February: Every Where Else It's Just Tuesday

 February Hours: 4

Total Hours: 10

The W Litter having outside playtime

    This is my fifth year living in New Orleans, and my first time with February not being my favorite month of the year. Every year, decorations line the houses and parades make it take double the amount of time to get anywhere in the city. Mardi Gras quickly became my favorite tradition with the lights, the floats, and just the overall friendliness in the streets. I have never made so many friends than during Mardi Gras. In true New Orleans fashion, the city came together to create new traditions. Many houses were turned into floats using decorations from previous floats. I live Uptown, and the St. Charles houses (more like mansions) were creatively decorated. While creeping down St. Charles traffic, it truly was amazing to see what people came up with. The actual Tuesday came with the second coldest temperatures I've ever experienced in this city, with 28 degrees. Thankfully, this year there was not a boil water advisory. It was the perfect year to have that weather on Mardi Gras.

                This year for service, I continued my work with United States Veterans Service Dogs. I worked with the professional dogs with fine tuning their tasks, including force fetch. It is extremely helpful for the trainer I work with to have me there, so she can make sure the dog's skills are transferable. This ensures an easier transition when the dog is placed with their veteran. We also took a dog who has great tasks but poorer house manners and took him into a home environment to works on it. A lot of house manners comes down to impulse control like not grabbing the remote or stealing food from the counter. A dog not behaving in the house will not help mitigate a disability, and can in fact trigger it depending on the levels of mobility that veteran has. After that, I worked with the neonates. There is a lot of work that goes into the puppies from the time they are born until they are 8 weeks old and go with their raiser. They get introduced to potty training, the kennel, other animals, comfortability being handled and picked up, and exploring new environments so that when they do leave the neonate care, they are not reactive and scared in new places. The video at the beginning of my blog was us working with the puppies on outside environment and manners.