Pets get their own page here, which is why the title. Pictures, for now, are in the Gallery. That may change if the pictures get too numerous.
I've been surrounded by four-footed animals as long as I can remember. My parents had cats when I was born, and then for my entire childhood and adolescence, we had a dizzying succession of dogs and cats. Some of them we deliberately adopted; others showed up at our door as strays. At one point we had three dogs and five cats, all living with us and each other in relative harmony. I think I still remember every single one of their names.
About midway through my high school years, I think it was, my parents got sick of the minutiae of taking care of pets: the walks, the litterbox, the feeding, the constant cleaning up after what are, after all, hairy near-wild animals which have agreed to share our homes and lives. Of course, at that point we still had plenty of fairly young, healthy pets. It would be a while. When I left for college, three cats and a dog were still around; by the time I joined the Air Force, two years later, our two longest-lived cats showed no sign of dying any time soon. Those two lasted most of the way through my military career.
Then it was a long time without pets -- the service doesn't exactly encourage them. I'd started to forget how much I loved them, how much I needed some warm, living, non-human, four-footed, fuzzy presence in my life.
When I met Andrea, she had a wonderful but skittish cat, really almost a kitten, named Tasha. It took a year or so for Tasha to accept that I had a right to be there. (Now, years later, Tasha is older and more sedate.) I think what finally broke her resistance down was that she could tell how happy I was to have her company. I hadn't realized, myself, how much I missed having pets, any pets.
For some time, we also had a succession of rats (Osiris the snake survivor, Johnette the über-rat, Sinéad the naked acro-rat, and Cleo the last pharaoh) but finally decided we couldn't handle such short-lived pets. Rats are amazingly smart, probably smarter ounce for ounce than any other creature on Earth including human beings, and so it's entirely possible to get attached to a smart little ball of fuzz with a strong personality which will then inevitably die in a couple of years. I miss having a (domesticated) rodent presence in the house, but I don't miss the heartbreak of their deaths.
The latest member of the Dvorkin-fuzz family is Maggie, who has shed the last vestiges of her puppyhood and turned into quite a sweet (though still quite energetic) adult dog. And so I feel I've come full circle. A wonderful dog, with her own personality but seeming also to embody some of the best characteristics of those who have gone before. I loved them all, and love them still.