Friday, November 23, 2007

Something Stinks

As you can see, we had an unwelcome visitor take up residency under our front step. After much discussion I convinced the children that a skunk would NOT make an ideal pet and also could not be trained to fire stink at their friends or enemies on command.

I called an exterminator and he set a trap using an egg as bait. Apparently using anything else would catch us a neighbourhood cat. It took a few days but finally Mr. Skunk got hungry enough and wandered into the cage to grab the egg. I took the above picture of him from the safety of my living room window. Hey, I'm not stupid.

The exterminator came and picked up the cage and took the little guy off to a forested area far enough away that he won't find his way back. I hope he's very happy there. I thought he would spray once he was trapped but he just curled up into a ball and went to sleep. If he had sprayed I'm not sure what I would've done to remove the smell.

In light of my Life's Messy contest, I thought it only fitting I deal with the smelliness of our messy life. When there's a particularly nasty smell around, I rely on Vicks Vaporub. A tiny dab of that under your nose and it's hard to smell anything else. I was told that a lot of crime scene investigators use that trick when they're dealing with the smell of decomp. I haven't verified that tidbit but it seems like if it works on other pungent smells, it could have some usefulness there.

If you celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday, I hope all the smells were pleasant. But how about other times? Do you have any tricks for dealing with bad smells?

2 comments:

B.E. Sanderson said...

When I was a kid, our dog got skunked on a regular basis. Tomato juice always worked for that. He looked very pathetic sitting in the bathtub covered in juice, but if he would've stopped wanting to play with them, he wouldn't have had to deal with the consequences.

For everyday smells, Febreze or Glade Odor Neutralizer. =o)

In college, I used to work for Animal Control. They used to trap tons of skunks and raccoons. One day we got called to remove a next of baby skunks. Too cute, and fluffy. Did you know baby skunks don't have a smell of their own? They acquire some from Mom until they grow their own glands. =o)

Wendy Roberts said...

Ahhh how cute about the nest of baby skunks! This little guy was pretty cute too but you could sure smell him even though he hadn't sprayed. I didn't know baby skunks didn't have their own smell! So they acquire it like body odour in pubescent teens, huh LOL!