I keep wanting to blog about the clinic, and I want to get it all out while it’s still fresh in my head.

Needless to say, I had the world’s most incredible time… and in addition to having the time of my life, I learned so much my brain hurt.  In some areas of how I approach horses I experienced a completely revolutionary shift in thinking… which was both weird and awesome.

I have a ton of pictures to go through – I’m only about halfway through going through them, and I have over 50 “favorites”.

I even took a bunch of notes on the long drive home, so I know exactly what I want to write about.

And then I woke up on Tuesday, physically exhausted but happy and ready to write….

And a freak accident occurred, and we lost our kitten Bubbles.

Even though he was still young, he was just an AWESOME cat.  He was one of those one-in-a-million cats.

I mean, we drove him to the DragonMonkey’s  preschool for show and tell and handed him around to twenty different preschoolers, and he never even complained, or tried to wriggle away.

That’s a pretty awesome cat.

On the one hand I’m just incredibly sad, although I’m not as devastated as I could be… mainly because when I lost my best friend (also another incredible cat) when I was in my early 20s,  I spent about three months just going through the motions of life, feeling like I had a hole where my heart used to be…. and I realized how ridiculous that was.

Our pets do not live as long as we do.  We live 80 years.  They live about 15 years.

I knew I couldn’t survive having my heart destroyed every 10 or 15 years, and I made a conscious decision to not lose myself completely in any of my pets again, at least not the shorter lived ones.  Oh, I still love them passionately, but I just don’t let myself completely go with them.  In the back of my mind I realize I’m going to outlive them.

Hey, maybe that’s not the healthiest way to approach it, but it’s what I had to do to keep myself from flinging myself off a bridge if I ever lost another pet.

Which I guess is why it surprised me that it hurt so much when Bubbles passed.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised – he was an incredible little cat, and I bottle fed him from the time he was about 5 days old.  Once they were old enough his sister found a home with my very good friend here in town, and we kept him. 

So, anyways, before I go on and post anything about the clinic, I just need to take a moment to say goodbye.  I kept trying to just keep it to myself, because I didn’t feel like writing about it, but the sadness was seeping into my clinic posts, so I realized I needed to do this.

Miss you, Bubbles.  You really were the best of kitties.  I’ll see you again someday.