The highlights of our week have been that Mari Dog encountered her first skunk, and Bill had a cold which he graciously passed on to me.

I was sitting at this desk paying bills Wednesday night and was vaguely aware of an unpleasant smell. When it hit me that it was a skunk, it also hit me that Mari was outside, not a good idea. I was right on both counts, as we discovered when she came barging in, and the smell came with her. She frantically scrubbed her head and body on the floor, the furniture, her bed pad, panted, and did it all again over and over. We put her outside where she did her best to uproot the grass in the scrubbing process, all to no avail, naturally. We had some dog odor remover which we rubbed on her, which helped only slightly. I guess we could have bathed her with tomato soup, in lieu of tomato juice of which we had none, and which I didn’t want to go for since it was bedtime, but holding her still long enough to wipe her off with the odor remover was hard enough, let alone with tomato juice, and besides, I am not sure that would have done the trick anyway. Needless to say, she spent the night outside  instead of in her kennel in the house.

So yesterday candles burned all day and she stayed outside, and today the smell is almost gone. Of course,  I couldn’t smell Pepe LePew if he was chasing me down for an embrace because of this cold. Nyquil and Mucinex cocktails have done a good job on the runny nose, and I do mean running like a river, and I slept last night, but with the stopped-up nose, I still sound like, well, I don’t know what I sound like, just not myself.

So maybe colds are the best cure for the smell of skunk.

Just trying to find a silver lining here.