Whitney and I had a ball at the Youth Literature Festival in Champaign last week, and the highlight of the entire event was meeting Kayla, a delightful second grader at Westview Elementary School. I usually don’t let kids pet Whitney when she has her harness on, but this was an exception. Kayla is blind, and she’d […]

Erin Lukacovic lives in Colorado and has been volunteering as a puppy-raiser for Guide Dogs for the Blind (GDB) since she was 16 years old. She has applied for an apprenticeship to become a guide dog mobility instructor, and if anyone from GDB is reading this, hey: you’d be fools not to hire her! She […]

Hava Hegenbarth volunteers as a puppy-raiser for Leader Dogs, and she’s been following my Safe & Sound blog for years. Hava is retired after a career in the diplomatic service, and after reading a recent post here about a Holocaust survivor, she commented that she, too, had survived a genocide — it happened when she’d […]

This week I wrote a post for the Easter Seals blog reporting my progress using a talking pedometer for their “Walk the Extra Mile” challenge. In that post I quoted from a post on the New York Times Well blog that said one mile of walking covers about 2,000 steps, and Americans, on average, take […]

When I published that post about the Ann Taylor store telling Becky Andrews she couldn’t come in with her guide dog, a lot of you commented and wondered how a business could be so ignorant. Donna Sword, a volunteer puppy raiser for Canine Companions for Independence, left a response that suggested sometimes it’s negative experiences […]