Tails of the Neutron Star – Jameyanne Fuller

Seeing Eye Day 0: the Storm and the Scramble

Let me set the scene:

It is early afternoon on Saturday. I am in the middle of my biweekly writing group. We are getting into deep discussion of the metaphors in one of our author’s pieces. I’m at my writing desk in my space library, and my Neutron Star is snoring on his bed beside me. Tomorrow, one of my writing group friends is going to come pick him up to take care of him for the next two and a half weeks while I’m at Seeing Eye. Once he’s out of the house, I’m going to pack—I don’t want him to see the suitcase and get nervous. But in the meantime, I need to clean up my whole house so I’m leaving it in a reasonable state. I have just the right amount of food left in the fridge for two days, though I do have a pile of dishes to do because it was one of those weeks. And laundry. Oh, the laundry! But I have plenty of time, and I have a plan. And yes I’m sad that Neutron isn’t going to be with me constantly for the next couple weeks, but it’s okay, I’ve planned for this, and he’s going to have a great time and be well-taken care of at my friend’s place. For right now, I’m in the middle of writing group, and it’s my turn to comment and I need to say something coherent about this excellent short story that I don’t think I understood in the least.

I get a phone call.

I don’t recognize the number, so I send it to voicemail.

About half an hour later, we take a quick break from writing group to use the bathroom, get more tea, and so on.

I’m in the bathroom when I get another call. This one says its from The Seeing Eye.

What? On a Saturday?

Uh oh.

I answer.

My train on Monday morning has been canceled because of the coming snowstorm. They are going to get me on a train tomorrow, Sunday, so I can get to New Jersey ahead of the storm. I’ll spend Sunday night in a hotel, and they’ll pick me up on Monday morning to go to the Seeing Eye’s campus.

They needed to talk to the other students coming from the D.C.-Baltimore area—there are three of us, apparently—and they would get back to me with the exact time of my train.

So here I am, standing in the bathroom feeling a bit like I’ve been hit by a snowball from behind. All my carefully laid plans are in ruins around me. I now have to get Neutron to my friend’s place, pack, do my dishes, do my laundry, and clean up my house all tonight, because I don’t know what time train I’m taking tomorrow. It could be really early (my original train was 7:00 AM on Monday morning, after all). It feels like so much I don’t know where to get started, but I need to get back to writing group anyway.

You’d think, after two years of life being uncertain and full of big changes, that I’d be able to cope with this very small change in plans, leaving just one day earlier to avoid a big snowstorm. But the thing about such a long period of uncertainty, and all the major life changes that have come with it, is that it actually depletes your reserves and your ability to cope. So on Saturday, this small change seemed like an insurmountable obstacle. I didn’t know how I could possibly do it all. And I was not prepared to say goodbye to Neutron today.

I returned to writing group. My friend who is taking Neutron was on the call, so I took a couple minutes to let her know the change and ask if she could take Neutron this evening. She could.

I finished up writing group in a swirl of emotions (very sorry to the two people who got comments from me in this state). Then I started my laundry, put my clean dishes away so I could load the dishwasher, and frantically started gathering up Neutron’s things to send with him to my friend. All the while still calculating everything I had to do and trying to figure out what I could cross off the list.

I heard from Seeing Eye that I would be on a noon train on Sunday, which was not as bad as I’d feared. I could push a few things to the morning.

My friend arrived. We packed up her car, and then I hugged my Neutron boy and got him settled in her car, and she took him home. And I cried like a baby about it for a bit.

I know I know, I’m getting him back in a couple weeks! But this dog has been with me through so much: law school, my move to D.C. and my first real job, the pandemic, my knee surgery, my mom’s illness and death. The idea that he wasn’t in my house with me right now, wagging his tail whenever I looked his way or else filling the room with his big snores and big dreams, was pretty awful.

And to be clear, I know I don’t have it as bad as the people on my train who had to say goodbye to their retired dogs a day early and who aren’t going to be keeping their dogs for whatever reason. I can’t imagine how hard that was.

