Average Jane's Caturday Feature: Xena

I'm listing the cats in the order in which they came to live with us, not by age, so next on the roster is Xena. We originally got her from my sister. Here's that story.

Xena and I have a complicated relationship because she is passionately in love with my husband and would be perfectly happy to have him all to herself. I'll admit that I could be more respectful of my kitteh co-wife. It's probably not nice of me to constantly refer to her as "wide load."

But she's a big girl. Big and glossy and squishy. She is evidently incapable of walking past the food bowl without stopping to eat, even if she happens to walk by a hundred times a day. We free-feed all the cats, so switching to light food just made the skinny ones skinnier and she still looks like ten pounds of mud in a five-pound bag.

 She can be very sweet, though, even to me. She loves to leap into my husband's arms and have him carry her around. If he's not available, she'll occasionally launch herself at me instead. It's very important to pay careful attention to her body language at all times because it's not a good surprise when sixteen pounds of cat comes flying through the air at you if you're not prepared.

Xena has a strong personality. When we had her spayed, she had to wear the Elizabethan collar for an entire month because she was so incredibly determined to chew at her stitches. I didn't go along on the vet visit when she had the stitches removed, but my husband reported that the procedure was a Herculean task and that the vet said that Xena was the worst patient he'd ever dealt with in his entire career.

 Her jealousy isn't limited just to me. She gets along okay with our older cats, Velcro and Velvet, but when I brought a fourth cat into the household, that was where she drew the line. I tried for months to incorporate Trillian into our cat population, but Xena wasn't having it. She harassed the poor kitten mercilessly until we finally had to give up and let Trillian live in the recording studio by herself.

One last little factoid: we almost never call her Xena. Thanks to too much "Name Game" early in her life ("Xena, Xena, bo-beena..."), we now mostly refer to her as "Beans" or "Beanza." So she doesn't even get to own her cool, warrior princess name. No wonder she can be so cranky.

Comments

[Keith]

Great post, very funny. I got used to having a large ginger Tom appear on my shoulder like a pirate parrot. That cat couldn't half leap !

[angelchrys.com]

Oh wow, I'm glad Spaz doesn't try to jump into my arms--she'd probably knock me over.