s the title would probably indicate, this page is for miscellaneous photos of pets. Unlike the other pets pages, these animals didn't get in enough photos, or simply aren't important enough to merit their own photo pages.

There aren't a lot of animals pictured here yet, but more will come over time.  You can feel free to send in your own pet photos. I'm not saying I'll post them, in fact I can pretty much guarantee you that I won't since it would be a betrayal of the whole point of this website, mainly that only things I personally do get posted.  Unless I really find them interesting, or I'm just feeling lazy that day.  But don't let that stop you.  Unless it does.

I'm sure that I've blogged about misc animals at some point, but since I can't remember when and don't want to search for them, you're pretty much on your own for additional resource links.

Yes, this page truly is the red-headed stepbastard of the Photos: Pets section.

If you're really desperate, you can check out the Prrowf page.  She was going to go on this page, and probably should have, but I had 16 photos of her and although any 2 or 3 of them are more than enough to get the idea that she's a fat, furry cat who lies in the dirt in my dad's backyard, I felt moved to post a whole page full of those boring photos.

• More recent photos are added on top.

While attending E3 2006, I was fortunate enough to stay at my step sister's apartment in Hollywood. She was out of town, but her two cats were there, and grew pretty friendly, once I was patient with them. This is Molly, the older and friendlier of the two. She wouldn't quite submit to lap catting, but she could not get enough head stratching, and would stand on the couch beside me, plant her two front paws on my thigh, and rub her head so firmly against the hardcover book I was trying to read that it was nearly knocked from my grasp. She would have stood there forever, so long as I kept scratching her head.

Molly's roommate is this furry land whale, whose name I have forgotten. He was more skittish and didn't like to be touched, though he enjoyed flopping over on the floor beside me, especially after he woke me up at 6am with constant yowling to be fed. The neighbor kid was housesitting and feeding the animals at 5:30, for some ungodly reason, and on their limited diets, they were ravenous when the time came. 

Yes, he's got a lot of fur, but it's not all padding; this is a fat pussy cat.

A feline friendly enough to flop over for intensive head scratchings. We encountered her in early 2006 at a vineyard on one of our wine tasting jaunts during a visit from my dad. Photo by Malaya's cell phone cam.

This relatively ugly feline (he looks like a skinny, short-haired Jinx with a deformed head) was dubbed "Crusty Cat" when I wanted to name him and Malaya wanted his name to be derivative of Dusty's name.  He's a stray cat that lives around our apartment complex and is pretty friendly, though very skinny and sort of skittish.  We've seen him down by the mailboxes a couple of times, and I've petted him once or twice.  His instinct is to run, but if you're patient and still he'll come over to be stroked.

These photos were taken from our back patio, looking down at the first floor patio fence, upon which he was perched one dusk.  The levels in these shots are turned up a lot to make them light enough to see, which is why the image quality is so grainy.

Dusty signaled us that Crusty was down below by bleating and looking over the edge with great interest, but Crusty has never leaped up to our back patio, and Dusty's certainly not going to jump down there.

Crusty is presumed deceased as of late November 2003, since we've not seen him since well before we got Jinx, back in September.

This photo is from the Sonoma Wine Tasting vacation page, and while it's mostly posted for the giant cask, the sleeping orange kitty was a bonus point. I assume it's a pet cat, rather than a stray, since it was sleeping near the wine tasting room entrance, and seemed pretty calm, if a bit cold and drowsy in the cool, slightly misty morning air.  I did not attempt to pet the kitty.

This orange cat was a neurotic, recently-salvaged pet of a friend of my mom's, whose home we stayed at in the summer of 2003 upon returning from the unpleasant funereal of my grandmother.  The woman, Sherrie, had spotted this kitty alongside a highway and pulled over and chased her down, then dragged her home.  A noble gesture, but given that the cat was sick and required hundreds and hundreds of dollars in vet bills, she might have chosen more wisely by picking up a healthy young one at the pound.  Especially considering the very nervous and relatively unpleasant personality this one exhibited.

She's shown here being held by my mom, and the fact that mom got Hilary to hold still for this sort of treatment is much more a testament to mom's perseverance and gentle manner than the cat's tolerance for attention. She was pretty good about chasing string and biting, but not so good at being held.  She also had a truly disturbing face; it's hard to tell in this image, and I don't have any better close ups, but the cat has a weird baby-doll face, with oversized eyes.  She looks psychotic, and never more so than when she's going after her string mousie.

That being said, she did have very nice markings and a lovely pelt.

This tired soul is Sherrie of St. Louis' other cat. I don't remember her name but she was old and sick and needed medicine to stay alive.  As a consequence of some illness or other her fur was matted and oily, and she basically slept 98% of the time, only waking up long enough to eat and drink some.

She was friendly, but whether that was her personality or because her terminal illness robbed her of the energy required to do more than purr gently and sometimes lift her head when stroked I can't say.  She made me very sad.

Despite their two rather lackluster cats, Sherrie and David have a gorgeous home, and it will eventually be featured on its own photo page, along with the 3 or 4 other series of shots I keep meaning to post from the Missouri trip.

Speaking of the MO trip to Granny's funereal, one day on a walk not far from the home she died in we found this dog.  My fellow walkers were my mom and stepdad, and this is what the country looks like in the Midwest US, if you've ever wondered.  It was an unseasonably-cool summer morning, and the dog pelted out of the bushes and trotted along with us for a mile or so, before eventually finding better company, as you'll see below.

It's a stretch to say the dog walked with us, when it probably covered 5x more ground than we did.  It was forever racing past us or in front of us or to our sides and sniffing at everything and peeing on every other thing.

Mailboxes are like dog toilet stalls, both for the messages left on them and for what you do while reading the messages.

We lost the dog here, on our way back, when this bitch and her four half-grown pups came barking down a driveway and stopped a few yards from the gravel road.  Our follower dog whined and lowered his tail but was brave enough as he ran over to meet these new dogs.  We foresaw disaster, since the black ones looked pretty fierce, but the pups just sniffed furiously at and pushed our dog around some.  If they'd set upon him with teeth we'd have felt really bad, but weren't about to get involved ourselves.

He enjoyed sniffing at them more than he did following us, which wasn't a real surprise since we were doing all we could to ignore him.  I don't like dogs myself, especially not unknown dirty ones like this one, and he proved way too hyper for mom and had to be shouted down by her husband a couple of times when he started to jump up on her.  Dogs are odd; they love to be scolded and adapt so quickly and eagerly to whatever limits the alpha males set on them.  Just another thing about them that creeps me out.

More photos to come, when I next visit someone with a pet and I have a camera.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.