Another excerpt from the upcoming Date Nights 2025 book that should be here in the next week or so. Several weeks ago, our Boston caught a face full of skunk and we’re still dealing with the ramifications. It’s been a complete nightmare to say the least, but at this point it’s at least kinda funny.

Katie has been doing a not-great job of getting up early lately. Last week she asked me to call her at 5:30am every day to make sure she’s up. Every day I called her, every day I said “you better not go back to bed” and every day, alas, she went back to bed. This week, we decided to try the same thing and when I called her at 5:30am on Monday, a new voice answered – one owned by a Katie who has been up at least long enough to remember her name! Progress had been made! 

To thwart our celebration of success, however, Katie complained of a skunky smell that had permeated the house. After some investigation, it appears our boy Brüe had gotten sprayed right in the face when he went outside that morning. It was still pitch black outside since it was still early, so the poor boy probably didn’t even see it on the other side of the fence. Not knowing it had happened, Katie allowed him to come in and presumably get cozy on furniture and run through the entirety of the house.

Fortunately, Katie took charge and immediately set out to open the windows and put every fan in the house on full-blast. She also gave Brüe the first of many baths and brought his crate outside so he could air out as much as possible. When I got home, the house smelled putrid. We left Brüe outside the rest of the day and I spent the evening spraying odor remover, placing bowls of vinegar in rooms and boiling a saucepan full of vinegar water to try to remove the smell.

Over the course of the week, the smell subsided little by little but at the time of this writing (Friday), it hasn’t fully gone away. I threw a fit last night because I was cranky and learned my gym shoes were covered in skunk. I’d washed a dog towel and an article of Katie’s clothes three times in a detergent-baking soda-vinegar mix and it still came out smelling like skunk. For the most part, the house is rather neutral at this point, but it’s still lingering. It’s also somehow spread onto Ozzy, who sleeps in the bed with us every night, so that has been wonderful.

Today, I gave Brüe his seventh bath of the week and I’m still not confident it has helped. Ozzy got a bath, too. We’ll see how that goes later tonight, I suppose. We’re leaving on a staycation in just two days and it can’t get here soon enough! 

Let this just be an official record that states why it’s important to let Katie sleep in. Sleeping until after sunrise is a surefire way to make sure our pets don’t have any altercations with nocturnal creatures.

-jtf

This is post 26 of 30 in my most recent attempt at tackling NaBloPoMo. Funsies and such.