Black cats and black dresses

Today is Saturday, or so the calendar tells me. My family is also home and I slept in till 10am, so everything points to Saturday. I’m only dwelling on this because I’m not quite sure where the week went. I vaguely recall Wednesday. It doesn’t help that the humidity keeps lulling me to sleep. Truth be told, I’m falling asleep now. I’m only staying awake because I am stubborn.

You see, if I stay awake, I increase my chances of something interesting happening (and not in the Agatean sense — props if you know what I mean — unless I am far away from the danger). If I fall asleep, those chances are basically down to zero.

Sleeping not allowed.

So far, nothing has really happened. I have stained my fingers with ink because I was fiddling around with the nib of my Lamy Safari fountain pen. This doesn’t usually bother me, because I liked having stained fingers — and this ink matches my nail polish. But it’s a bit of a hassle now, because I am eating chocolate and have melty chocolate on my fingers that I can’t lick off in case I get ink poisoning omg, etc., etc., hypochondriac, etc., am not, etc., in denial, etc., just lick the chocolate already okay.

Something might happen, though. (My conscience whispers: ‘work? Like that article you have to redraft?’ —Shut up, conscience, you traitor.) While I’m waiting, I’m going to spam you poor readers with blog posts. Of the sort-of-drunken vein. I’m not drunk, though; I don’t actually drink alcohol. Like Gussie Fink-Nottle from Wodehouse’s Jeeves novels, my poison of choice is orange juice. I love the stuff. I call it poison because I drink far more than the recommended dose. Whatever that may be. I’m not even sure if there’s a recommended dose for orange juice but I assure you, I drink more of it than I should.

For one thing, orange juice gets you through all-nighters. Forget coffee. Orange juice. Seriously. The sugar. It hits you. I speak from experience; particularly the ‘I spent two weeks going to bed at 3am and waking up at 7am because of the damn’d thesis’ experience, which I don’t really remember. But orange juice managed to pull me through.

Aaaaanyhow. I can’t remember how I intended to segue to this set of pictures (when I was still awake; before I decided to rattle on about orange juice). Meta-segue will do! Pseudo-segue! What you will.

Today, I wore a black dress by Birds & Umbrella. It’s inspired by the Lover Charlotte ruffle dress, which I umm’d and ahh’d over when it was first released. It’s a bit different to my style generally, you see; casually feminine instead of hyperfeminine, omg bows-vomited-on-you feminine. And then I saw the Birds & Umbrella copy at about $65 I figured that it wouldn’t hurt to give it a try.

 

My bag is from Oroton. I can’t recall the style name but I think I bought it in 2008. It is a good, simple, utility bag and everything gets tossed into it with an air of happy, carefree disorganisation (and taken out with an anguished, ‘aaugh, my bag is such a mess where on earth are my keys — oh, there’s fifty cents in here; neat — I hate this bag aaaugh!’). I have a Mimco bow on my wrist and my headband is from a UK brand, though I can’t remember which. The acrylic is remarkably similar to Mimco’s, though — perhaps a bit lighter, but more or less the same. I wish I could remember because I wouldn’t mind nabbing some more.

The belt is from eBay and can be had for about $10 (maybe even less) if you just search ‘bow belt’ on eBay.com (eBay Australia’ will yield you belts that claim to be from Alannah Hill, but they’re not. Very similar, but not.) And my necklace is the ‘Fairest of them all’ piece from Disney Couture. I love how it puts pops of red into my outfits. You can see a closer picture in this post.

My shoes are from Siren. I used to have them in a flat version as well but I lost the shoe on the rails at Town Hall Station (Christmas crush, ugh) and never really bothered trying to get it back. I don’t mind the heeled version, really; it doesn’t feel hugely different as the heel height is rather low. I should have tried for a close-up of the shoes — there are two little gold flat studs on the outer side of the round toe vamp, and two subtle pleats/folds/seams. I like them very much. You would have been able to see them here, but my cat photobombed us.

 

PHOTOBOMBED. (Duchess, my grey Persian snobby cat, also inadvertently photobombed the shot of my headband — funny fluffy catty thing by my head in the middle picture.)

Valerie was lying down to get this shot and he wanted to say hi to her. His name is the most original of names ever bestowed upon a cat: Black Cat. In our defence, it only came around by accident: he wasn’t ours to begin with. He lived at a house down the road from our old house (we moved last year) and used to torment our cats and eat their food. So whenever we saw him, it was ‘that black cat’ and ‘go away, black cat’ and ‘Mum, the black cat is bullying Kipper again’.

(Kipper is my socially anxious gay tabby. My sister calls him ‘Loretta’ because, like Stan from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Kipper desperately wants kittens. Of his own. With our older tabby, Star. Star hates Kipper. Star’s hatred is a source of anxiety for Kipper. It’s a strange relationship.)

Anyway, his owners moved away and left him, which made him bully our cats away from their food all the more. We left extra food out for him, because even though he was an arse, he’s a cat and cats shouldn’t be abandoned. Animals, full stop, although I’m a cat lover, so they’re ‘default cute animal’ to me.

When we moved away, we tried to catch Black Cat but couldn’t get him. He didn’t really like us (he just liked the food) and used to attack us if we tried to save our cats from being bullied. (I have a scar down my right forearm where he bit me and clung on, though it’s fading now.) My mother would visit our old house every day to leave him food and hopefully catch him, and after two weeks, gave up.

One week later, she checked out of sheer desperate hope and there he was, a bit thin but not really any worse for wear.

She took him home.

And he loved us. Still does. He acts like we’re the best people in the universe, and I haven’t the heart to correct him. He particularly likes Valerie, and we’re not quite sure why.

Tags: Cat, Disney Couture, Oroton, Siren