Happy Anniversary

Thursday April 13th – Today is my Anniversary! Notice I said “my” anniversary, that’s because the 13th won’t happen until tomorrow for my husband, Grant. So ‘his’ anniversary will be tomorrow. Whichever country we are in, we have been married for 13 years! Happy Anniversary honey, I love and miss you!

We had a really interesting lecture this morning. GDV has a Neurological Physiotherapist, Geoff Bell, who consults for them both for client who have gait and posture problems and for clients who develop basic problems during training such as shin splints. We learned all about movement; voluntary, reflexive, and rhythmic motor patterns (such as walking). Then discussed different ways in which these movements can be affected by various brain disorders, injuries, or inherited disease. Geoff gave a great presentation with video footage of various clients he has worked with and by using us as ‘guinea pigs’ for live demonstrations of balance, gait analysis, and coordination. Very cool stuff.

We began the afternoon by working with some volunteers again and teaching more long cane skills. We then headed to town and began planning and teaching each other the first part of “our routes”. I put this in quotes because during the rest of the course we will be learning and adding onto “our routes” until at the end we will independently use our long canes under blindfold to leave a house in a residential area walk to a bus stop, take the bus to a business area, walk through that area to a designated end point.

Because it’s Easter Weekend we have both Friday and Monday off. So after class Sue and I packed up the car and drove about 4 hours away to a town called Warrnambool which is on the coast. Our plan is to follow the “Great Ocean Road” back towards a town near the bay called Geelong where we will visit with a friend of Helen’s (our nurse at GDB). We will then head back to GDV and make a day trip on Monday to the Werribee open range zoo. Should be a fun 4 day weekend!