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Leprechaun Event RaT: Read-a-Thon Daily Questions: Day 11
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1: What is your favorite animal? Your favorite mythological animal?Favorite animal is probably a tiger. Favorite mythogical animal is a Phoenix. It's just so cool that it can continually be reborn. A pet that lasts forever!
2: Do you have any pets? How many pets have you had in your life?
I have a cat named Ohno who's adorable. He's a tuxedo cat and super rambunctious and drools a lot. As a kid I had a bunch of pets. In total I think we've had about 3 dogs and 3 cats, not including my current cat.
3: Tell us about your pets, post photos if you'd like!
Ohno likes to lay on anything papery or bookish. At one point I had to put out a decoy book so that he would leave the one I was reading alone. He also likes to sit on my lap while I'm at the computer and bat at things on the screen.
1: What is your favorite animal? Your favorite mythological animal?I love bears and wolves as far as wild animals go. But dogs are my favorite overall.
2: Do you have any pets? How many pets have you had in your life?
Yes! I have two dogs. Peach is a 6 year old Golden Retriever. Jax is a 10 month old White Swiss Shepherd. These are my first dogs as an adult owning pets myself but I've had numerous dogs and cats over the course of my entire life.
3: Tell us about your pets, post photos if you'd like!
Peach is sweet, loyal, quiet, and gentle. Jax is the opposite of all those things. He doesn't like dogs, he doesn't like other people, he's incredibly protective of me, but he doesn't like anyone else. He's a nightmare...but he's mine and I love him. Here are my babies!
1: What is your favorite animal? Your favorite mythological animal?My favorite animal is the elephant. I just think they are so smart and gentle. When I read "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" I thought the dolphins should have flown away with the elephants as they both seem too smart to be under humanity's thumb for long.
My favorite mythological animal, however, is a different question. Do mermaids count? Or are they too humanoid? Probaby mermaids first and then Pegasus/unicorns/alacorns I guess.
2: Do you have any pets? How many pets have you had in your life?
Currently I have one cat, Ginger. Over the course of my life I have had 4 dogs (Bud, Jessie, Chester and Molly) and 6 cats (Kiki, Dusty, Winston, Zoot, Dingo and Ginger). Ginger is the only animal I have had as an adult.
3: Tell us about your pets, post photos if you'd like!
(Sorry guys, lots of pets- lots of descriptions)
My parents had Bud and Jessie when I was born. They got Bud from the Humane Society and were told that she was spayed. Not so much. About a year after they got her, she got up to greet my dad when he got home and she had puppies coming out of her. I grew up knowing where all of Bud's children went and my parents kept one, Jessie. I was very young when we had them. I remember they both had no hair on their backs after a while. They were nice dogs.
Fun fact: my parents considered naming me Jessica but decided they couldn't because then I would have the same name as the dog, so they went with Stephanie instead.
Bud ended up drowning in a neighbor's swimming pool and Jesse got cancer and had to be put down. I remember my dad and my brother going to be with her when they did it and feeling cowardly because I couldn't sit there and watch her die.
After Bud passed, my mom and my brother were down at the school and found an abandoned litter of puppies. Needless to say, they took them home and found homes for all but one of them, Chester. His sister went to my aunt's and strangers took the other four which my mom gave away for free after she made sure they went to good homes.
Chester was a black lab/german shepherd mix and he was a GOOD dog. He was really tolerant and happy. I still, to this day, think of him as MY dog. He was very playful as a puppy and when he got older he would follow you around, happy to be near you. You could lay on him and he would be just as happy as if he was laying on you. A part of me is afraid to get a dog as an adult for fear that it won't measure up to how awesome Chester was. He managed to make it through one last Christmas before dying of cancer out on the back porch with my dad the year I went to college.
When Jessie died, we got Molly from the Humane Society, a black lab/collie mix and she became Eric's dog. Chester and Molly were pretty well inseparable and Chester put up with Molly nipping and trying to mess with Chester really well. Molly also got cancer in old age, but instead of waiting until she passed they just put her down.
My parents haven't been willing to get new dogs since they died, I think because they were such cool dogs they couldn't stand the pain of losing more dogs like them.
