Tonight Officer Krupke is going to live with Gramma.

I’ve given it over three months, but Officer Krupke hates Java Bean more than water and dogs and the sound of plastic bags. Several times a day there is hissing and snarling. I pick little globs of hair off the carpet because fur literally flies. There has been blood and scratched noses. Java Bean seems to think it’s fun to chase Krupke and bat at him with his paws. It’s all a game, just like it was when he was growing up with his litter of brothers and sisters.

Krupke was a stray, so I don’t know his background, but I don’t think he was socialized. I don’t think he played with brothers and sisters because Java Bean’s attempts to have fun are appreciated as much as a flea bath. Krupke makes sounds I don’t like to hear outside of a professional wrestling match. Sometimes he wrestles Java Bean to the ground and bites his neck, not in a playful manner, but as if to say, “I will [...]

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This is Java Bean.*

Java Bean came to live with me three weeks ago after a friend of mine adopted his whisker-biting sister. I can’t turn down free donuts and I can’t turn down free kittens either. Java Bean was born in the wild (or as wild as Indiana gets) and survived a respiratory infection that killed three of the nine kittens in his litter. When I stopped by the vet, four of his brothers and sisters had been adopted, leaving me in the position of deciding which of the last two kittens would be picked last for dodge ball. After Java’s brother bounced around the room and tried opening my purse, I decided the more low-key cat was the one for me.

I took him home four days later and he spent the weekend inspecting the quality of my box springs. I slowly lured him out on the second evening and by the end of the night he was on top of the bed instead of underneath it, bouncing on my chest demanding we play with [...]

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While I have been maintaining my weight for the last several months, my cat has been putting me to shame. Officer Krupke is down 3.5 pounds since August. According to Hill’s Pet Fit site, Krupke was the human equivalent of 40 pounds overweight. Now he’s only 9 pounds above average. He’s lost 30 pet pounds! Don’t worry. I haven’t been starving him and he doesn’t have any horrible diseases. He’s been on a vet supervised diet, and it seems diets do work with cats.

I started to notice Krupke’s weight loss in the same way that I noticed my own. When I was petting down his back last week I felt bones that I hadn’t felt before, just like how I felt my pelvic bones after I’d lost about 100 pounds. Krupke also seems to be prone to the same cravings and binges as humans. Last night I caught him licking grease from my George Foreman grill after I cooked a steak. I pulled him off the kitchen counter immediately, but got distracted by food [...]

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I screwed up my cat’s food and I have the carpet stains to prove it.

Officer Krupke has been on prescription diet cat food because some of the weight I lost found him. I noticed his food was getting low over the weekend. I later discovered that one and a half cups of kibble looks a lot bigger than I thought it did because I hit the bottom of the bag by Monday when the vet reopened. I drove by after work to pick up a new bag just in the nick of time. When I walked in the door, I looked at the white, wire shelves and…the logos were all wrong. They’d switched brands! I got a prescription to buy his food at another store, but was unable to get any before they closed.

Now, I know you’re not supposed to change your cat’s food suddenly, that this is a big no-no, and that I should have really known better. But given the choice between listening to a cat moan, “Give me food!” in meow-speak all [...]

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I have a fat cat.

I took Officer Krupke to the vet yesterday for his annual check up after carefully cornering him in the walk-in closet. As I was stuffing umpteen pounds of fur and tail into the carrier amongst a background chorus of “Meow! Meow! Not the blue box! Anything but the blue box!” I wondered if the carrier had always been this small. And when I picked it up by one hand to carry cat and caboodle to the car, I was leaning slightly the left despite all the time I’ve spent lifting weights. Maybe I could have saved money on dumbbells by picking up my cat instead.

When we got to the vet I took the offense, immediately commenting on his weight before anyone else could and declaring that I wanted to do something about it. I suppose this is like a fat person who makes jokes about their size before anyone else has a chance to. They pulled out the scale and weighed Krupke to discover he’d gained two pounds since last year. [...]

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