Thanks to everyone who made suggestions for naming my new foster cat. Many of them were quite good, but nothing really quite fit him. Then I thought of OJ (for the juice, or for Orange Julius, or for something to do with silly former Sox pitcher Julian Tavarez, not for the more notorious person). I kept calling him "Orange Guy", so I thought then that OG would be a good name for several reasons: It's all "street" and therefore both funny and accurate; it's a shortening of what I was already calling him; it also works as a word ("ogee").

But OJ just seems to fit him better than OG, so he's officially OJ as far as the vet is concerned.

Anyway. If anyone out there is looking for an absolute sweetheart orange cat, or who knows someone else who is, feel free to follow the PetFinder link in my last post about him or just drop me a note.

Winry, my shy, nervous, skittish girlcat, has decided she is going to take him down. He is almost as bewildered by this as I am.

Jasper, meanwhile, is stable. (He's the white-with-gold who showed up on my front stoop, desperately ill, a couple of weeks ago.) He's probably not got anything that is likely to sicken my cats, but he is still ill with something (though looking much better) and he's an intact male with all the urinary marking instincts that entails, so he remains basement-only. He's probably got only a few months, but there's really no telling. Again, if anybody out there wants a friendly, older intact male in his twilight, let me know.

(Yeah, the post title is somewhat random. I recently rediscovered the song "I Want to Be a Cowboy", which I remembered loathing but which I now find catchy and fun. There's a backing vocal bit that I could swear is almost identical to a more current song, though I can't come up with it. The title is a quote from that song.)

(And I think I actually did come up with the other song the night before last, and I realized it really wasn't as close as I had thought it was, but I didn't mark it down and so have forgotten it again ... though it's possible that I only dreamed that I remembered it that night. Yes, that is the sort of dream I tend to have ....)