Kiki only liked my dad. Only he was aloud to pet her, but I remember her being really pretty- brown, black and tan all together in spots all over her fur. She had green eyes.
Dusty was a ginormous black cat. He wasn't fat, just big. He lived to be 21, which is absurdly old for a cat. I was out of college by the time he passed and I was about six when we got him. He used to come sit with me when I was sick or going through teenage drama- he was a good cat too.
Winston, although loveable, was almost the opposite of Dusty in every way. He was a mancoon/tabby and he was tiny. Smallest cat we ever owed to that point. One day, he just showed up at our door and after about a week, my dad fed him and he was ours. To make up for his size, he would lay in wait for the other animals. He and Dusty would "sumo" wrestle in the entry way all the time. Winston attacked Chester on a regular basis and Chester just let him- that wasn't as much fun, so Winston focused on Dusty solely after that. Honestly, to poor Dusty, Winston was just a big bully, but Winston had such a big personality that none of us really cared, although if Dusty was having a hard time we would try to separate them. Winston ended up having kidney failure. The last year of his life was pretty painful to watch.
Zoot and Dingo were kittens from down the road. Zoot from one litter from my friend's cat and Dingo from another. They were sisters, so we named them after the prostitute sisters in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. We got them maybe two years before I went off to college, so they weren't my cats in the way that the others were, but I think they still count. Dingo was cross eyed and picked off by a hawk from our back yard. Zoot lasted a little longer, but my dad thinks she was probably eaten by a coyote.
They haven't gotten more animals since.
When I grew up, got married and a house of my own I wanted an animal but my husband said no. He didn't really want a cat and we would have needed a fence for a dog. Then our friends moved down to California and could only bring one of their cats. Suddenly, we had a cat!
Ginger is awesome. She has as much character as any of the cats I grew up with and LOVES people. She doesn't like other animals, which is a good reason to not get a dog yet (and why we justify prolonging building our fence). She would just hurt it, but she is really good with the girls. When they were littler, they would pull her ears and tail and the worst she would do is hiss at them and bat at them with claws retracted.
She is a calico tabby mix and HUGE (nearly 22 pounds when we got her- she has since slimmed to a 17.75 pounds). We just had a kidney scare with her- she is 12 this month, and I had memories of Winston all over again. However, I am happy to say that she seems to be coming out of it. A little dehydrated maybe and stopped up but seems to be recovering nicely now. I am hoping she is around for a good long while. I wouldn't be upset if she lived to be 21 just like Dusty did.
Animals ~1: What is your favorite animal? Your favorite mythological animal?
My favorite animal is the dolphin though I also have a love for Beluga Whales as well, after spending some time in the same building as some when I worked at Sea World. No real mythological favorites. As a child/teen I loved unicorns, can't really stand them for the most part now. Dragons have grown on me a bunch.
2: Do you have any pets? How many pets have you had in your life?
We currently have 3, two dogs and a cat. I've had both dogs and cats in my life. Dogs ~ Inky (childhood dog), Kodiak, Talladega and the two I have now. Cats ~ Luxor, Sahara, Casino with my ex. Up here we had Axel and she had kittens twice we named Roxas, Xemnas, Xigbar, Saix & Xion then we have the cat we have now.
3: Tell us about your pets, post photos if you'd like!
The pets are a pain in the butt. The cat (formerly known as Zoe, we renamed her Zexion and just call her Z or "the cat") isn't even ours, but a friends who asked us to look after her for a month or two. I stupidly said ok, and we're stuck with her, it's been over a year and a half. She's the only cat that has stuck around. She goes outside as well, but she never goes far, the rest had all taken off.
The dogs are a pitbull named Naminé and an unknown that we THINK is at least part Ridgeless Ridgeback named Sora. (Any gamers see a pattern here, but for those who don't, all the animals we've had since moving here are named after Kingdom Hearts characters). Naminé is the animal that my Hubby wanted and all we were going to have here (we live in a TINY duplex) but I found Sora wandering around as a tiny puppy so I took her in and she's been here ever since.
