That's no lady, that's my cat

The other night I posted a picture of Kate wearing her die-now-and-bother-me-no-more-with-your-worthlessness face. I mentioned that I have another cat and I do, a much nicer sweeter little dumpling of a cat who reminds me entirely of a woman who works in a cake shop.

Her proper name is Elvira but it just doesn't adhere. She is Ellie mostly, but will answer to Elwood, Elephant, Elton and Eldorado. She had a brother Thor but they don't keep in touch.

Ellie was one of four kittens left in a carton in a car park in western Sydney. A kind person turned the homeless family in at a local vet, and he sent them to the Unwanted Cats Unit at the local council. They in turn farmed them out to the Co-ordinator of their Look After Ill-treated Cat Families department and she advertised Ellie and her siblings on the Internet.

Clickety click and she came to live with us. For her first three days she lived on top of the skirting board in the dining room behind a huge cupboard. I don't know how she did that except she was very small. At any given time of day I could walk past and find my sweet spouse or Kate sprawled out flat, peering in under the cupboard, trying to coax Ellie out. She took her time, adapting to her living environment inch by inch: first she slunk out and sat near the leg of the cupboard, then she extended her patch to include the dining room table, soon after she walked around a chair and a month later she ventured into the lounge room.

These days Ellie's quite the traveller and also, I suspect, a pervert. She spends a lot of time on the front verandah hiding behind pot plants, ogling passers by. She is not a big cat, her legs are quite short and her nose is the colour of a pencil eraser. If Ellie were a person I suspect she'd look a little like Sherilyn Fenn in Twin Peaks and a little like a lady who works in a cake shop, all perma-wave hair and a full pouty mouth full of lipstick but not suggestive and not, well, sex-kitten like. Ellie would wear floral shifts and kitten heels, a pinny when she was in the kitchen and a scarf around her head, knotted under her chin British Royal family-style when she went to do the shopping. She'd carry a hand bag and not a shoulder bag. In her purse there would a be a lipstick - probably Max Factor - and a clean hanky.

She'd volunteer at the local Church too. Church of England, possibly.