So once I felt my feelings for a bit, I wrangled myself into getting everything done. Transferred the laundry, did the dishes, gathered up my toiletries and chargers and everything, got the suitcase down, started packing the suitcase, got the clothes out of the dryer and put some of them in the pile to be packed and the rest up in my room to deal with later, put everything into my suitcase, realized I wouldn’t have enough room for all the extra dog stuff I was sure to accumulate, got a bigger suitcase, put everything into that suitcase, ran up and down the stairs a million times in search of those last few things I needed, laid out my clothes for the morning, and fianllly went to bed.

I woke up early Sunday morning and used the time to stop my mail (which I forgot to do on Saturday) and order a new toothbrush and retainer cleaner from Instacart, because I could have sworn I already got those but couldn’t find them anywhere. I was still grabbing random stuff and shoving it into my suitcase. I scrubbed down the kitchen and cleaned the bathrooms and even had a minute to vacuum. Finally, I took out my trash, watered my one and only plant, which will probably thrive in my absence, and off I went.

I chose to brave the metro on a Sunday morning with my heavy suitcase and white cane. A choice to be sure, but I got to Union Station with plenty of time. I even met up with the other student from D.C. so we were able to sit together on the train.

And we were off!

A couple Seeing Eye instructors met us at the train and brought us to our hotel. I’ve been relaxing and catching up on blogging since, with a break to order dinner and talk to my college friends in our weekly Sunday night call. I hear D.C. is basically shut down already. But I haven’t checked to see what the weather is doing here. In about an hour, someone will be back from Seeing Eye to take us to the actual campus, and our training will begin! It still hasn’t really sunk in that I’m here and that I’m going to have a new guide dog in two days.

While I wait for that to sink in, please enjoy this picture, courtesy of my friend who’s watching him, of Neutron happily licking all specks of a celery stick off his nose.

2024: the Good, the Bad, and the Books

Hello friends! It’s been a while since I posted here, but once again I’m trying to rectify that in the new year. Starting with a quick roundup of my 2024. Or not so quick, as it turns out.

2024 was a rough year for me. I spent most of it at home in New Hampshire, spending time with and helping to care for my mother as she battled brain cancer. She passed away at the end of July, and while it has been such a terrible loss, I will always treasure all the time I got to have with her in her last year.

I returned to the D.C. area in August, and since then I feel like I’ve been trying to rebuild my life around all my grief. I’m working in the office two days a week again, and I’ve been getting back into tandem biking. I’ve most enjoyed being able to see my D.C. friends more regularly, and I have been so grateful for all their support over the past months.

But even after losing my mom and moving back to my apartment in the D.C. suburbs, 2024 wasn’t done serving up big life changes.

In October, I stumbled upon a perfect house in D.C. proper, and I put in an offer. They accepted, we closed in two weeks, I got out of my lease before it renewed, and my dad and uncle helped me move. Friends I have a house now! And I have loved making it my own. I finally have a place for all my hardcopy Braille books and my big writing desk from my room in New Hampshire. I’ve turned one of the bedrooms into a library, which I’ve decorated with an outer space theme. I call it my space library and I love it!

I also love the neighborhood—I’m just a few blocks from the metro, but it’s still residential, and there’s a great little independent bookstore near me and an actual Italian restaurant and everything—and also all my new neighbors, who have been so kind and welcoming! It’s a huge change to go from an apartment building where people just said hi or maybe ventured a comment about the weather in the elevator to a neighborhood with regular block parties and an active group chat where everyone is always helping each other out. Seriously, one of my neighbors just texted to tell me he’d salted my steps for me, with pet friendly salt, ahead of the snowstorm that’s coming through tonight.

But wait! There’s more!

Somewhere between my knee surgery at the beginning of 2023, the year at home with my mom, and the move back to D.C., Neutron let me know that he didn’t want to work as much anymore. I applied for a new dog at Seeing Eye and once we were back in D.C., I’ve been slowly phasing him out of working and into retirement. We took our last trip together with him guiding me home to New Hampshire for the holidays. He was his usual flawless pro through the airport. We even managed a revolving door—perfectly I might add!—for the first time since we trained together in 2017. I am going to keep Neutron as a pet, and hopefully he will have many years ahead full of snuggles and sunbeams and long walks and frantic tail wags.

