no pets please

Oh-em-gee, read something posted by a Facebook friend that proves that I cannot ever be a pet owner.

They have three mice and instead of their regular mouse food, her husband decided to feed them vegetables.  One morning she checked the cage and there were only TWO mice alive and one headless mouse body.  Were they so hungry that they decided to eat one of their cage-mates?  Why eat the head (apparently skull and all, since there was no skull in the cage) and leave the more meaty body behind?  Yikes, I would be so freaked out!

When I worked on Molokai there was a rat (or maybe more than one rat) that ran across the rafters in high ceiling of my upstairs apartment.  Someone at the other end of the building had cats, so I'm sure the rats were helping themselves to the cat food.  There were holes on either side of the apartment where the rafters were, so that rats would run between the apartments along the rafters. I complained to maintenance so they patched up the holes.  This must have really pissed off the rat, to have his path blocked off.  In the middle of the night, I heard a loud noise when the rat busted through the patch from the apartment on one side, ran across the rafter beam screaming and then busted through the other patch to the apartment next door!  So freaky!

There was also mouse season on Molokai where hundreds, maybe thousands, of mice came out.  I was working an overnight shift and the hotel was wide open to the elements.  All night I had to tap my foot to scare away the mice that kept trying to approach me while I worked.  During the day, you could hear the mouse traps snapping in the office.  My boss even found a mouse in her bed.  Worst experience ever!

When I found out my childhood idols, the Osmonds, had Akita dogs, I really thought I would like a puppy.  On childhood friend at the time also had Akitas and my best friend had dogs, cats and guinea pigs.  But my mom always said it would be too mean to have a pet when we were out all day at school and it would be home alone.  I probably would not be good about poop or smelly things anyway.  I see people walking their dogs on my drive to work, carrying their little bags of poop.  Yeah, not my thing.

My only experiences with pets were fish, but that didn't go well.  I think one was a carp and it got too hot in the house during the day, so my mom came home from work and found it lying on the floor after it jumped out of the tank.  We also had a fish tank with snails to eat the algae and they also ate all the fish (I remember seeing the skeletons floating around).  We had a goldfish that lasted a while but it got sick with red spots.  Not sure what happened to it.  Ry always wanted a dog and Grandma was going to get him one (so different when it's a grandchild!) but we decided against it.  He made do with playing with the neighbor's poor dog Lani, who was bedraggled and lonely since she was outside all the time.

No pets is something Darrell and I have in common.  He grew up with his mom's dogs and he didn't like them at all.  I had a boss with 10 dogs and I did like petting one of them, Miu-Miu, a tiny thing that was so cute.  But I'm fine with never having any animals around, ever.