Xena, Warrior Princess

Do you recall this lovely little nugget of a show from the nineties?:

I can honestly say I never watched it - can you blame me? It seemed very cheesey. Though I'm jealous that Lucy Lawless's bangs hang so effortlessly straight downward. Sigh. I'm soooo growing these stupid bangs of mine out.

Anywho.

Ben is a MAJOR cat lover. A cat can melt this 6'2", 220-pound man into mush. When he was on his mission in Brazil, he kind of adopted this stray cat. Ew. A stray cat? In Brazil? Can we say "scabies"? He let this cat sleep in his bed. And I think this cat had, like, one eye or something. You get the picture. Anyways, one night, the cat was sleeping near Ben's bumb, and he was petting it, and suddenly, he feels this wetness on his hands. As it turns out, this stray cat had kittens IN BEN'S BED!!! Ewwwww!!! I should ask him sometime what he did with the kittens. I haven't been able to stand even getting past the whole scabies-infected-stray-Brazilian-cat-giving-birth-in-one's-bed thing to ask...

When Ben was jobless, and seemed to be okay being jobless, I was going nutso. So, to motivate Ben to get a job, any job, I told him that, if he got a job, I would let him get a cat. When Ben landed his current job, off he went on a cat search.

I haven't let Ben get a cat yet in our marriage, because 1) Let's face it; my track record for keeping pets is really bad. I hate cleaning up animal poop and barf - I clean up kid poop and barf. And my own poop and barf, as the case has been this week. I don't need to clean some animal's poop and barf. And they ruin stuff. Carpet, shoes, upholstery... the list goes on and on. I just have a hard time with an animal wrecking my stuff. So I have been nervous that I wouldn't be able to handle having a pet again. 2) I've been marginally allergic to cats for most of my life. We had a Persian when I was in high school, and I figured that her dryish hair, instead of her oily hair, made me not sneeze so much. My best friend, Pooh's, mom's cats have always made my eyes go bonkers. So much itching and watering. And so much sneezing. So I've been careful about not touching cats, and if I do, I've always tried to wash my hands afterwards. Still, even with these precautions, I often fled Pooh's mom's house with a wet washcloth covering my eyes. Wet washcloths on one's eyes greatly help when one is having an allergic reaction to a cat. Or a hay fever attack. I get a lot of those, too.

Ben did a lot of searching online for an "allergen-free cat," and it seems that there really isn't such a thing, but what he has read over and over again is that, if you bathe your cat once per week, the allergy-sufferer doesn't, well, suffer as much. He promised to bathe our future kitty once a week, and if I was still not doing well, we could obviously find a new home for her.

We don't have a local Humane Society shelter per se. The local Humane Society "rents" cages in local pet stores for their animals. Ben went to PetSmart to check out the cats, and he fell in love with a little black cat with tortoiseshell markings named Xena:

She was born last summer, and she has been fixed or neutered or whatever the official word for cats is. She has also been de-clawed, and she is already trained to a litter box. Voila. No hassle for me. No poop cleanup (I make Ben clean out the litter box). No shredding of upholstery or carpet.

And she couldn't be sweeter. We have to actually lock her out of our bedroom at night, because she likes to spend all night sitting on our faces, head-butting us, and massaging our throats with her little paws. When I pick her up, she faces me and puts her little paws around my neck. What a babe. She's so stinkin' CUTE.

And the best part is, she's really sweet with the kids:

That dang Sadie treats Xena like a stuffed animal, and she just sits and takes it. She doesn't push against Sadie with her back claws, she doesn't hiss, and she doesn't struggle. She just lets Sadie cart her around. And then, when she can get away, she walks like three feet away and lies down, and Sadie grabs her and starts the process all over again.

I love this picture. Sadie didn't know I was there to take a picture. This is her actual closed-eyes look of contentment:

Verdict: Xena stays. With her original, fabulous name. :) Ben has bathed her once a week, and so far, so good.