At the end of November, I got the call from Seeing Eye that they have a new dog that’s a match for me, and they invited me to come back to their campus to train with that dog in the January class. I am actually writing this post in a hotel in New Jersey, because I had to come up a day early because of that big snow storm. So while 2024 was packed full of big life changes, they’re still coming in 2025. I’ll be starting the year with a new partner by my side. One of my writing group friends is watching Neutron for the next couple weeks, and she reports that he is enjoying himself immensely.

As you might imagine, with one thing and another, reading and writing both took a bit of a backseat this past year.

I had a hard time working on many of my ongoing writing projects, as suddenly so many of them seemed to be about grief—past, present, or future. But I still needed to write. That’s the thing about writers. If we don’t write, we go a little crazy inside. And so I returned to my roots and started writing poetry. I kept a journal of sourts in poems this past year. I don’t know what I’ll do with it, if anything, but it will always be special to me. Those poems helped me to express all my feelings and also helped me rediscover my love of writing poetry, something I’d long convinced myself I was bad at.

It’s only been in the last few weeks that I’ve turned back to writing fiction, and I have at least one project that has grabbed me by the heart and won’t let go. I’d almost forgotten what it’s like to write a story that feels like it’s writing itself and I’m just transcribing it, that feels like it is the only thing in the universe that matters right now, even though of course there are other things, like your job and your dog and the dishes that matter too. I’ve really built up some momentum and made progress in the last few weeks, and I have some bbig plans for finishing up some of my many unfinished projects in 2025.

But while I wasn’t writing much, I did continue to submit short stories to magazines, and I’m excited to share that I have two short stories that have been accepted for publication in 2024. “Éclairs for Elodie” is about grief and baking and memory, and it will be published by Abyss and Apex. and “Born in Flame and Song” is about destiny and sacrifice and family and belonging and music and, you guessed it, grief (I have a theme going I know), and it will be published by Cast of Wonders. I wrote “Éclairs for Elodie” in 2022, and “born in Flame and Song” in 2021, despite the theme that has unfortunately become all too relevant to my life this year. But I’m so excited for you all to read them soon, hopefully this year!

As for reading in 2024, I had a hard time focusing much to read a lot. I kept starting books and struggling with them and then putting them down. 2024 was the year where I embraced putting books down if I wasn’t enjoying reading them. Too much else was hard to struggle with something that should be bringing me joy.

I reread a lot of old favorites this year. Of those, revisiting Catherynne Valente’s Fairyland books was I think the best comfort read I could have asked for.

Of the new books I read this year, only a few stood out to me as really extraordinary in one way or another.

Glowrushes/Lo Stralisco by Roberto Piomini: beautiful, moving, haunting, I read it both in English and Italian early in 2024 and it has clung to me ever since
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery: do I understand it? Not at all. Do I love it? Yes!
The Swifts series by Beth Lincoln: the back cover describes it as Knives Out meets Lemony Snicket. Need I say more? These were delightful mysteries full of heart, humor, and a healthy amount of wordplay. I really hope the series continues.
The Redhead of Auschwitz by Nechama Birnbaum: a true story that was incredibly poignant and powerful and has stayed with me
The Yellow Bird Sings by Jennifer Rosner: Another WWII/Holocaust book, this one about a part of the war I didn’t know much about
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone: I can’t even describe this one, but if you haven’t read it, go read it! Go read it now!
Plotting the Stars trilogy by Michelle A. Barry: magical school in space! Magical school in space! Magical school in space!
The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy by Anne Ursu: found family, mysterious boarding school, conspiracies, beautiful writing, what more could I want?
The Midnight Orchestra and the Dark Refrain by Jessica Khoury: the second and third books in the Mystwick School of Musicraft series. Don’t get me started, or I’ll never shut up about these books.
Castles in Their Bones trilogy by Laura Sebastian: Laura Sebastian does political intrigue in a really comprehensible and also human way. In this series we have three sisters raised to conquer the kingdoms their mother is marrying them off to, battling their love for their mother and their homeland with their love for each other and also their betrothed (oops that wasn’t part of the plan) and a long ago prophecy that could ruin everything. This was another series that pulled me in and wouldn’t let go, which was just what I needed.

