Current Entertainment:
DVD ¤ Matrix: Reloaded
CD-ROM ¤ D2X
CD Player
¤ Metallica - St. Anger
¤ Nine Inch Nails - Still
¤ Orff - Carmen Burana

Books Lying Open
¤ A Clash of Kings, George R. R. Martin
¤ The Complete Tales and Poems, Edgar Allen Poe

¤ Ears: They are bat-like, bigger than Dusty's in width, and filled with very long white hairs.  I don't especially care for them, and they are completely un-dainty.

¤ Legs: She's awkward and gawky, with legs far longer than her body would seem to require.  The hind ones look to be too long, and often when she's prancing she'll do it with all the grace of two guys in a horse suit; the rear portion getting completely out of line with the front portion.

¤ Ass: Yikes.  She's got an entirely too visible ass, and has had it since we got her.  Every time she walks away, or stands near you facing the other direction, you can't help but notice, and wish you hadn't.  I took to saying, "Christ, you could stick a walnut in there." and when Malaya objected with the voice of reason, we reduced it to an acorn.  So now we frequently call her "acorn ass" or just "Acorn!" and feel better about ourselves.  I blame this sort of behavior on the smells that come from acorn on a regular basis, even when she's far from the litter box.  Yes, cats fart.  This one more than most.

As for Jinx's undersized body parts, they aren't as noticeable, with one exception.

¤ Voice: I've covered this elsewhere, and her voice is growing along with the rest of her, but it's still quite amusingly-pathetic when she's mewing and lets off two or three silent ones in a row, while looking up with her eager little face.

¤ Teeth: She's still got kitten teeth, and they're small and needle-like, and undisciplined.  Malaya fried a fish the other day, and the smell drove both Jinx and Dusty into a frenzy.  A Dusty frenzy is pretty unimpressive, but Jinx spent more time stuck to our ankles than a ball and chain on a convict as the fish was cooking and being eaten.  We fed them both tidbits, of course, and Jinx ate at least 85% of them, frequently wolfing down her bite before it ever hit the floor, and then racing over to steal Dusty's from the floor before he got finished sniffing it.

And we soon used the floor exclusively for feeding Jinx, when we found out that she was not at all content to lick and nibble at the fish we held.  She was biting, and punctured Malaya like a diabetic's blood sugar checking kit, sending her (Malaya) to the bathroom for a bandage.

¤ Tail: This is the silliest portion of Jinx's anatomy. It's wispy with long hairs on it, it's limp and hardly wags at all, and feels like a wet strand of Angel Hair pasta when you hold it.  There are bones and all of that, but just barely, and it's got no strength at all.  Dusty's tail could be used to clear farmland, and has more strength than Jinx has in her entire body.  Of course that's intrinsically connected to the fact that Dusty is pissed off about something like 80% of the time, and the fact that when pissed off about something, he lashes his tail non-stop.  We often have to sit on it, or tuck it away if he's on our laps or between us on the couch, since it's like someone constantly whacking you with a padded baton. It will be just fine if Jinx's tail never gets to that point, but what she's got now is just pitiful.

Jinx enjoys sleeping in odd positions. When she first lies down on the floor, furniture, a lap, etc, she's always crouched or sitting, and she does not tolerate being pushed down or held down.  After she's been lying for a while she loosens up, and often rolls onto her back or side.  The odd thing is when she's got her upper body going one way, and the lower body going the other.

These two pics were taken just seconds apart, as you can tell by her nearly identical pose; I just liked the eyes in the top one, and the "mouth of Satan" yawn in the lower one.

She's also fun to caress when she's in this sort of mood/position, since you can turn her over at will, rub her belly and feet, pick her up by the legs, or whatever you like and she's quite calm about the whole thing.

In these photos she's showing off another odd trick, and that's her desire to sleep in my office chair at every opportunity. She likes my lap when I'm in this chair even though I'm sitting upright so she's usually sliding towards my knees, and even though there's not much lap, since I usually have the sliding keyboard tray pulled out all the way.  One reason is that Dusty never screws with her when she's in this chair, since he had some past instances of being spun around madly while in office chairs (Malaya swears it was an accident.  Every single time it happened.  Just like his broken tail.) and won't go anywhere near rotating chairs anymore.

Since Dusty and Jinx get along well enough now that Dusty goes over to lick and bite at her scruff a dozen times a day, her habit of sleeping in my chair (when I'm not sitting in it) serves her pretty well.  There's no telling if she'll stick with it, since the chair has a concave indention in the cushion to mold to the human ass, and at her current size she fits pretty neatly into the depression, and seems to like it there.  Once she's larger it won't be at all form fitting, which might ruin it for her, but since she ends up sleeping all stretched out or off to the side of the depression now anyway, that might not be such a factor.

