Patience. Faith. Trust. All admirable traits. All things that I constantly work on.
It's way past time to again start this blog, to again get into the habit of writing, to again (it can be hoped) write well. As with the good intentions that come with going to the gym or starting a diet, it's not the initial well-intentioned effort that's the killer, it's the second, and the third, and the fourth, and so on. Somewhere along the line one obtains a new habit or lifestyle that becomes the new norm and is not to be sidetracked except by an act of God, but in those first few fledgling attempts, it doesn't take much to derail the best of intentions.
"Importance" became a really good excuse for why I hadn't started the blog a year and a half ago. I needed to start with a bang, have deep thoughts to pass on, wait for a truly unique vision to share with the world, and so on. Then Jessie killed and ate Kelly's toy and Kelly peed on the replacement and it was obvious that there was a good story to tell. (FYI, we had give Kelly up for adoption just a couple of weeks after that incident as the relationship between the two dogs deteriorated even more.) Eighteen months down the line, as time stretched on, "importance" again became a roadblock in my admittedly flawed logic. It was frustrating. And then came yesterday.
It hadn't been the best of days to start with and by the end of it I was not a happy camper. My annual physical had been disappointing, with my blood pressure being a tick higher instead of significantly lower. Because of that I'm now back on a diuretic medication that I really don't like. The prostate exam seemed to last
much longer than normal, and that's
not a good thing.
The rest of the day sort of went downhill from there. I went to the gym while mad about the physical, wondering why I'm even bothering since I'm not seeing one of the key benefits that I was looking for. That might have been a mistake, since The Idiot Subconscious went and overcompensated across the board on every exercise set, leaving me exhausted and sore.
At home, The Wife was the voice of reason and pointed out all of the good, healthy things that I've improved on in the last few months. My weight is down, my exercise regimen is solid, I'm feeling better, my energy level is up, and I kicked Mt Ascutney's ass. She's absolutely correct and I know it, but I figured I had earned a couple of days of self-pity and pouting before admitting it. All in all, I was in a pretty good funk.
We settled into our evening routine and about 8:00 I put Jessie outside in the back yard for her evening constitutional. A few minutes later I heard her going off as if all of the demons of hell were invading the back yard, so I went out to investigate.
Jessie's an opinionated dog and she's vocal about it. We've learned to understand her barks to a good extent. There's a short, quiet "I'm-still-out-here" woof when she wants in. There's her loud, aggressive "Someone-rang-the-doorbell!!" bark. Often from the back yard we'll hear her attention getting "I-think-I-smell-or-heard-something!" bark which indicates that there may be a squirrel or other critter up in the trees. But when she gets going with that deep throated, baying, howling-for-all-the-world-to-hear bellow, that means that she's actually got a live one.
I went out the back door and could hear Jessie off in the bushes in the dark corner behind the jacuzzi, waking up the whole neighborhood. I yelled at her to knock it off and come in, but she completely ignored me. This was significant, since she usually knows that she's in trouble if she doesn't come in when we yell. She was still bellowing from the bottom of her soul, so I figured she didn't have just another squirrel, it had to be a bigger critter. We have raccoons and opossums occasionally and they can be nasty if cornered or with young, so I would prefer that she didn't tangle with them. And there's always the chance of a cougar or rattlesnake coming in from the hills.
I yelled a couple more times, got thoroughly ignored, then started walking across the yard in the dark. Jessie was wailing away and I was just about to head back into the house to get a flashlight, figuring that I would have to go back into the bushes to drag her out. But suddenly Jessie gave a startled yelp and tore out of the bushes past me headed for the door. I immediately smelled my worst nightmare.
Jessie had pissed off a skunk.
We know that they're in the area, we smell them from off in the distance every week or so. Once or twice a year you'll smell it a lot stronger and presumably a lot closer, and every now and then you'll see one prepped for the Roadkill Cafe. Once we even saw one in a friend's yard a couple of miles away. But this was a first.
I went back in the house to find Jessie stinking and starting to dig at her eyes. She had run into the house through the master bedroom, then off into the bedroom we use as a computer room. It was like she had been hit by tear gas. She was pawing at her face, rubbing and itching her face and eyes on the carpet, on the bed, on the walls, on the chairs, on us, on whatever she could find. It wasn't helping her discomfort, but it was spreading the liquid from the skunk on everything.
The Older Daughter had been off in the other end of the house playing video games, but she had heard the ruckus in the back yard and then had started to smell the results. She ran back to the bedrooms to confirm that Jessie had indeed done what she thought she might have done, then started gagging from the smell.
I got Jessie off into the bathroom with the bathtub and shut her in. I immediately got on the Internet, found a recipe for a de-stinking solution, and verified that while the skunk spray was painful to the victim, it was not toxic or likely to blind Jessie or otherwise cause permanent harm. Knowing that Jessie was going to be a handful to deal with, I sent The Wife out to get the supplies needed for the deodorant mixture while I started to get Jessie washed down.
Those of you who know Jessie will know why this is the "fun" part. Considering that she's a yellow lab & German shepherd mix, you would think that she would be a "water dog". Nothing could be further from the truth. Jessie hates water with the white hot passion of a thousand suns. When it's bath time, she's 45 pounds of fury. And it was now bath time in a big, big way.
I changed into a bathing suit, preparing for battle. The Older Daughter yelled something about not being able to stand the smell and taking off for a friend's house. I could hear Jessie trying to claw through the bathroom door, so in I went. I wrestled her into the tub, which was only possible because there wasn't any water in it at the moment and Jessie was seriously distracted by all of the excitement and all of the smells.
I was actually surprised by the smell. Everyone knows the classic skunk smell, that incredibly "sharp", "bright", musk odor that even in trace amounts you catch like a distant clarion call of a trumpet and which up close smells like the olfactory equivalent of Louis Armstrong hitting a high-C and holding it for about sixty seconds.
