Yesterday we met up with Skyler and Korra (Brad stayed home). First I had to drop my computer off at the repair place. Skyler and Korra met us there, and the pups were so good at meeting up for the first time in a long while inside a store and behaving appropriately!
Then we headed over to the mall. It was still closed when we arrived, so we headed into Barnes and Nobles for a bit. Hestia was full of vim and vigor and was SO excited to be working with her pal Korra! She showed it, too! She was spinning in circles, pulling to be right next to Korra, and generally being extremely happy and excited—much to my chagrin! But it was good to see her so happy to work. She was having a blast! After about 20 minutes of being really excited, Hestia was worn out! She was very calm and heeled perfectly (or lagged a bit!) for the rest of the outing.
After a while, we headed into the rest of the mall. As we entered, we noticed a sign saying that they had firearm detection dogs working in the mall. We hoped we wouldn’t run into one! They had many of these signs all throughout the mall.
We started walking and pretty soon ran into a female security guard. She said “Dogs aren’t really allowed in the mall” to us. So I replied that our dogs are service dogs. She said “Oh perfect!”. We thought this was the end of the interaction, but the guard followed us all over the mall. Pretty much for most of the rest of our time in the mall, she was behind us! It felt really weird to be watched like that. I couldn’t tell if she was following us because she was waiting for our dogs to make a mistake, or if she just liked dogs.
As we completed our first loop of the mall, we heard a cacophony of barking! We looked at each other and immediately realized that was probably the firearm detection dog. Sure enough, we soon saw a police officer with a German Shepherd Dog on the level below us. The dog was wandering around at the end of a 6 ft leash and generally not behaving in any really good way. It kept pulling despite its prong collar.
We hurried away, not wanting the dog to see ours and start barking.
For the rest of our trip to the mall, we had to keep our eyes peeled for the dog. We had to change our route several times to avoid running into them. Once we turned a corner and they were almost right there! Luckily the dog didn’t see us, and we turned around and ran away!
Another time we saw them on the level below us and the female security guard was trying to pet the dog. The dog was practically backing out of its collar to try to get away from her.
We had a good time in the mall together. We did a lot of walking, and my hips weren’t too bad! I think the warmer weather helps. Plus we stopped and sat a fair amount, too.
Eventually we got tired and came back to our place to hang out some more. Brad’s dad was putting up the magnetic screen door for us, and we (including Brad) chilled out in the yard as he did so.
It was a good trip and a lot of fun to hang out with Skyler and Korra again! We will miss them a lot when they go off to college!
I got four pictures of Hestia and Korra—they are below. Hestia is a black and white Japanese Chin wearing a purple harness. Korra is a sable Standard Poodle (with a much shorter topknot than before!) wearing a black vest with holographic patches.
