Not too cold. Not too hot. Just right -- for a cat.

Goldilocks.

You know the story. You may even know several versions of the story. Maybe, when your children were young, you got tired of telling the same old story over and over, so you embellished a bit, just to see if small ears were paying attention.

At our house, we have yet another evolution in the story of Goldilocks. It involves a sassy cat known hereabouts as Missy Kitty.

Nowadays Missy Kitty is also known as Goldilocks.

Here's why.

Our Missy Kitty -- perhaps even more so than others of her species -- is an independent animal, to say the least. Other cats that have possessed us over the years have been responsive when you called their names. More than that, they all loved to hear "Here Kitty, Kitty, Kitty." Or "Come here, Miss Kitty." Or something like that.

Not our Missy Kitty. She has never once responded to her name or to the all-purpose "Kitty, Kitty, Kitty."

Not once.

Missy Kitty has other peculiarities, too. I've told you about some of them. She is overheated most of the time. I don't know enough about feline physiology to explain. But she doesn't like sitting in direct sunlight, for example. And she doesn't like sitting in your lap very long, because of the extra body heat.

And there are some other things Missy Kitty doesn't like. And she lets us know, of course.

For example, she demands milk several times a day. She knows milk comes from the refrigerator. So she camps out by the fridge to let us know it's time -- according to Missy Kitty's clock -- for more milk.

But here's the thing: Milk straight out of the fridge is cold. Too cold for Missy Kitty. She prefers her milk at room temperature, thank you. So she lets you know how put out she is while she waits for her milk to arrive at the preferred temperature.

As the weather shifts throughout the course of a year, Missy Kitty has to decide which parts of the house are best suited for literal catnapping. Much of the year that means climbing into one of the padded dining-room chairs where her gray-striped fur blends into the gray upholstery, making her virtually invisible.

Sometimes, when the heat is on, the temperature at chair level is too warm, so Missy Kitty camps out on the floor under the dining room table -- apparently one of the coolest spots in our house.

But during the winter even the floor in the middle of the house is too warm, which had led to the discovery by Missy Kitty of the sofa in the guest bedroom/office. This works, because the guest bedroom is the farthest from the furnace, which means by the time heated air reaches that room it is cooled to a near-perfect temperature for our heat-sensitive cat. She is there right now as I am writing this column, happy as can be.

So here's the score:

Sitting in a sunbeam or on a lap is too hot for our Missy Kitty. Successful begging for more milk is too cold for our Missy Kitty. Sleeping on the sofa at the far end of the house is -- ready? -- just right.

In the overall scheme of things, pleasing Missy Kitty has its rewards. It's nice to know that it is, indeed, possible to make a cat -- any cat -- happy.

Not too hot. Not too cold. Just right.

There you are. Missy Kitty. Or Goldilocks, if you prefer.

She doesn't answer to any of them.

Joe Sullivan is the retired editor of the Southeast Missourian.