That was what I had smelled outside, but inside it was different. Stronger, much stronger, but more "muted". To continue the analogy, instead of a single "bright" trumpet, it was more like the entire tuba & trombone sections of the USC marching band "blaaaaaaaaaating" at you in a midrange register. Not pleasant at all, but not truly horrific as I had expected. Sort of like a sewage smell plus the smell of newspaper ink plus enough skunk smell to remind you where it came from.
Good thing that I wasn't totally nauseated by the smell, because pretty soon it was all over me. I closed the shower doors and turned on the water and Jessie started freaking out. I was freaking out as well because I expected the water to be coming out of the faucet, and instead it came out of the shower. (
Thanks, Younger Daughter!) Cold water. All over me and Jessie.
Very cold water. In a slippery shower stall with a panicking 45 pound dog. The good news was that Jessie wasn't pawing at her eyes any more. The bad news was that she was going to get away from that water if it killed her, and I was in the way.
Note for next time, or if you ever find yourself in the same situation - put on sneakers. In bare feet it was slippery and in her panic Jessie managed to put some significant scratches into my feet and shins. So now I'm bleeding in a cramped shower in the ice cold water trying to keep my balance in a slippery barefoot situation next to two glass shower doors while trying to control a stinking, freaked out dog...
Keep that thought.
I got the shower turned off, the water warmed up, and Jessie more or less calmed down. OK, it was less, not more, but at least for the moment she wasn't trying to disembowel me in order to get out. Heeding the advice from the online suggestions about what to do when your dog makes friends with a skunk, I started washing down Jessie, being careful to wash and rinse any skunky fluids away from and not in to her eyes, nose, and mouth. I had to remind Jessie several times that I was the alpha male and I wanted her to sit and I was not going to let her out, but we made it for about fifteen minutes before The Wife came home with the ingredients for the deodorant mixture.
And then the tub stopped draining. Jessie tends to shed when she's excited, and a brief investigation showed that there was about a pound of matted, fine, white fur filling the drain. OK, another complication that I could have lived without. If Jessie was hesitant to sit and behave when it meant sitting near water running out of the faucet, there was no way she was going to sit in a couple of inches of water! She was going to be on her tiptoes, exposing the absolute minimum of her skin to that horrible dihydrogen oxide. In what was unfortunately only the third or fourth most grotesque act of the day, I managed to dig out the gigantic hairball and restore the drain to a functioning status.
The Wife arrived back at the chaos, inspiring a new round of panic and escape attempts by Jessie. Even if she couldn't convince the alpha male to let her out, surely her patron saint and champion (The Wife) would rescue her! Sorry, no joy on that one, just more scratches on my feet. The Wife got a batch of the the magical deodorant goo mixed up, which I proceeded to use to wash down Jessie for another ten minutes. Did it work? I was hoping, but by that time my sinuses were so saturated with the skunk sme
ll that I really could not tell for sure. I do know that the hydrogen peroxide in the magical deodorant goo will drip off of the dog and into those open scratches on your feet and hurt like hell. I did my best to not make Jessie-like whimpering and whining sounds when that happened.
Before releasing her I decided to try to make Jessie smell good instead of merely smelling less foul. The shower we were in had a supply of The Younger Daughter's shampoos, lotions, and potions, so Jessie got finished off with a liberal supply of some Herbal Essences peach-smelling shampoo. By that time she was so miserable that she didn't care any more. In fact, when that final shampoo was done and we were ready to let her out to get dried off by The Wife, Jessie wouldn't even do that water shedding "doggie shiver" thing that they do. I finally got her to do it by tickling her ears, then she bounded out into the waiting arms and towels of The Wife. And then, still soaking wet, onto our bed.
Once I got dried off (and pulled another pound of matted white dog hair out of the drain) it was time to try to get the smell out of the house. I Fabreeze'd everything that I thought Jessie might have touched or wiped skunk scent on, but the effect was marginal. After a couple of rounds of this, it actually started to get worse, with the smell of the Fabreeze mixed with the skunk smell actually getting to be stronger and worse than the skunk smell alone.
In the end, Jessie smells fine (if a little peachy) and we're still friends (at least when I feed her). There's still a smell in the house, just a little bit noticeable in the far end of the house where Jessie never smeared any skunk juice, a lot more noticeable in the computer room and bathroom and our bedroom. Again, while certainly not pleasant, it's not totally disgusting or nauseating. And I can still smell it on my hands today, despite repeated washings.
Has Jessie learned not to bark at skunks? Yeah, right! While she's bright for a dog, when the critters are there to be chased and confronted I don't think she has a lot of her higher brain functions activated. It's a territorial and instinctive thing. The memory of the stink and the pain in her eyes and the bath that followed won't mean squat.
As for me, remember that bleeding, cramped, ice cold, off-balance, slippery, dangerous, barefoot, freaked out situation? That happened to be the perfect moment for The Idiot Subconscious to whisper in my brain, "Are we having fun yet? Still want to worry about your self-pity and pouting? Look around at all of this prime quality chaos!
THIS is freakin' hilarious! The dogs gave you a great story with which to start your blog, and now Jessie has given you a great story with which to start again. Don't screw up!"
Patience. When the time is right, I'll write. That doesn't mean that it's OK to skip another eighteen months before the next blog entry, but it doesn't mean that I have to write 2,500 words a day every day. Try a little bit of balance. (Hmmm, there's something to write about tomorrow. Or next week...)
Faith. EGBOK. Everything's Gonna Be OK. Don't sweat the little stuff. The story worth telling will reveal itself to me.
Trust. I will be able to tell that story when the time comes.
Oh, and, Be Careful What You Wish For.