Sora when I found her & Namine a few weeks after we got her ~
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Sora & Naminé a month or so ago ~
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1: What is your favorite animal? Your favorite mythological animal?I love animals so it's hard to pick a favorite --- I seem to be partial to penguins :-D
2: Do you have any pets? How many pets have you had in your life?
Currently I have two dogs -- they are litter-mates. Boxer-lab mix. Unfortunately they don't seem to get along well anymore. One of them has had some health issues and they are cranky old ladies.
Growing up my family almost always had a dog -- I can remember Taffy, Bruno, Cinnamon, Licorice, and Shadow. When I graduated from college, I got a cat --- actually ended up with 2 -- because I lived in apartments. My cats were Nermal and Matisse. I lived with Nermal longer than I lived with any other person --- I had her for 19 years!
3: Tell us about your pets, post photos if you'd like!
I'm not sure how to post photos :-D See above .
1: What is your favorite animal? Your favorite mythological animal?2: Do you have any pets? How many pets have you had in your life?
3: Tell us about your pets, post photos if you'd like!
It's hard to pick a favorite animal. I love a lot of them - especially dogs, cats, house rabbits, wolves, orcas and dolphins
I have a cat, Malz, and a house bunny Kirby, and a hermit crab Cleveland
Karsyn wrote: "Animals ~1: What is your favorite animal? Your favorite mythological animal?
My favorite animal is the dolphin though I also have a love for Beluga Whales as well, after spending some time in the..."
Those dogs are so cute!!
Actually ALL animal pics on this thread are adorable =)
1: What is your favorite animal? Your favorite mythological animal?My favorite animal? Can I answer in two parts? My favorite domesticated animals are dogs, the bigger the better. My favorite wild animals are tigers. :-)
My favorite mythological animals are dragons. Any book that has dragons in it is one I want to read, and if those books are romances and the dragons are dragon-shifters, all to the better! lol ;-)
2: Do you have any pets? How many pets have you had in your life?
I have one dog, but he's not really a "pet." Max is my service dog. :-)
My parents owned a dog when I was a baby/toddler. A couple of years later, I had a kitten/cat. Then we had another dog starting from when I was eight. She was with us for over 13 happy years. And now I have my Max. :-) Apart from cats and dogs, when I was a kid we also tried having fish, hamsters, and a guinea pig or two, but none of them ever lasted long, sadly.
3: Tell us about your pets, post photos if you'd like!
The first dog we had, I sadly don't remember. I was three when Hercules had to be put down (he was also around three). He turned out to be a mentally unstable Saint Bernard and, as he was taller than my parents when standing on his hind legs - and once knocked me down such that I just barely avoided having my head hit against the curb - and could have jumped over a six-foot fence, he had to be put down for his safety and mine (and my baby brother's, who was truly a baby at the time). :'(
Our next "family" pet was a cat. But she was mine. In my memory, her name was Meow (Mom says it was something else, but I choose to disbelieve her, lol). She was a little black kitten that sadly was apparently rather sickly and didn't live to reach adult-cat-hood. I always said my Dad did away with her because he wasn't a fan of cats, though. It was my version of my brother's "I'm adopted because no one else in our family has red hair!" spiel.
Then when I was eight and my brother six, we went to a K-Mart and found a box of puppies abandoned outside the store. Missy was clearly the runt of the litter, and she stole our hearts. So we (meaning me and my brother, but of course my parents let us) rescued "him" and named "him" Mikey, after our Dad (Mike). Then we went camping with a travel group we belonged to at the time. Showing off our "Mikey," one of the lady members of our group flipped "him" over, looked at my Dad, and said, "Mike, your Mikey is a Missy." So Missy she became. :-) This was in 1983 and she lived for just over 13-and-a-half incredibly happy years. She was the best dog ever (and yes, I say that even now that I have a dog of my own who I love very much). Sadly, she had a debilitating stroke, or maybe it was one major stroke followed by several smaller ones, and it broke our hearts but we had her euthanized. Prolonging her life would have been too cruel. She crossed the Rainbow Bridge on October 17, 1996. And I'm crying now. I wasn't able to say goodbye because I was 1500 miles away at college. :'(
Okay, I'm calmer now. Max did one of his jobs and helped me calm down.
