TRUELY a Halloween Nightmare

Hmm... Where to start. At the point of nearly starving to death or almost getting run over by an old lady behind the wheel of a Walmart shopping cart? I'll just start from the beginning of it all. I thought it was going to be a normal day of just sitting around and relaxing, clearly I was wrong. I can never remember what we have to eat here at home so I'll go raid the pantry and sometimes the fridge to find absolutely nothing to eat. So i grabbed a sleeve of ritz crackers that were in the pantry and decided this would be a good snack. Well that good snack ended up practically being my whole ration for the day. So I asked Natalie if we could go to walmart to pick up some groceries so we could eat something besides the dust we breath in. Natalie told me we could go later because she was doing laundry, which I later realized meant she was watching an America's next top model marathon. So I retreated to the bedroom to put myself in a self induced coma to slow my metabolism so I could save my strength for the day. (I really just took a nap and didn't realize it till my phone rang and scared the life outta me) So I finally annoyed Nat enough to get her to take me to walmart. Here is where the real nightmare begins. It all started out well enough, we walked in and nothing is out of the ordinary... Till SHE showed up. Nat and I were looking for nacho cheese because I love nachos and I have been dying for some lately, when an old lady who Nat describes as looking like The Penguin from the batman movies comes down the isle. Now I don't know if none of this lady's senses work but she walked right down the isle and Nat tells me to watch out so I panic and don't know where to go. Natalie kindly moves out of the way so the lady can go around Egypt and I. But NO! the lady strolls right up to me and Egypt, making Egypt move and trip on my foot. She didn't say a word to me or acknowledge that I even existed... I have no clue how she drove herself to Walmart, if she has that same attitude on the road she has got to have one hell of a driving record. .. Anyway. I was really upset at this rudeness, I usually brush everything off, but i guess it was the complete lack of acknowledgement of my existence that got me mad. So I fumed a little bit about the lady for a few minutes just loud enough so Nat could hear me. She was pretty ticked too. When all of a sudden I hear a bark in the store. My first thought was is there a stray here in Walmart??? Then Nat and I thought it might be a crazy kid screaming. So we brush it off. So we go to the check out line for the first time. (I wish I was making that up) When some kid says "OOOO look at the dog!" And he comes and pets Egypt. Now if he was 2 years old I would have been ok with it, but no this kid was like 13 Nat told me. Lucky for him Natalie was the one who caught him petting Egypt and told him not to. So we inched along the counter when we realize that we don't have eggs or a cake pan for the cake Nat wants to make. So we get out of line so we can go get these 2 items. Remember I am about to eat anything that has the misfortune of coming too close to my mouth. So when we go get this cake pan we hear a bark again, sure enough it was real. But it was a fellow service dog. I don't really have much to say about him because he was an assistant for a woman in a wheel chair. But on our way to the eggs... This other woman had a german shepherd in the store... I think the dogs halloween costume was to be a service dog, because the moment it saw Egypt it started to lunge and growl at her. This leaves me silently apologizing to the lady with the wheel chair, it was not her dog after all. I'm not going to lie this dog scared the crap outta me simply because i thought we had solved the mystery of the unknown barking. So the dog scared Egypt as well and I had to calm her down a bit and assure her the dog was gone. Well that dog made me a liar. We were heading over to the check out counter when who do you think we saw... You got it the german shepherd. It lunged again and this time barked a few times confirming my suspicion to his bark. So it scared me again and I gave it a mad look. I don't know if he saw me, haha It was just my reaction to things, I always make a mad face. So I'm all stressed out with that dog and then I'm hoping a manager wasn't going to come and talk to me about my dog being disruptive when she did nothing at all. But it didn't happen. The cashier had my back, without realizing it. She always sees us walking around in walmart and said Egypt was good. This so far has been my worst time ever going out somewhere with Egypt. From old ladies that try to run you down with a shopping cart, to roudy dogs in the store, it was truely a nightmare. The good thing that came out of this whole ordeal is that I found out which cheese I like with my nachos and I'll never by the wrong one again. Thanks for reading and I'll have more to post to catch you up on some of the past with Egypt. Happy Halloween and be safe.

Intros

Hi everyone! My name is Darrell Garza, I am 21 years old and am currently a student in college. I plan on getting my degree in kinesiology and doing something with it, haha. I got a guide dog 5 months ago I sort of had a blog going about it , but i was having a hard time posting. Now I have a Mac book pro... and it's awesome. Well enough about me for now... Now to Egypt. She is... How should I put it??? Perfect? Yeah I'll go with that. She is a yellow lab born on July 11th 07, She has stunning brown eyes from what I hear and a pink heart shape on her nose. She is a very mellow and relaxed girl, she is a lot like me laid back with no worries. She is an excellent worker too. She alerts me to many things sometimes when she doesn't have to and she is very cautious. She takes very good care of me and if I do slip or bump something and she notices it, she gets upset. If I didn't have egypt I don't know what I would do. Yeah thats a bit dramatic but it is the truth. I went blind in Oct. of 06 and for about a year and a half I just bummed rides off of peoples shoulders and that is more or less how I got around. Then I met my girlfriend Natalie. She did the shoulder thing for about a month or so then started asking me to use my cane(which I got in 4th grade). I wasn't to keen on this idea simply for the fact that I was a bit self conscious of myself with the cane. So I didn't use it (wish I did. you'll find out why). Natalie wasn't going to not let me use the cane so she started telling me she was going to run me into stuff on purpose (I thought I'd call her bluff). She wasn't bluffing! Haha. Some of you might be upset at this I know i was, but it was for a good reason, and I'm not bitter anymore. So i started using my cane for my own safety, it also came in handy for tripping Natalie up when she wasn't expecting it. So this went on for several months, as each one passed my frustrations with the cane built up. I had a super tall cane which wasn't bad, but if it got caught up on a tiny pebble or grain of sand it would rocket up and stab me in the arm pit which hurt really bad or it would get me in the chest and I could almost swear there was a jouster around. So one day after threatening my cane to hell haha, Natalie thought she would research guide dogs. So we looked at several schools which all seem great, and I choose the one that sounded like it was just right for me. (It was actually the first one she told me about and I stuck with it but we still looked at the other schools) This was back in August of 08 by the way, I didn't know how long the program was going to take but when I found out i was a little bummed. The program took a month to complete which is about the average with all the other schools. So being that i am a college student it was kind of out of the question unless i wanted to bomb every class and take them again the next semester. So a couple months went by and then I started getting serious about filling out the info I needed for the school to accept me. When I finished the requirements for admissions I impatiently waited for an answer from the admissions office. One day I decided to call the school and see if they had gotten my info and the woman that started the change of my life told me "Have you checked your email? You've been accepted!" And as you can probably tell... I talk a lot. Well this wasn't the case for me at the moment. The lady actually had to say "hello?" because believe it or not i was speechless. This was at the end of March, and my training began on May 25th. So I tried to keep myself busy not counting down the days, which didn't happen but somehow they melted away. Days were ticking away and before I Knew it, it was May 24th and I was nervous as hell because I've never been away from my family for so long. So now I am going to let my fingers, your eyes, and my/your ears relax and I will start telling you about the guide dog school summed up of course and get you up to speed with my and Egypt's everyday life.