Animalbum 1

Animalbum 1

Return to Marian's Site page
Animal album 2 Animal album 3 Animal album 4 Animal album 5 Animal album 6 Animal album 7 Animal album 8 Animal album 9 Animal album 10 Animal album 11 Animal album 12 Animal album 13 Animal album 14 Animal album 15 Animal album 16 Animal album 17 Animal album 18 Animal album 19 Animal album 20 Animal album 21

Here I am with my first pet, Midnight. He tried to eat someone's canary, so they gave me the kitten.

Middie was a full tom, and an outside cat. He did get beat up a lot-- but there were also quite a few black kittens in the neighborhood. He was a lover rather than a fighter. One time he brought over a female cat with a litter of kittens and stood guard over them while they ate every scrap of his dinner.

Once we were taking him to the vet because he was sick, and he escaped when a dog lunged at him from a car window just outside the vet's office. We put up reward posters, and about two weeks later, we heard him meowing outside the back door, perfectly healthy and hungry. So he got the reward, a can of tunafish. It cost a lot less than the vet visit would have.

I think this photo was in 1979. (maybe)

Here's dad holding Peter... yes, Peter Rabbit, I was quite young at the time.. (this picture was taken sometime in the 1970's I believe- after I'd had the rabbit for years.) Peter mysteriously appeared between two fences bordering our yard when it was a baby. I never did find out whether the rabbit was male, which is just as well as I can't think of a female version of 'Peter'.

Peter had a black mask and the rest of his/her dark fur was brown. One eye was blue, the other brown. A girl friend of my brother Ken's came by one day and said 'that rabbit really freaked me out'- because the girl also had one blue and one brown eye. I believe that girl's brother was later buried astride his motorcycle...yes, they buried the motorcycle, too.

This photo of dad and Honey------> was Dec. 25, 1977.

Honey had a variety of coats, mostly ones I'd made for her. I think my favorite was the red corduroy Santa suit with hat and beard (fake white fur trim) lined with rabbit fur, and complete with green felt elf booties. She quite liked the coat, but not the booties.

<--This also looks like the 1970's. Dad's holding my first dog, Honey. Her mother was my brother's dog, Bess.
Dad and Honey

Here Honey is with a hamster named Squirt. Squirt was sickly, probably taken too soon from the mother.

I gave the baby hamster cod-liver oil by eyedropper to build it up. It hated it at first, but learned to love it and would bite pieces out of the eyedropper to make it flow faster.

That hamster got so strong it could do one-armed pull-ups from the top of the cage for half an hour at a time.

It also beat up a cat- well, the cat had been annoying the hamster by sitting on the cage, so I stuck the tip of the cat's tail in the cage, and Squirt ran over, grabbed the tail in both paws and bit! The cat never went near the cage again.

I wanted at least one photo to show what a pretty dog Honey was.

She was getting older by the time this photo was taken and her tail curl was relaxed, but at first she carried it in a curve that lay on her back.

She weighed exactly 16 pounds her whole adult life, even though she loved cookies.

She would jump up onto a tall folding step-stool chair and sit up and beg for cookies.

This is probably why most of her teeth fell out in later years. But even so, when a rat wound up on the back porch when she was 16 years old and had never seen one, she was Gung-Ho! and shook the poor little rodent to death with her toothless jaws.


Honey was like a cat in many ways. She washed her paws (and bit her nails like me) and loved to be on top of things- here I'd piled up all the sofa cushions into a teetering pile and she was thrilled to get on it, even though it swayed.	This was 1974. Yellow was big in 1974. So was Peter Max and tissue paper flowers. This cat is Ginger. Most red cats are male, so Ginger was rather rare. My brother found her huddled in the road during a storm.

Honey in her Santa Suit- sometime in the 1970s is my guess. The picture had faded & gone orange/purple on me. Yay for Photoshop.

Yes, I made my dog a Santa suit. It had jingle-bells on it, and she loved it. She liked it even better when I later lined it with rabbit fur. She wasn't happy about the little green felt booties I also made her, though.

And yes, we did actually get cool enough in South Florida in the 1970s for a smooth-haired terrier to get cold.