Dusty, on the other hand, has red eye in at least 50% of the flash photos I take of him, and while it can be pretty damn cool at times, it's mostly annoying or distracting.

While this habit annoys Malaya, it's one we both wish Jinx would learn, since while she's getting better at crapping neatly, she still often emerges with bits of kitty litter stuck between her furry hind toes.  And since we know well what must be causing the litter to stick there, I usually end up taking her into her watering trough, AKA the bathtub, and splashing her feet in the remaining puddles a bit, before rubbing at them with an old grout-scrubbing toothbrush.

She'll eventually lick at them and get them all the way clean, but it's never more than a few hours before she's heading back into the shed to offload some more deleted files, and possibly pick up some Trojan horses in the process.  Plus she almost always explodes into a burst of activity the minute she's out of the litter box, evidently due to feeling so much lighter, which means that any evidence remaining stuck to her feet gets widely-disseminated almost immediately.

It's primarily due to this habit that she's still not allowed to sleep in the bedroom with us at night.

Given that she has shown herself to be quite restless and climb-y on the few early morning occasions she's been allowed in the bedroom with Malaya and/or me still trying to sleep, we're probably okay with letting her get a few weeks older and better at sleeping peacefully before we unleash the hounds.

The last odd kitty thing is one that's still unfolding, and that's her dietary preferences.  Jinx is crazy for any sort of meat, but that's to be expected.  We don't eat much meat, and prepare it ourselves even less often, but if a can of tuna is opened, or fried chicken is consumed, Jinx is in the kitchen and more underfoot than an ingrown toenail.  And it's not just curiosity; she wolfs down anything she's given, and immediately comes back for more.

Since Jinx hasn't puked in a week or so, we're feeling pretty okay about giving her scraps.  The rats would hate her if they were smart enough to know, since quite a few of the little odds and ends of food that used to go to them now goes down Jinx's gullet.

So meat is okay, you expect that from a carnivore, even if Dusty is slow and picky and lazy about his handouts.  How about dairy?

I guess that's to be expected, after all, a cat and a bowl of cream is as cliché as a dog with a soup bone or a dingo with a baby.  But how about cream cheese?  Or sour cream off of a knife?  Or white cheddar cheese flavored popcorn?  Or chewed up celery with a slight trace of the spreadable cheese it once had on it still remaining in the masticated-wad of roughage? Jinx has eaten all of these things, or would have if she'd been given the chance in the case of the last one.  She will lick clean anything that's had some cheese on it, and recently pushed an empty sour cream container around the kitchen floor for the better part of four hours, even after I picked it up, washed it out with a brush, and then put it back down on the floor so she wouldn't climb into the recycling bag to get after the surgically-clean container.  We've never tried to see if she'd actually eat sticks of butter, or lick out a margarine container, but I wouldn't be surprised by either of those actions.

And while I can accept the meat enjoyment, and the dairy-product mania, I'm still unsure about the corn.  Yes, she loves corn, in every form we've yet tried.  Popcorn is her favorite, ideally cheese-flavored, but she'll eat it plain, with great crunching.  She also loves cornbread, to the point of licking a crumb-covered plate to a spotless shine, and hounding a cornbread-eating human so relentlessly that said human can hardly enjoy the golden-brown results of his own oven! *cough*

How about waffles? Oh yes, she goes nuts for those, in any flavor, even blueberry.  We wait until she's in a frenzy, and then toss the little bits from the edges across the room.  Jinx is getting pretty good at fetching, so long as the object to be fetched 1) tastes good, and 2) doesn't need to be returned to the throwing master in unconsumed form. Sure, she brings it back. It's inside her belly and she just wants more to eat, but we can work out the picky little details later.

Another thing Jinx is good at is leaping. She loves to attack and gore the center cardboard roll that was left over from toilet paper, especially since I tied her string mousie through it so I could drag it around.  She'll also chase it around madly, and if she gets near it and it suddenly goes up into the air, she's not at all adverse to leaping a couple of feet skywards as she tries to bat it down. Her success rate at batting it down isn't real good, but fortunately her success rate at amusing her human masters is very high, especially when she goes full speed, leaps, and does a back flip, or crashes into the VCR while reaching for the escaping cardboard mousie.

I have no hope of getting a photo of her hijinks with the cardboard tube flight plan; she moves too quickly.  Pity we don't have a video camera, or I could take some damn funny movies.  That would do you guys no good, since I couldn't the bandwidth to post them, but hey, at least you'd get to hear me talk about them in far too much detail.  And who can put a price on that?

All in all, Jinx is a lot of fun and I'm glad we have her, and I think Malaya is too, at least in the rare moments when she forgets that kitty once peed on her down comforter.