Current pet count

Pickle Underfoot, that most excellent cat, died at the beginning of January; he had turned 22 in December. He had been failing a bit in the last couple months - though he was still spry enough to jump up on the counter, he was hit-or-miss with the litter box, and was eating and drinking a ton and having it go right through him, so there was a /lot/ of missing going on. So, I couldn't have done this whole house thing before he died; it wouldn't have been fair to such an old cat to disrupt his world like that, and his problems would have wound up ruining some of the new stuff in turn. So his passing was really the tipping point to deciding to do this. He really was an excellent cat. Many of you had seen him play "fetch" with bottle caps, as if he were a dog. He continued to be able to do that up until about the beginning of November, and then it was as much his increasing blindness, not lack of agility, that kept him from finding and retrieving the caps. Dexter is somewhat lonely without Pickle, and has been real clingy with me, though he does also get some company from Fern bun and the chinchillas. Right now the buns are Fern, Farfalle, and Domino, the chins are Chippy and Darwin, and the guinea pigs are Oreo and Theodore. Oreo and Theodore are fairly recent, acquired from the Baltimore Humane Society just a couple of days before Pickle passed - I knew I was going to have some extra time and energy, once I was no longer spending a couple of hours a day cleaning Pickle and cleaning up after Pickle, and I wanted to get guinea pigs back into my life. They came with those names; I like to think I am usually somewhat more original than naming a black and white guinea pig Oreo. (Not to mention, half the black and white Dutch rabbits in North America seem to be named Oreo, along with the belted guinea pigs...) Dexter is 8 years old now. Chippy chin is 12, Darwin chin is about 8, Fern bun is about 9!!! Fern, you'll recall, came with us from Austin, as did Chippy, and that's almost 7 years ago now itself. And Domino and Farfalle are about 6 years old - we got them in late 2006 or early 2007, I'd have to check which, but they were young adults about a year old then. They were from the Harford County Humane Society. So, Darwin and Fern are both getting on in years; they don't show any big signs of age but they are each a tad slower than they used to be, just a hair less rambunctious. At 8 pets, that's still relatively few for me,

Needless to say, I am only looking at condos that allow pets. Luckily, there are lots of them.