New to the pond this month is Ramona the Red-eared Slider. One of these days Dave will put his foot down and say 'no' to the billions of animals I drag home.
I have a couple of ducks that hang out in my backyard.
Ruby is a mallard that I bought six years ago as a companion to a duck I was caring for. The furthest she flies anymore is from the back porch down to the pond. She likes to act as air traffic control for incoming duck visitors.
Katie is a very shy cat and ranks the lowest of the low in cat pecking order. She is shaped oddly, sort of hunchbacked and duck-footed, she has greasy looking corse hair, and crusty eyes. She hates to have her tail messed with. Dave calls her 'the disease' because of the way she creeps around and will suddenly appear on your lap. She is sweet, though, and she likes me so I reciprocate in kind. When she's all cleaned up and pretty she bears a striking resemblance to Puss in Boots from the Shrek series. Poor little critter - she's usually hiding under the cedar chest in the living room.
Mert is my first cat - I adopted him from the Ogden Animal Shelter the same year I got married. He's sixteen and it shows- He's going into renal failure so he drinks all the time, his teeth are falling out, his breath is horrbibly foul, he's a walking skeleton and he's a bit touched in the head. I love the old goat--it's terrible watching him get old.
Teensy used to be a neighbor's cat. They called her Angel, fed her spaghetti and bacon grease and never got her spayed. I thought she was a kitten until I noticed the evidence that she had been nursing a litter of kittens. She would come over to my house to eat - probably because she didn't like spaghetti sauce. 
I don't know how old Mickey is now, maybe eight or nine. He showed up on my front porch and never left. He's named after Mickey Mouse. I let Audrey name him--she wanted to call him Cinderella but decided that it wasn't a very boyish name. 
Here's Otis. As you can see he's absolutely gorgeous. He has turquoise-green eyes and really long perfect fur. He's also dumber than a box of rocks. He's three or four years old and started as a neighborhood stray (he followed us home from a walk). Now, he tries to leak out the door and heads straight for the neighbor's back yard or the blue spruce in the front yard. If I leave him outside he will undoubtedly get himself stuck someplace (under the shed is a favorite). He thinks he's the boss and lets my girls carry him around on a pillow.
This is Gigi. I think she's about two years old. I found her after a movie wandering around in the parking lot trying to shake hands with the cars. She was most likely dumped there. Shortly after I brought her home she went into heat and tried to talk my cats into messing around, needless to say my cats are all neutered so they couldn't figure out what the hell was wrong with her. I think that's what started the rivalry between her and Otis - she was trying to be attractive and he just wanted to kick her ass.
This is Douglas.....He's a regular three-legged wonder. I don't let him go outside but the light was better for pictures so I made an exception for a few minutes. I think he's about two years old now and was born without his right back leg (we think it was strangulated by the umbilical cord). A few months ago his stump started to bother him. He would extend and retract it and the pain would make him scream and flip himself over. I felt really bad for him and decided the best thing for him would be to amputate the rest of his stump.
The surgery went well, he gets around every bit as well as the other cats. Right after his surgery I stupidly brought him home and let him out of the cat carrier into the bathroom. He lurched out of the carrier like something possessed and tried to kill me. Anesthesia recovery is scary! I'm glad he got over that. Doug is more of a cat's cat than a people cat - his best friends are Gigi and Teensy, probably because they baby him, wash him, and keep him entertained.