I’ve added these titles to my book recs page, where you can also see my other favorites from years past.

And that’s it for 2024. I think it’s enough, don’t you?

As for what’s ahead in 2025, I’m starting training with my third Seeing Eye dog tomorrow, and I’m going to try to post daily updates on this blog. We’ll see how long I keep it up, given how busy the training schedule is, but I’m going to try.

Once I’m back from Seeing Eye, I do hope to return to posting about what I’ve read each month, and I’m also planning to do a monthly post on some kind of writing topic.

For writing, I’m aiming to make significant progress on, and hopefully finish, at least two of my unfinished projects this year.

And I’m aiming to read 50 books in 2025, with one of those books a month being in Braille.

I’m also going to try to cook at least one new recipe a week, because cooking is something I really love that I haven’t done as much of as I would like in the last year, what with one thing and another. Maybe I’ll post about that too.

On the whole, I’m crossing my fingers for the next year to be relatively more settled than the last couple. I could use a few months of nothing but exploring the city, meeting up with friends, and snuggling my dogs in my new space library.

Happy 2025 friends!

Goodbye 2023!

2023 was a really terrible year. On the list of terrible things we have major knee surgery, another novel failing to get a book deal, a really upsetting reading slump, Neutron making it clear he’s about ready to retire, my mom being diagnosed with brain cancer, and more. It’s been a rough time, and I can’t wait for 2024 to start and hopefully move in a more positive direction.

But there were some good things that happened in 2023, and I’d like to focus on those right now.

I have a wonderful, supportive group of friends and writing buddies who I honestly could not have gotten through this year without. And this year I really strengthened and developed my friendships with some of my coworkers. I feel like I have an army around me holding me up, and I couldn’t be more happy to have all of them in my life.

I also successfully branded myself as the person in the office with all the space clothes, and I’ve got even more coming for 2024! A silly thing but a good thing. Everyone should have galaxy dresses.

My job has been fabulous about letting me telework from home, so I’ve been able to spend so much more time with my mom than I would have otherwise. We have had so many small adventures in the last few months and built so many precious memories.

I wrote a new book this year. It was a deeply personal book about the first time a friendship ends, but it’s also about prejudice and inclusivity, and I’ve thrown in some vampires, selkies, weerebears, and dragons for fun. The draft needs a lot of work, and I’m currently revising to add more actual plot to balance out all the feelings, but I’ve grown a lot as a writer because of this project, and I think I’ll be really proud of this book in the end. If I ever finish it.

I also started writing another book this fall, which I’m calling my destress project and which has done wonders for my mental health and my love of writing. I’ll have a lot more to say about this in 2024.

And I had two short stories published in 2023, which I completely forgot about in my first draft of this post! “Duet for a Soloist” was published in Electric Spec, and “Where No One Sleeps” was published in Andromeda Spaceways. I’m really proud of both of these stories and so glad I got to share them with you this year!

Despite the reading slump, I also read a total of forty-five books this year. Twenty of them were new books, and twenty-five were rereads. Here are my favorites:

The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud
Bloodmarked by Tracy Deonn
Before and After the Book Deal by Courtney Maum
Save the Cat! Writes a Young Adult Novel: The Ultimate Guide to Writing a YA Bestseller by Jessica Brody
Don’t Want to be Your Monster by Deke Moulton
The Thing About Jellyfish by Ali Benjamin
Chewing the Fat: An Oral History of Italian Foodways From Fascism to Dolce Vita by Karima Moyer-Nocchi
The Chalice of the Gods by Rick Riordan

I have added these books to my book recs page, and I will have more detailed thoughts about them soon, I hope!

As for what’s coming next in 2024? I don’t know, and I’m not going to set any goals for myself right now. I have plans for my blog and books and short stories I want to write, but I’m just going to keep doing my best with everything.

So happy New Year! Here’s to a 2024 full of light and love and words!