Missy was a fabulous "dog." I put "dog" in quotes because she didn't think she was a dog. My Dad trained her, though, so she worshiped him. I was always jealous of their relationship.
I know she loved me, though. When I went away to college, she accepted my absence. But in October of 1994 my mother's mother, my Grandma, was hospitalized (for what would be the final time) and I told my Mom that I wanted to go with her when she flew back to Oklahoma to visit her. I hadn't been home since Christmas of '93, as I was trying to earn Washington residency and so spent the summer break with relatives in Spokane, and when I arrived home it was only for a three-hour visit before my mother and I had to fly to Oklahoma. (Before I continue, I should tell you that we lived in a two-story house and Missy wasn't allowed on the second floor, or in the kitchen. To the best of my knowledge, she'd never been to/in either place.)
So I arrived home and Missy gave me the cold shoulder. Then I left before she thawed. When Mom and I landed in Tulsa, we called Dad to tell him we made it okay and he told us that after I'd been gone for a couple of hours and Missy realized I wasn't coming back, she went up the stairs, down the hall to my room, and pooped on the floor! So this is how I know Missy loved me, even though Dad was still her "one true love." I felt so loved. lol ;-) And when I stopped off at home during my long-but-not-very-long layover-between-flights on my way home (Oklahoma to California to Washington), she was happy to see me and didn't give me the cold shoulder. ;-)
I wasn't able to adopt a dog of my own when I lived in Washington. Unfortunately, all of my homes in Washington - both at university in Pullman and later in Seattle - were "no dogs" zones. And by the time I realized that a service dog would be helpful, I was 100% disabled, living on a monthly fixed income, and unable to afford one. :-( Then my Dad got his terminal diagnosis and I moved to Arizona to help Mom take care of him. I told her that the one thing I HAD to get in return for giving up my life in the city/state I loved was a dog of my own. So when, not even six months after I moved here, her coworker said her bitch was pregnant, I was granted first choice of the puppies. I picked "Max" out to be mine when he was maybe three weeks old, and when he was only five-and-a-half weeks old, he came home with me. I consider him a rescue dog, even though we knew the people I adopted him from, because that family was going on a Fourth of July 2013 vacation and said they needed all of the puppies gone before they left. Had I not adopted him, he might have been surrendered to a shelter. So...he's a rescue. And he's been with me ever since. :-)
Max will be three in May. Back when he was only eight-weeks old, I started him in Puppy Obedience Training. We went through three different levels of classes. Then, in 2014, I found a Train-Your-Own-Dog Service Dog Training Program and signed him up. We went for a couple/few months, but it didn't work out very well and ended after I was sat down and told that Max and I were not right for each other. I was pretty devastated, but by then I had noticed that Max was a HUGE help at helping me "control" my Major Depressive Disorder, so I decided that I was keeping him regardless of what they said. Plus, to give him up would have killed me. Possibly quite literally. :'(
Then a couple of months later I found another Train-Your-Own-Dog Service Dog Trainer, but after three or four months she told me the SAME THING! That Max and I weren't the right match for each other. She said this because, she said, when we went on our outings to local businesses for practice "shopping" and such, she said Max always tried to get away from me. What I took for overly-enthusiastic puppy behavior, she saw as "not being a good match." I essentially said "F#@% this" and have been training him myself ever since.
Well, Max and I went on a road trip together in September of 2015. We drove to Oklahoma (Mom flew), where we buried my Dad (he had died the year before, in September of 2014) and spent a week visiting with Mom's side of the family. Then we drove down to Texas, where I saw my best friend from the first grade/elementary school for the first time in about 20 years. Then we drove home to Arizona. And Max did WONDERFULLY. I was so impressed with and proud of him. He did a really excellent job, and there was really only one incident where I learned he's not quite there yet as my full-time service dog. (Although I don't think I'll take him to another buffet restaurant even when he IS my fully mature full-time service dog, not without someone else to come along and hold him while I get my food.)
