She's SUPPOSED To Look Like This ...

Thanks to Robin and Barry, I finally have a picture of my cat that doesn't make her look like a glowing-eyed demon!

This is my Devon Rex, Buttercup. Her big official CFA name is "Moirja's Buttercup Baby of Pattnchat," and if you look her up on the Web you'll see that Grand Champions have sprung from her loins. But around here she's just Miss Cup ... or Cuppy, for short. Sometimes we call her Boogersnot, due to an unfortunate sneezing problem. I'll bet you didn't know that cat's even produced snot. Well, they do. Prodigious amounts of snot which defy the laws of physics and rival epoxy cement for adhesive quality.

Several of my friends call her The Ugly Cat, and my son introduces her to his friends as Chemo Kitty. We always have to explain that, yes, she's supposed to look this way ... and we paid a lot of money, on purpose, to get a cat this weird.

At seven years old Miss Cup weighs in at an eternally kitten-sized five pounds. She's tee-ninesy. Her head is roughly the size of a tennis ball, and about as fuzzy (except for the bald spot on top like a monk). You can almost see it in the photo ... it's that spot between her enormous ears that looks like corrugated paper.

Cuppy, in fact, has almost no hair. What she has is a fine layer of soft crinkled fuzz covering most of the top half of her in cold weather. In warm weather she has even less. As you can see from her photo, she doesn't generate whiskers or eyelashes, either. She does have an impressive amount of pink, wrinkly skin on most of the underside of her. When Ev holds Cuppy up on her back feet and hides her ears under a blanket she looks exactly like ET! Ev enjoys this probably more than Cuppy does. :)

Oh, and she's not exactly graceful or "cat-like" in motion. Her back legs are slightly longer than her front legs and they're just a tad bowlegged, so she galumphs more than she glides.

But I gotta tell ya ... I love this cat. I love the way she seeks the warmth of a human lap whenver one makes itself available. I love that she would so totally NEVER get out of bed if she didn't absolutely have to. She's fully embraced her down comforter habit now that we transplanted her from sunny Arizona to cold, wet Southern Illinois.

I love the way she always jumps up on the tiny patch of clear countertop on the wrong side of the kitchen counter; picks her way gingerly across the precarious structure of knives, glasses and dishes in the dish drainer; and then uses the window sill like a tiny balance beam to get to the wide open expanse of counter on the other side of the sink ... where the food dish sits. All of the other cats just hop up there and eat, but not Miss Cup. She knows that if something is worth doing it's worth doing the hard way!

So that's Cuppy. And yeah ... she's supposed to look that way.

Kwach