Many of you have asked about the animals that periodically show up in my videos, especially in the bloopers, so I decided to put up a page to let you get to know them.

Junie Moon

Junie gets top billing, because she has been with us the longest. We got her as a puppy in 2009. She is a Shih-Tzu. She spent her first few years as a beach dog, playing in the surf in St. Augustine, Florida.

Now that we live in Utah, she is very happy as a canyon dog. She loves the freedom to run, and LOVES the snow. We take Junie Moon with us when we go hiking or rockhounding, and she loves riding in the car. Like our other furry friends, she always gets excited when I start packing the tripod and camera gear.

Kiki

We adopted Kiki as a kitten on July 4, 2012, just after we moved to Utah. She is part Manx, which is why she has a very short, sort of kinked tail.

Kiki and Junie Moon get along very well, especially since they both know who is the boss.

Ethylene

Ethylene adopted us. She wandered up one day and announced that she was staying. We don't know how old she is. Christmas of 2012, she vanished for five days. We were very worried, and finally decided that something had happened to her. After five days, she showed up again, with a hurt, front foot. The Vet said she had been caught in a Bobcat trap. It took several months for her foot to heal, and she permanently lost the middle two claws on that foot, but she does just fine now.

She is a flame point Himalayan, and spends a lot of her time rolling in the dirt and climbing the cliffs. In spite of that, she almost magically appears all clean and white.

Note: After a long and happy life, Ethylene passed away in June of 2014. I still miss her, especially when I am taping videos.

Little Bit

Little Bit also adopted us. He and his mother appeared one day, sitting on the cover of our hot tub.

His mother was not happy being around the dog and the other cats, so we found her a new home, but Little Bit has become a very established member of the family. When he was a kitten, we started calling him Little Bit, and the name stuck. Although he is not little anymore, he is a little bit silly, a little bit crazy, a little bit pester some, and a LOT of cute.

Matilda

Matilda was a Christmas present from my wife Nancy in 2012. She is a Brazilian Salmon Pink Bird Eating Spider (lasiodora parahybana). She was about the size of a quarter when I got her, but over the past 18 months, she has grown quite a bit.

It is easy to see how much she grows by looking at her old molts. She has a lot more growing to do. When she is full grown, she will have an 11" legspan.