Welcome to this week’s Cleveland Chronicles.

This week we went to Lowe’s.  We had a lot of opportunities to practice commands in a strange, new place.

We began by opening and closing drawers on floor model bathroom vanities.  Then we opened and closed doors on yet another floor model vanity.

He does a terrific job at pulling me in my wheelchair and there were a lot of wide aisles we used to practice.

When we found the plywood stacks I thought it was a perfect time to try an ‘up.’ (Up puts his front paws on the stack.) Cleveland puts his whole self into pleasing his human and in his eagerness he did a perfect ‘jump.’ (A jump sounds like the word up.  A jump involves leaping to the top of the stack with all four paws ending up on top.) A few more tries and some well placed blocking he was doing perfect ups.

It snowed this week and his Montana was showing. He didn’t even blink when we went out to the yard that morning.

This week he can position himself behind my wheelchair, then he goes under to retrieve a dropped item. He does this very well.

Now, we are working on a whole new command where he will retrieve my inhaler from the tv cabinet.  He is a quick study so I imagine this will be an easy task.

I am a professional learner and I’ve been finishing up a study of CSS Coding.  I saw your eyes glaze over. Last night I was telling him about the usefulness of Child Combinators and he didn’t even pretend to be interested.  I got a dog’s equivalent of an eye roll.

I hope you are enjoying these Cleveland Chronicles and the photos. Don’t touch anything sharp.