Juris Dog-Torate

Hi! Hi hi hi! It’s Neutron Star again! My person is studying for the bar, so I’m here to tell you about my hat. Do you like my hat? It wasn’t very comfortable, but everybody says I was the most handsome.

Yes, the hat means what you think it means. This week, I graduated from Harvard Paw School with my Juris Dog-torate. My person and I got up bright and early on Thursday morning (actually it was just early, nothing bright about it, because the sun wasn’t awake yet), and we got dressed in our giant robes and my person helped me with my hat, and we went over to school. We had to stand around a lot, and then we had to sit, and then stand some more, and lots of people were talking. My person got a plastic hammer that I wanted to chew. I was disappointed that it didn’t squeak. There was a bit where everybody stood up and waved the hammers in the air and screamed like crazy.

Then more sitting and listening and trying to be patient, but there wasn’t a lot of room. My person said I was a good boy and gave me lots of snuggles though.

Finally, we lined up with all the people we’ve had classes with, and they said my person’s name, and we walked across the stage and got my person’s diploma.

There was no diploma for me, but I don’t need a piece of paper. I had the hat.

There were a lot of people and a lot of new smells and the hat was very distracting because it was very handsome, even though it kept slipping. But I did my job like a superstar and guided my person all over. And I only tried to eat her tassel a couple times.

I know I know. But it was just so floppy and dangly and I had to try.

I was sad that Mopsy couldn’t come, because she was with our person for the first year of paw school, but she doesn’t like crowds anymore, so she decided to stay home with our other buddy, Rocket.

I’m also sad because even though school is over and we’re all graduated and everything, my person is still studying all the time. I guess there’s this big exam called the bar that she has to pass before we can go to work as lawyers, so there’s going to be a lot of sitting this summer. So my job this summer will be to bring my person plenty of balls and bones and snuggles and make sure she doesn’t work too hard and takes me for walks, because I need to stay in shape for all the adventures coming this fall.

A Year in the Life of a Neutron Star

Hi! Hi hi hi! Do you like my ball? Do you? Do you? Good. It’s a good ball.

Yes, you guessed it, I’m the Neutron Star. My person finally let me on to talk to you. Hi! I’m very excited to meet you.

I’ve been with my person for a whole year now. I can’t believe it’s been that long, but I also feel like we’ve been together forever.

One morning a whole year ago, I got a bath, and then my trainer brought me into a new place. And in this new place was a new person. She was very excited to meet me, and she smelled like puppies, and she figured out my favorite place to be scratched right away (my Neutron noggin). But then my trainer left me with this new person, and I liked her lots, but I was confused. I saw my trainer again soon, though. Now he was teaching me and the new person to work together. We went all over Morristown, New Jersey and New York City together. My new person and I became good buddies.

Then the new person and I got into a big flying tin can and went to a new place. I finally got to meet the other puppies my person smelled like. They’re black labs like me, and they’re named Mopsy and Rocket. Mopsy told me that she was my person’s guide first, but she couldn’t do it anymore, so I better do a good job. I said I would, and she let me snuggle with her. Rocket didn’t want to be left out, so he snuggled with us too. And we’ve been buddies ever since.

Soon after we went to the new place, my person and I started law school. My person was actually going back to law school. She took time before all the classes started to teach me the campus and the places she liked to go. I paid good attention, because I knew I needed to catch up, since I was starting in the middle. I learned the campus, and I caught up on the law stuff I needed to know (Mopsy taught me lots when we went back to see her and Rocket and the other people). And then the adventures really began.

In the last year, I’ve been all over Cambridge and Boston with my person. I went up to Vermont twice, and we went back to New Hampshire a lot too. We took classes at the law school and Harvard College and MIT. I learned some French with my person, and we learned a lot about negotiating in all sorts of scenarios and international business transactions and diplomacy and artificial intelligence. When the school year ended, my person stopped practicing French and started teaching me Italian. I like how Italian sounds better than French, and I think she’s better at it anyway.

In January, we worked at MIT for three weeks. Well, almost three weeks. There was a big snow storm one day that meant we had to stay home. When we went out in the big snowstorm because I had to go out, there was so much snow I had to swim.

