I love animals. A simple statement with no more and no less to it than it says. It was always a part of my childhood background, and I probably got stung by it to an unrecoverable level. I remember two small stories that my mother used to tell me, and of course she had to repeat them again and again, and maybe this is part of this background I am talking about. The first one is about the time she was pregnant in an advanced month, after several years of trying, at last this big belly and the soon to come big event. My parents had a dog at the time, Tizza her name. At the time, in Romania, dogs were getting most of their education (not to mention "love life") in the streets. And she was the hottest babe for any male dog in the vicinity. One day, while wildly chasing and being chased by one of her latest male conquests, she crossed the street and along came a carriage drawn by several horses (no cars at that time in this small town) and she was severly hit. My mother, hearing all of a sudden the terrifying squeals of her hurt dog, dropped everything, rushed down the stairs at a far higher than whatever suitable speed a pregnant woman should rush at (no elevators there neither), picked up the messy bleeding bundle from the middle of the cobbled street (no, no asphalt) and ran holding it atop her belly to the nearest doctor house (of course, no veterinarians at that forgotten place, what would you expect). Well, they saved the dog, to live with me for its full 15 years of a dog's life. The funniest point in this story, however, is that people being quite superstitious - my mother included - kept worrying that because of this act the unborn child will look much like a dog. Which added to the act the extra halloe of courage and love for the little beast that was all I needed to become myself a great animals lover. And for those of you that start wondering - no, the filters applied on my picture on the home page of this site do not hide my canine features, rest assured of that. The second story has also some funny undertones - you see, same day that I was born, the dog had its new litter of soprano squealing squirming puppies brought into the world, and the family duck had all of it's layed family of eggs magically transformed into a family of noisy quacking wobbling ducklings. A real birth(s)day.