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.