We had some guinea pigs, but family lore tells me one died because I dropped it. It seems that one was white and brown. I remember my dad burying some brown ones and him insinuating my cousin Jesse had contributed to their deaths. But I can't have been older than four, so who knows if that really happened.
We had a fishtank and we had plecostomuses, sucker fish. Because they are ugly, my family named them Homer, after Homer Simpson, and I think we had several Homers: Homer 1, Homer 2, etc. But then one day that fishtank cracked, so we had to transport the fish to bowls and my aunt came and took them.
One Christmas, probably in 1993 but maybe 1992, my brother got an iguana for Christmas and named it Lizzie. But a few days later it died. That was one of the rare times I saw my brother cry.
Soon after that, however, my parents got him a snake. It was an albino corn snake, so David named it Al. He used to play with Al all the time, and he even measured its length on the closet door where my family measured our growth. (My family got rid of that door. :( ) After a while, though, he quit playing with it as much, and it became less tame. That made it a problem when it would sometimes escape and he had to catch it. We used to go to the pet store to buy pinkie mice to feed it. We eventually gave it to my uncle's wife.
Around this same time, circa 1993, my aunt got a blue budgie bird that she intended to give to my cousins for Christmas, and we kept it at our house, but my family became attached to it and kept it. We named it Tweeters, Tweets for short.
In 1994 (I think), David got another bird, I think for his birthday. This bird was a cockatiel, named Spike for the stick-up feathers on its head. David often called her Spoy or Shpoy. David really wanted a dog, so Spike became his pseudo-dog. At one time we got bird food that looked like dog food. David taught it to bark, wolf whistle, and say "Pretty bird." It would often look in its mirror and go, "Pretty bird. Pretty pretty pretty pretty pretty bird." We tried to teach it to whistle the Andy Griffith Show theme--it got the first notes right, but then it did its own thing. One peculiar trait it had was to put its head in its toy bell, grab the dinger with its beak, and shriek as loud as it could. This was loud to us, so we can only imagine what it was like for her! (Sorry I keep switching pronouns for the bird.) If she would see someone nodding, she would nod too. I used to run around the living room and spin my arms in circles, and that would make her nod too. Sometimes Spike would have night terrors and would thrash around in the cage, leaving bird blood splattered on the cage and walls.
When we would get the two birds out, Tweeters was a little more defensive and aggressive, even though she was the smaller bird. David cut out pieces of cloth to put on his shoulders to keep his clothes clean. Sometimes he would take the birds (at least Spike) into the shower with him, although I don't think they sat on his shoulder but on his finger. David left on his mission and later moved away again, and since birds are messy, we didn't get them out often, and they got less tame. Tweets died just before Thanksgiving in 2003. In 2007, my sister was diagnosed with some disease that was aggravated by birds, so we had to give Spike away.
In 1995 or so, our neighbors across the street, the Reeds, gave us a hamster. I think one morning David found it in a plant holder. Shortly after that, we found it had escaped again and died, probably from eating mouse poison.
For my birthday in 1994, we got a new fishtank, and over the years, we had lots and lots of fish. I was particularly fond of the see-through glass fish, and I liked the crabs we had that used to escape. (I once wrote a post all about the crabs.)
We had a few notable fish. When I was in first grade, we had orange fish in which the males had sword tails, and on one occasion we bought both a male and a female, and soon the female was pregnant, and shortly thereafter there were lots of tiny orange dots in the fishtank. The other fish, including the parents, tried to eat the babies, but one hid in our decorative rocks. We captured it and took it to my aunt's house so it could be safe until it was fully grown. I named it Pumpkin and it lived to adulthood.
In college, David became a biologist and worked with zebrafish. In one lab in 2000 (I think), he injected chemicals into sets of 100 zebrafish, and in one of those sets, two fish survived while all others died. I don't know if they survived because they were superfish, or if they were superfish because of the chemicals, but these were super hardy fish. David named them Ishmael and Queequeg, characters in Moby Dick. They lived for more than four years, maybe even as long as six years. Not only did they live a long time, they lived in harsh environments. My mom took the aquarium to school, and the kids accidentally turned up the heat, killing all the fish except for the zebrafish. We weren't the most responsible at cleaning the tank, and sometimes it became super gross and all the fish died except the zebrafish.
And then there are our cats. In 2001, my sister and her roommates got a cat, Cleo, and we watched it for a few weeks. After that, I really wanted a cat. My mom's friend's cat had kittens on July 16, 2001, so we got one, a black and white cat with a black "mustache." I named it Dinah, after Alice (in Wonderland)'s cat. Dinah was hilarious but mean. She would sometimes bite me and even drew blood. She liked to attack my feet. As she got older, she got tamer.
Unfortunately, after we had had her for just over a year, in September or October 2002, she disappeared. We don't know what happened to her, although my dad saw a raccoon in our yard the night she disappeared. We went to the pound, but she wasn't there.
But I wanted to get a replacement cat. We were going to Taiwan in November 2002, so I asked my maternal grandparents if they would watch a new cat while we were gone. They agreed, so in October we went to the pound and got a grey kitten, which we named Jenny. More than twelve years later, Jenny is still alive and well. And what a strange cat she is. Soon after we got her, my paternal grandparents came for a visit, and Jenny loved rubbing against Grandma Judy's white leather shoes. To this day, she likes to rub against feet, more than she likes to be petted by hands. My dad won't let her be fed inside the house because she tends to throw up. She's picky about her litter box. She isn't particularly loving, hisses at kids, and likes to spill her water bowl. But she's a good mouser, and I like having her.
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