The handwriting on the wall

When I received The Call from CCI (8 years ago?) telling us that Tucker had failed to made the cut, I remember feeling the blood drain from my face. I felt faint, overwhelmed with a wave of disappointment.

We've gotten more blasé over the years. Or maybe Steve is right: we've gotten more knowledgeable about what kind of dogs are fit for a life of service. Either way, we both felt confident that Dionne was too rambunctious, too irrepressible to make it. So yesterday, when The Call about her came, I was more than braced for it.

"She's a good girl," Stu began. "And she settled into the kennel environment pretty well. But she's got a lot of energy." He went on about how CCI doesn't aim to break puppies' spirit, but the service dogs do need to be under control. Dionne "needs to be busy," he said, repeating that she was "not a bad dog at all. She just wants to be a dog."

So tomorrow I'll drive up to Oceanside to collect her and bring her back here. That will be fun, after our abrupt leaving-taking at the end of April. Fun for us and, I suspect, deliriously exciting and pleasurable for her to re-enter Civilian life. As a dog.

Dionne gets a second report card!

It arrived last Friday, and the comments of Dionne's trainer, Kyle, might appear to be nothing worth getting excited about.  They were so similar to his comments in the first report card that for a minute I thought perhaps a mistake had been made and we'd been sent the wrong file.

But I compared them and found small differences between the two reports. The biggest one was that next to the Potential Breeder box, NO has now been checked, rather than YES.

Other than that, Dionne is still apparently displaying "a higher level of energy than normal, excitable greetings, distractibility, and rough play with other dogs in the play yards."

Still.  What did excite Steve and me was that Dionne is our only CCI puppy, other than Brando, who ever got two report cards. Tucker and Yuli only got one before being released. Darby never even made it to the first report.

Brando, of course, was our sole star, going on to the glories of graduation and service. Could Dionne possibly follow in his footsteps? It seems unlikely (particularly in light of Kyle's comments). But at least we can still dream...