Sidenote, I got to go swimming for the first time with my person yesterday. Once I figured out that she hadn’t taken me to some giant magical water bowl and I was supposed to swim around, not drink the whole thing, I had a lot of fun. (I like the idea of the giant magical water bowl too though.) It was less fun when my person decided that now I needed a bath.

Anyway, after we finished classes for the year, my person and I and my person’s mother went to New York again, which I remembered from last year. I zipped around through all the people on our way to meet my person’s brother and to get food. Then we went to a new place my person called Gaithersburg, Maryland. She says she’s going to talk about it more later, because she was doing a lot of stuff on the computer and I was taking nice long snoozles under the desk. I made a lot of new friends in Maryland, and we were both sad when we left, even though I was kind of bored with the walk to work by then.

Now we’re back in Cambridge, and my person is doing more stuff on a computer, and I’m taking snoozles under the desk. But I’m closer to Mopsy and Rocket, and the walk to work is much more interesting here.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last year. I love my new person and all our new adventures. She buys me the best bones and balls and other toys, and she knows all my favorite places to get scratches, and she’s always happy to snuggle with me. Also, she’s given me all the best names. I’m not just Neutron the subatomic puppy. I’m the Neutron Star, the Neutron Superstar, just Star, Starship, Starfish, Starburst, and a whole lot more. She even renamed my crate my Nucleus.

It’s been a great year, and I’ve learned lots and lots. But the biggest thing I’ve learned is that I am a real superdog now. I finished my training, and I have a sidekick I have to watch out for. It’s my responsibility to get her where she needs to go and make sure she has fun along the way.

And that’s what we’re off to do now. I guess that means I have to put the ball down.

Neutron in Time Square

As I write this, I’m flying home from Seeing Eye, with Neutron at my feet under the seat in front of me. This is Neutron’s first plane flight. I’m glad to be going home, but this has really been a fabulous class with a great group of people, and I’m not sure I’m ready to get back to the real world. There have been a lot of things I’ve been putting off while I’m here, saying I’ll deal with it when I’m back from Seeing Eye. Well, I’m almost back from Seeing Eye, so now I’m going to have to deal with all that stuff. (Note: At the time I’m posting this, I’ve arrived home, been mobbed by dogs, and started unpacking, organizing my life, and catching up on sleep).

I’ll talk about arriving home in the future, when I’m awake enough to string two words together. This post is about my last week of training with Neutron.

We cruised through our second solo. There were a lot of challenges: dog distractions, planned and spontaneous; an idling bus sticking out of a driveway; the facial salon Neutron was intent on taking me into; people not looking where they were going and nearly mowing us down. Neutron was fabulous the whole way through, and we had a lot of fun. I’m not sure when, but somewhere between our first solo and our second, things really clicked into place for us and we just started zooming along.

After our solo, we began freelance work. During freelance, we did some standard things as well as work that was similar to what we might face at home.

We started with escalators. Yes, it is possible to take a dog on an escalator, and no, the dog doesn’t have to wear shoes to do it (though I must say Neutron has some super snazzy shoes for snow storms and extra hot summer days). The trick with escalators is to keep your dog resting at your left side and reach out along the railing with your right hand, and the second you feel the railing start to flatten, you and your dog start moving and walk off the escallator. If your dog is moving, there’s no chance of their feet getting caught. Neutron is a huge fan of escalators. His tail was wagging all the way, and when we got off, he was all wriggly and prancy because he did it right.

Revolving doors didn’t go so well. On our second morning of freelance, we went to do revolving doors. I never learned how to do revolving doors with Mopsy—I always took the regular door—and once I found myself in a situation where the regular door was locked and the security guard refused to open it for me, so we had to wing the revolving door and it stressed everybody out. So I wanted to make sure I actually learned how to work Neutron through a revolving door. We practiced primarily on manual revolving doors, the kind you push. The trick with these is to keep your dog on your right side, rather than your left, so they’re in the widest part of the door. Keep them up as close to the glass in front of you as possible, and push the door with your left hand. I didn’t do so well my first try, and I accidently bumped Neutron’s butt with the door, which caused him to get nervous and not trust me so much on revolving doors. The second time I did better. And yesterday, we went to another, bigger door to practice on (because I wanted more practice to feel confident), and we nailed it. Neutron was super happy about it. We learned how to do the automatic revolving doors too, but we didn’t actually practice on them, and honestly those freak me out so we’re going to generally stick with the regular door to the side, which by law they have to have (so there, random security guard who wouldn’t let me in with Mopsy).

