and simulated “Juno” walk, which simply means that the trainer holds the dog-end of a harness while I hold the handle and leash to get a feel for what working with a guide dog feels like. All commands on this simulated walk are addressed to Juno; for instance, “Juno, right,” “Juno, forward.”
It was on this walk that I caught a glimpse of the life lessons a guide dog can teach me. Part of the challenge for a partially-sighted person like me in working with a guide dog is that I will inevitably use what little sight I have to second-guess my dog’s judgement. In an effort to curtail this tendency, the trainer had me do some occlusion training, which is just a fancy way of saying she made me walk with my eyes closed. To me, this is akin to those clich scenes in movies in which people do a “trust fall” from some height into the waiting arms of his or her companions. Trusting Juno with my eyes closed was at first very difficult, but even in the brief time it took us to walk home I found myself relaxing and becoming more comfortable with letting the “dog” be my eyes. In follow-up discussions with GDB instructors I’ve asked for some blindfold work during my training.
Records sent and evaluation complete, I simply had to wait, which I’m not necessarily very good at. Around late October, GDB admissions called to inform me that I had been accepted and was guaranteed a place in the class beginning January 5th. Since then, supporting materials like plane tickets and lecture CDs have been trickling in. Now the time has come to start packing!
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TheCabin - We even make j00m0m r33t
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Ellena |
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December 27, 2008 ,
3:15 pm |
Apparently, it is possible to go through Christmas completely drunk.
What the hell man, since twelve days before Christmas I have been consistently drunk every weekend leading up to the holiday. Vickna’s visit completely threw my plans of having a sober Christmas Eve. Seriously, you’d think knowing the guy for 11 years, I’d have learned by now. The discovery of a bottle of Chivas Regal wiped out all memory of the extended family’s Christmas Day dinner (thank you, Jesus?). Boxing Day, well, let’s not even go there. I’m hoping the one picture of me on the floor laughing that Anu took is just it – one picture.
Oh god, I need a new liver. While I’m at it, can I have a new brain, and can I exchange the heart for, uh, well, y’all can have it for free?
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TheCabin - We even make j00m0m r33t
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madcow |
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December 23, 2008 ,
1:11 am |
Stop the presses! Seth has updated his blog!
Yes, once again I have let my blog lapse, both of them in fact. I haven’t posted any reviews up on AzureScape lately either. And now, as if neglecting two blogs isn’t bad enough, I’m adding a third to the mix: MyGuideDogBlog.com.
Thats right, it’s official! On January 5th I fly up to scenic San Rafael for several weeks to undergo extensive training in the care and feeding of a guide dog. I’ll be blogging extensively about the entire process, both here and at the aforementioned site.
I’m fortunate to have a leg-up (no pun intended) on the process, since my lovely girlfriend Sarah is a Guide Dogs for the Blind alumna. I’m receiving some intensive pre-training from her great yellow lab Kodak, and I’m looking forward to partnering up with an equally beautiful bundle of joy and energy in a couple weeks.
To answer everyone’s most pressing question: no, I don’t know my dog’s name, breed, or gender yet. I won’t find that out until I meet my dog on the fourth day of the program. D-Day, they call it. But it’ll likely either be a black lab or a golden lab. I’ve received some preliminary lecture material from them, which I’m listening to with great interest. I’ll post about that in more detail soon.
It feels good to be blogging again. It’s like exercising, or eating healthy, or any of those other lovely things. You get out of the habit of doing them, and when you finally get back to them you feel so exhilirated you wonder why you ever stopped in the first place. Life is funny like that.
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TheCabin - We even make j00m0m r33t
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Real-ity |
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December 18, 2008 ,
4:36 pm |
Poor PandoraFM.
I left it in a near-death state for the past couple weeks. I didn’t know what was wrong with it, and I wasn’t finding the time needed to really dig into it until last night where I figured it out and fixed it. But damn. That was really douchey of me.
Admittedly, it’s run pretty flawlessly for years now. I just set it and forget it. But something happened on Last.FM’s side and I had to make a small adjustment.
Again I find myself wishing I could hand off the project to someone who wants to put time and energy into the next generation of it. A lot of people still use it (almost 4,000 tracks were queued up during this downtime), so it’s still worthwhile… people rely on it. It’s just not something that’s a priority for me anymore, and it deserves to be.
I do miss all the effort I put into it back when it was in development. I’d hide in my room for hours every day working on the new version. Spending even more time on top of that talking to users and getting feedback and beta reports. I was a real developer one time.
Maybe some day i’ll be passionate about something again like that, but it won’t be PandoraFM. I see that project really “as good as it’ll get” as far as the feature set. In fact, it probably has more features than anyone really needs… but that’s what happens when one makes choices for the many 
Almost time to take off for lunch. Cassie is picking me up. Then I have the remainder of today, all of tomorrow… and then i’m off for a week. I’m catching a flight from Omaha to Madison on Monday, and then driving with my parents from Madison to the UP of Michigan. Argh. Why can’t I be from somewhere more rad than the UP?
And yes. Still no meat.
Keep on rockin.
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TheCabin - We even make j00m0m r33t
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Real-ity |
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December 15, 2008 ,
5:20 pm |
I made it over a week without meat. Who would have guessed? I knew I could.
I’m already seeing some success from this experiment. It’s easier to eat food I have at home than to go out and find somewhere convinient that has a tasty non-meat meal.
When eating out I’m already finding new options that are probably better than before and loaded with veggies. Noodles and Company has been a great find. However at Burger King when asking for the Veggie Whopper (what they used to call it anyway) I got got a whopper with no patty of any sort, veggie or otherwise. Fail.
Every day is an adventure, and it’s added stress. What am I going to eat? I’m still trying to figure it out every day. But I think eating out less is going to happen a lot more and in turn it’s going to be easier to eat quick veggie meals.
I forgot to grab my lunch to bring to work today, so i’m about to go out in the cold-ass weather and get something. Boston Market I think. Oh man meatloaf sounds so good. God damnit.
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TheCabin - We even make j00m0m r33t
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Ellena |
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December 14, 2008 ,
1:56 am |
My hangover is gone, and I’m not feeling so drained. Friday was absolutely insane. There were a few shockers at the big Christmas party, and I totally wished my senior had attended because she would totally have gone :O with me.
Those of us who went were suitably inebriated within an hour, despite having a decent lunch and drinking lots of water. We ended up on the dance floor, only for me to spy 5 employees we brought over from India getting down to the music. It wasn’t even half-decent dancing. It was the kind that would make you lol or go :O
I went :O and if I wasn’t so sloshed and contending with my own issues of staying on my feet, I would have totally recorded their little jigs and turns for my senior to see. At this rate if I tell her when she gets back from her honeymoon, she’ll accuse me of being so drunk I started to hallucinate. But mommy, it’s true! And it was horrifying/lolarious!
But that was just a small, separate part of what had transpired at the party. I was very glad to see L again, and this time she could drink, as she was pregnant the same time last year. She kept me in one piece, told me to relax and go with the flow, and stopped me from drinking my way to oblivion. She’s the only one at work who listened to my laundry list of gaffes and foibles in the last four months, and I did my best to take her advice, even if it meant putting up with her smirks on the dance floor.
Like L said, I need to start embracing emotional change instead of running away like I always do, using work/study/dance/etc as an excuse. I can only do my best to take her advice, and hopefully with her guidance (and smirking, sigh) I might be able to do just that.
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