Hand-me-down pets have a strict no-return policy...

Of all the pets we have in this household, only one of them was actually chosen and purchased. The $3 Beta fish.. The lizard was a birthday gift for my daughter. Even though he is quite awesome, he is a bitch to feed and maintain. He has to be misted every day, several times a day, and will only eat live crickets... And before all this I never realized how fragile (and completely stupid) crickets are. You barely touch them and they fall apart, and they will drown themselves in the smallest amount of water while drinking if they get to close..... Kinda like that drunk uncle everyone has that they dread seeing on the holidays. And they smell. So again....kinda like that uncle. So in this instance I suppose its the pets food that is a bitch to take care of as opposed to the actual pet.

Our cat went through two owners before coming to us, all within a matter of weeks after being weaned. (This should have been a warning sign) And our dog, who is a pure breed Maltise, was abandonded during the coldest part of the year, right on the brink of a really bad snow storm. (ALSO should have been a warning sign) Me not being able to resist, and would not have been able to think of anything else but the poor puppy freezing outside, let him in. Now here we are one year later and he's still here. Its been two years for the cat.

This morning, I received more proof that my pets are disfunctional...

The dog and the cat share a water bowl in the kitchen floor. It is one of those that dispenses water into the tray as the water level goes down. Being that I am lazy, and usually have better things to do, it rarely gets scrubbed and filled up all the way. Usually I just pour a cup of water in there once or twice a day and call it good. But last night I realized it was getting kinda funky, so I actually took the time to scrub it out.

I scrubbed and cleaned this thing so well that the damn queen could have drank from this thing....not as if that situation comes up very often, or at all..... but the bullet point here is that it was clean, and full of sparkling clean, cool water. The pets rejoiced.

Also, being that I am a sucker and felt sorry for my little dog that gets locked in the kitchen at night (he has issues with his bowels and bladder during the night when there is no one to take him out every three hours..), and since it is still pretty cold, I gave the dog one of my throw blankets to sleep on..

Well........

This morning I stumble into the kitchen to start the coffee and step on the blanket to a most unwelcoming, cold, disgusting squish when I stepped on the blanket. Somehow during the night, the dog had worked it over to the water bowl, and it had absorbed ALL the water out of it...... and we are talking about a lot of water....like six cups.. So needless to say, the blanket was completely soaked.

THEN....and it gets soooooo much worse....

THEN I (while cussing mildly under my breath) pick up the blanket, to uncover a dead mouse.... This mouse had no sign of trauma or injury, so it appears to have drown. WHY in the hell would a home WITH A CAT have mice at all......but one that had actually survived out in the open of the kitchen long enough to drown in wet dog blanket?!?!?!

Now.....I have seen my cat eat an entire mouse, whole, before, so Im not quite sure what happened this time. Either my emo cat feels that he is too good to be eating live (or dead) things off the floor any more, or that last one didn't sit too well and he has decided not to make the same mistake twice. Either way, as I was disposing of it, he looked at it, and me, with great disgust.

Right then I felt like an old jewish mother, clutching her chest with tissue in hand, after discovering her only son has joined the circus instead of going off to medical school as she had hoped.. "What did I do to deserve such an ungrateful child?!?!"
What indeed?........

Maybe his mental capacity is part of the problem....?