We also did work on roads with no sidewalks—country work. Neutron and I walk on the left side of the road, so we’re facing oncoming traffic and I’m between Neutron and the traffic (I’m more visible and it makes Neutron feel safer). We went to a grocery store and practiced using a cart with Neutron. I said it seven years ago and I’ll say it again: there’s a reason I didn’t pass driver’s ed. We wandered through the Morristown courthouse, which was a maze of interconnected buildings with lots of trick staircases and short turns and narrow hallways. We also went to the pet store, where I got Neutron another bone and an ID tag and we worked through all the distractions (there was literally a wall of dogs). We worked on how to deal with medians in the middle of streets, and we cruised around a shopping mall where we practiced getting directions for different stores and in general dealing with the public. Personally, I prefer Amazon, but we found Neutron some nice lacrosse balls to play with, and we fended off small children who wanted to pet him and people who were trying to take sneaky pictures of him. Folks, I can hear your phone make the little camera noise and I will chew you out for it, because taking pictures of my dog can distract him and possibly endanger my safety, and also it’s just rude and an invasion of my privacy. Flip the situation and ask how you would feel if someone was sneakily taking pictures of you without asking and you get it. Just don’t do it. Rant over.

We worked with buses and trains as well, and we used the clicker to get Neutron to target the bus stop (more training me to use the clicker than Neutron). We did a trip in downtown Morristown at night, so I could practice with Neutron when my residual vision isn’t nearly as good, and we rocked it. And of course, we took a couple trips to get ice cream, because ice cream is life and we had to make sure Neutron had proper exposure to ice cream shops with me.

Finally, we went to New York City for a day. We started at Port Authority and walked down to 30th Street, where we encountered a lot of construction. I wanted some construction work because there’s a lot of construction in Boston. We worked on how to deal with construction that blocked the sidewalk and funneled you out into the street with a barrier between you and the cars, as well as scaffolding slalom, both things I had to handle this summer on my way to my internship. Then we took the subway up to Columbus Circle. In the subway station, we worked on platform awareness with the dogs in the subway. If you tell the dog forward thinking you’re facing the way to go but you’re actually facing the platform, the dog won’t take you into the platform but will steer you right or left, guiding you along the platform. Neutron brought me close, following my direction, saw the edge, went “oh nope,” and then steered me away. When I insisted, he steered me even farther away from it. All indicators that, if I was confused and thought I was heading somewhere else but was really facing the platform, I would need to reassess where I was. We also did more practice with the clicker, teaching Neutron to target the turnstile to get onto the platform. When we got out at Columbus Circle, Neutron took me right to the turnstiles even though it was a totally different station. From Columbus Circle we walked down Broadway to Time Square, where we worked through the crowds of people and dogs over to a burger place for lunch. And after lunch, we walked back down to Port Authority and went back to the Seeing Eye. Neutron was just flying through New York, weaving around pedestrians, poles, dogs, pigeons, bicycles, mail carts, gratings, and the one guy in a wheelchair with three off-leash chihuahuas in sweater vests. It was really an incredible experience, and I feel like if we could handle that, we can definitely take on Boston.

It’s taken me longer to write this than anticipated, because Neutron was a bit anxious during take-off and landing on the plane (it was his first flight and there were so many noises so he tried to climb into my lap). But he was zooming through the airport. I can’t wait to get home so I can see Mopsy again and Neutron can meet her and our pet black lab, Rocket. We’re going to have a relaxing couple of weeks as much as we can, letting Neutron settle in and get familiar with home and my new apartment at school.

