The unscripted story…

Buckley is my nine year old Shih Tzu poodle. He weighs about 10 pounds. For the past nine years I’ve been travelling with Barkley all over Canada in the United States. When Buckley was just one month old I took my first trip with him so he’s learned to travel in cars and airplanes and he travels well.  When Buckley was just a couple of years old I took him on his first big trip on an airplane. We flew to Arizona.

Buckley in Invermere, BC

Before leaving for Arizona I went to the vet and made sure Buckley‘s vaccinations were up-to-date. During that visit the vet also gave me a spray that I could put on one of his toys to keep him calm during the four hour flight. This spray was a lifesaver because midflight Buckley did start to get a little bit of anxiety on the plane. Travelling through the airport in Canada Buckley had to be in his kennel from the time we got onto the bus in the Jetset parking lot rate until we landed in the Phoenix airport.Once we were in the US Buckley was free to walk around the airport and go through customs. I find travelling in the US with a pet is much easier than travelling through Canada. They allow dogs in stores, restaurants, and in many tourist attractions.

While in Phoenix, Buckley spent a lot of time with my friends husband while I went shopping and toured around. It was a great that Buckley could stay home with my friend Eddie and hang out in his man cave. Each day they visited with neighbours smoked cigars watched hockey and red car magazines in the man cave.

Halfway through my trip, I took Buckley and we travelled to tombstone, Tucson, and desert pines casino. In tombstone and at the casino, Buckley was welcome to visit the shops, Restaurants Buetel Khoma and was even able to go in the casino. On the way back to Phoenix, we went for a hike in cactus Forest.

In cactus forest, Buckley stepped on a cactus. It took about 15 minutes to get all the thorns out of his paw and mouth. Even though he was a bit scared Buckley seemed OK after he stepped on the cactus. That night I noticed Buckley was limping around on the paw where I pulled the thorns out. The next day he was still limping and I decided to take them to see if that in Phoenix. The vet was great, she told me she was from a Mexican family and she had been born in Edmonton which is where I’m from. She didn’t charge me an exam fee to see Buckley and prescribed him and antibiotic to deal with the poison in his body. She also thought he sprained his paw but but assured me that if he rested his paw it would heal on his own. The poison from the thorn in the sprain were causing him to limp. She did tell me that many dogs that come from Canada, often end up in her office because they step on a cactus.

The rest of the trip with Buckley in Phoenix went relatively smoothly. His foot healed up nicely and by the time we came home he had finished taking the antibiotic. Since our trip to Arizona Buckley has travelled to many more places with me in the US including California, Oregon, Washington State, Idaho, Montana,And New Mexico. If you’re thinking about travelling with a small pet to the US, I highly recommend it.

This week I experimented with the voice to text function on my iPhone, known in the Apple community, as the dictation function.  I have used this function in the past to send text messages through my Bluetooth and Sync program in my vehicle or when I don’t necessarily have the hands to text but can send a quick reply to someone using my voice.  Previously, I only used this function to sent short text messages.

The text deviates from conventions of written English in that this function doesn’t pick up on punctuation.  In order for me to put punctuation into my text, I had to say the punctuation that I wanted to add, for example “While in Phoenix (coma)….”  The task was to tell an unscripted story, but other than putting a period at the end of a sentence, adding a coma here and there, and starting a new paragraph, I had a hard time thinking of the punctuation that had to go with my text, as I was speaking.  As the tone in my voice changed through the story, there is nothing in the text to indicate the emotion in my voice.  And had I not asked the to add a coma’s, periods, and new paragraphs, I would have ended up with one really long, monotone sentence.  As it is reads now, my story sounds a bit boring.

The errors in the text seem to come from the tone in my voice changing or my enunciation.  As I was completing this task, I found myself talking slower, in a higher and calmer voice, and enunciating words differently than I normally would when telling an unscripted story so that the function would work better on my phone.  I found that a lot of the proper nouns were picked up by the dictation function and spelled correctly.  If I had to guess, I would say about 80-90% of what I said was translated to the correct word, which is pretty phenomenal, when you think about how the technology has evolved in a relatively short period of time.

In terms of mistakes, I would say the common mistakes came from longer pauses that I made when telling my story and the “Uhhh” or “Umm” that came naturally from me as I was learning to do this for the first time.  I also found the Apple’s voice recorder would automatically turn off and I would have to go back and say something again, which caused a lot of the mistakes in the text.

If I had scripted the story, I think the story would have been a bit more interesting to read.  I could have added some emotion to invoke laughter or excitement, and of course the grammar and punctuation would be fixed.

Oral storytelling is more interactive and unedited.  If you have an audience, you can respond to them by reading their body language and reactions.  An oral story may never told exactly the same way.  Written stories are deliberate and concise.  They are recorded and edited and told the exact same way over and over again.