oh no!

Saturday night. Shortly after 10pm. I take Mama Mimi out for a late night pee. We descend the front steps and Darkness starts to kind of scuffle and growl while pulling in the direction of the recycling bin. I turn around just in time to lock eyes with a little skunk. I’m not sure if animals feel the range of emotions we do but this guy sure as hell looked as surprised and terrified as I felt.

After I made a run for the sidewalk, I thought that we had managed a clean escape. I hadn’t heard anything nor felt anything. I assume that when skunks spray, you hear and feel something. Within about oh, 10 seconds Mimi started sneezing and burying her face in the snow. Dang…Never one to want to accept reality, I thought that perhaps this was something else, somehow NOT skunk related. I bent down to smell her head and…yup…….skunk!

I’ve been one of those people (I am assuming I’m not the only one) who have always found that the smell of skunk is not that bad. Cow, pig, or chicken crap smells way worse than skunk (I thought). Raw sewage and sulphur, also very unpleasant. But THIS, THIS…was horrible. I’m not saying that it’s worse than any of those things I’ve just mentioned but still, fairly nasty. It’s as though you’ve crawled up inside someone’s ass and you discover that somehow, SOMEHOW, this person has been storing dead bodies up there. And leftover Indian food.

Anyway, after about 15 minutes of Mimi giving herself snowjobs, we finally return home. And yes, the smell was overwhelming and horrible outside the house, inside the house….everywhere.The magic of the internet gave me a recipe (not tomato sauce) to bathe her in. White vinegar, baking soda, peroxide….dish soap. So I proceeded to bathe Mimi only to run out of hot water (fyi: dogs do not like being rinsed off with ice cold water…they’re kinda human in that regard). Many cups of microwaved water later, Mimi is rinsed off, totally unhappy, and still really really smelly. Once out of the tub, Mimi felt like the best thing to do was to rub her smelly self all over the house. I put her on lockdown the rest of the night.

Funny thing about skunk smell, apparently, it gets STRONGER as time passes. Like a punch in the face, the putrid smell actually woke me up in the middle of the night. The only time a smell has ever woken me up in the middle of the night was when one of my former girlfriends had the hummus platter at a middle eastern restaurant. THAT was horrible. I actually got up and left the room to regroup only to go back to discover that IT had gotten stronger as well. I ended up elbowing her awake to see if maybe, MAYBE she had left a hot lunch in the bed. Ok, the very last part did not happen but everything else is true. It was truly traumatizing. For reals. She’ll never read this but if somehow she does, she’ll know it’s all completely true (you know who you are).

One day, and another bath later, Mimi is still kind of skunky. It’s not bad anymore but it still makes me scrunch my nose. The question is, has she learned her lesson? I say no. Damn her.