It’s the sleep-deprivation talking, I’m sure, but all of this still feels really surreal to me. I just can’t believe that I went to Seeing Eye, was matched with this super smart, sweet, curious little boy, and now I’m almost home with him. But we did it. For me, training at Seeing Eye this time was almost all about learning to listen to this new dog, and this new dog learning to work with you. Training’s over now. We’re a team, and off we go.

Neutronian Physics

Exactly one week ago, I was matched with my second Seeing Eye dog. He’s a sweet little black lab golden retriever cross named Neutron. He’s 22.5 inches tall and weighs 55 pounds, and he’ll turn two years old in September. So he’s roughly the same size as Mopsy. I’m actually told that he bears a striking resemblance to Mopsy (based on the pictures I’ve sent home).

It’s hard to believe I’ve only been working with Neutron for a week. It feels like it’s been at least a month, if not longer. Part of that is because I’m tired. We’ve been going from before 5:30 in the morning to after 8:00 at night with very little time to stop, and the last few days the heat has been incredible.

In our first week of training, we do set routes with our dogs. The first route was a big rectangle—down four blocks, left for one block, up five blocks, left one block, and then left again to find the training center. At first we did it with our instructor coaching us through each crossing. Then our instructor backed off until, Sunday morning, we were doing it completely independently. There was a barricade and a planned dog distraction we had to work past as well, but otherwise it was pretty straightforward, and I could focus on learning to feel Neutron’s signals through the harness rather than on where I was going. Even though I know how to work a dog now, Neutron is still different from Mopsy, and we need to learn how to dance together.

After our successful solo Sunday morning, we started our second set route. This one was more complicated both in terms of the crossings and obstacles and the general orientation. It’s like a quarter of a pie with a hook on the end, if that makes sense. The street crossings are wider, and the sidewalks are narrower with trees, telephone poles, and sometimes trash cans. It’s a significantly greater challenge, but this was the point where Neutron and I hit our stride, and we’ve been flying. He’s had to wear his booties a couple times because it’s been so hot, and he goes even faster with those on. Like the first route, there’s a baricade set up to block the sidewalk that we have to work past. This baricade is more complicated, because it blocks the sidewalk but also extends to block us on the left as we approach, so we either have to approach the barrier and turn out of it to get to the street, or we have to turn before we reach the extension at all (that choice is up to Neutron). There’s also a more complicated dog distraction, where we have to work past a poodle who then follows us down the street. I’m pretty sure Neutron thinks poodles are part of a weird religious cult. We’re doing our solo for this second route this morning.

This afternoon we’re going to start our freelance work, where the training is tailored to what we’ll face when we go home. We’ll learn to work escalators, elevators, and revolving doors. Seeing Eye has two rows of airline seats to practice sliding our dogs under the seat in front of us or situating them in the bulkhead (I’d prefer to slide Neutron under the seat in front of me because it’s safer, and I think he’ll fit there, but we’ll see). We’ll work through department stores and shopping malls, and we may practice on roads with no sidewalks, paths through the woods, and college campus settings. We’ll also do buses, trains, and subways, and one day we’ll be going into New York City.

It’s been a lot so far, and it’s going to be a lot to pack into our last week here. Of course I’m also grooming Neutron, cleaning up after him, and playing and cuddling with him. He really is a sweet little lab. He loves belly rubs and cuddles. When he has a toy he likes to run around holding it in his mouth and making little snorting noises. He likes to claim me with his paws, and if I’m sitting next to him on the floor giving him scratches, he’ll put his paw on my arm and sort of wrap it around my elbow like a hug.

And of course there are all the science puns I can do with his name. My favorite nickname for him right now is Neutron Star, and I’ve already determined Neutron’s first law of motion: a Neutron in motion tends to stay in motion; a Neutron at rest wants to get moving.

I’m still considering Neutron’s superdog name (Mops was Mopsy the Magnificent). A friend suggested Neutron the Wonderdog, and I came up with Nuclear Neutron, but I’m not sold on either of those. Any suggestions are welcome.

Obviously at this point we’re both still learning how to work with each other, but we’ve come leaps and bounds in just one week, and I’m sure we’ll go leaps and bounds this week too.

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