I can't help but think very uncharitably of those two "service dog trainers" who tried to get me to give up my Max. They didn't understand me; they clearly didn't understand Max; and they definitely didn't understand our bond. Several times on that road trip and since then I've had the thought, "If only they could see us now." We are doing just fine. :-)
Here are some pictures. Right clicking any of them and viewing in another tab/window will show you the full-size image, if interested:
The one on the left is of Herc and me when we were both babies. The one in the middle is Missy when she was about 15-17 months old. And the one on the right is Missy at age 10, modeling her shaved-for-summer look. Herc, as I said above, was a Saint Bernard. We don't know for sure what Missy was, but we always suspected some sort of cross between an Irish Wolfhound and a Old English Sheepdog. :-)
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I had the blood test done that would tell me what breeds (the (parenthetical) part is what I think he got from them) Max is. His four main ones are Australian Cattle Dog (coloring and some behavior), German Shepherd (size? he's taller and heavier than the average male cattle dog), Bull Terrier (bone density; strength), and Labrador Retriever (personality). Then I was told the top five other breeds he has in his genes: Rottweiler (his two sisters had the look of Rotties), Belgian Tervuren (body shape? depth of chest?), White Swiss Shepherd (no clue), Akita (his skull shape, or so I've been told), and Standard Schnauzer (he has a two-to-three inch wide strip down the middle of his back that is wavy). I'm not sure which of the nine gave him his jowls, but as you can see in the photo on the right, they're big. :-)
The photo on the left is from just after he came home with me. He's six weeks old. :-) The photo on the right is of him in September of 2015; he's two years and four months. :-)
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I don't have any pictures of my little Meow. There must be one or fifty somewhere, but they're in a pretty-much inaccessible place in this house and so lost, for now. And I could have shared a story about the hamsters and guinea pig, but they were so transient in my life, and I had so much I wanted to say about the dogs, that I decided to leave them out.
If you read all of this, thanks and I'm sorry. Once again I failed at my attempt to be brief.
lol Karsyn, when I first looked at your post and saw that second picture of Naminé, I was all, "Wow! How strange that she grew from being black to being brown!" It was only the second look that showed me that your Sora is sitting on Naminé. lol!
Jex wrote: "At one point I had to put out a decoy book so that he would leave the one I was reading alone...."I think that's pretty fabulous. lol! :-) (But did it work?)
@Jen - it did! If you look at the 2nd pic I posted of him, he's laying on the decoy book and reading with me.
Jex wrote: "@Jen - it did! If you look at the 2nd pic I posted of him, he's laying on the decoy book and reading with me."That's pretty neat, Jex. Thank you for sharing! :-)
My Max's "book fetish" is that he likes to give my books (library books especially) kisses. :-)
1: What is your favorite animal? Your favorite mythological animal?I love dogs. I also think bears, elephants, and orcas are pretty cool.
2: Do you have any pets? How many pets have you had in your life?
I don't have pets of my own per se, but I live with my grandma's dog who is a cockapoo, and my parents have a dog that I consider "mine" and he's a snow white miniature schnauzer.
3: Tell us about your pets, post photos if you'd like!
I love our little schnauzer, Frankie, but I also miss our last dog....she was the best golden retriever a family could ask for. When my mom was going through her cancer treatments, Leena would lay right beside her all the time and it was just so sweet. Man I miss that dog! I still can't bring myself to read The Art of Racing in the Rain, no matter how many people recommend it to me. :\
1: What is your favorite animal? Your favorite mythological animal?I would have say I love zebras. Something about those stripes. It's the same with tigers... Unicorns are pretty cool...
2: Do you have any pets? How many pets have you had in your life?
Sadly we live in an apartment building that doesn't allow pets. Throughout my childhood, my family always had a lot of animals. I had dogs, cats, rabbits, frogs, turtles, mice, homing pigeons, fish, lovebirds...
3: Tell us about your pets, post photos if you'd like!
1: What is your favorite animal? Your favorite mythological animal?
2: Do you have any pets? How many pets have you had in your life?
3: Tell us about your pets, post photos if you'd like!