Skunks and Other Minor Annoyances

This was just a banner week in terms of annoyances. It started off on Sunday with a fire that torched the mountain across the way from our house. I smelled smoke and asked my family, “Does anyone else smell that?”

“Nope,” they said. “It’s your imagination.”

I looked out the window later and saw smoke starting to go up and the first thing (I know it’s bad) the FIRST thing I yelled was, “I TOLD you I smelled smoke! The hill is on fire!” The theory is that someone threw his cigarette out their car window, a theory borne out by the fact that a bunch of people saw a dude throw his cigarette out the window, and the subsequent fire.

I just hate that. Responsible smokers clean up their butts. They don’t leave them on the ground or throw them out the window into the pile of dry tinder known as San Diego from April through October. And the next day I saw someone throw a cigarette out the window near the mountain and I swear I came thisclose to ramming them with my trusty mini-van (So THAT’S how your bumper got knocked ajar, eh, Margaret?)

Then on Wednesday night, I was asleep when another smell awoke me. It was chokingly awful, like a mixture of rotted onions, eggs, rancid pot, and a paint thinner all thrown together.

I went downstairs to see Cadillac washing his hands. “I let him out and he got into something. He’s foaming at the mouth.”

“It’s skunk. Can’t you smell that?”

So I fired up the Internet and found the skunk potion: baking soda and hydrogen peroxide and water mixed together, and Cadillac, cursing like the dad from A Christmas Story, turned on the bathtub.

I opened all the windows and blasted the A/C and oh mah goodness. It still stank. I could taste it. It permeated the air.

It took a long time to go back to sleep.

The next morning I was totally knackered (British word, right? I like it! We need to use it here and it begins RIGHT NOW) and I had to take los animales to the vet for their shots. Gatsby still stank. Then I had the brilliant idea to just drop him off at the groomer’s, and after calling around found one that had time to take him and do the de-skunk treatment. It worked on about 80% of the stench. Four days later, he still stinks quite a bit.

Yesterday evening, Cadillac opened the garage door. We have an extra fridge in there, and a litter box for Richard Parker, that semi-feral cat. We leave the door cracked for him. The skunk was using the litterbox. It ran under the car and peered up at Cadillac, unperturbed mostly. We theorize it had appeared for what we call hard rubbin’s. This is the firm petting that our animals get from Cadillac on their backs. He kind of, I don’t know, smashes their backs down, but the animals love it. Like, if I pet an animal they will abandon me to go get petted by him. I am a poor substitute in terms of pettings.

Now we have to trap Richard Parker in the garage at night.

On Friday, Cadillac had to go to Pasadena to do an audit for work and he took us with him to go to the Huntington Library afterwards. It was all going super until I walked into the gardens and felt like I needed to vomit, cry, and lie down all at the same time.

On the way up we made a pit stop at the same Carl’s Junior we’d stopped at on the way to Tahoe, where I got the same food without incident. I was hungry and had only eaten a small bowl of almond milk and puffed rice. I got a breakfast that had scrambled eggs (whole eggs + citric acid!) and a biscuit and tater tots and sausage and bacon. I only ate the eggs and gave the rest to my son.

I think the eggs were bad. Approximately 3.5 hours later, the GI distress hit.

Not to get into many gory details, but I had to stay near a bathroom. The guards were looking at me sideways, no doubt thinking, What is this lady up to? Is she doing drugs in the Huntington Library bathrooms? but I was prepared to tell them the truth.

Cadillac took the kids to a couple of the gardens and we looked at the library and then I said I needed to go. We stopped and got Tums and I basically slept the whole way home, whereupon it really hit me.

See, that’s always my biggest fear when I’m traveling. Getting sick like that and having to ride 2 or 3 hours back in a car. And what if I chaperon something and I get sick? What happens to the kids? How the fuck would I be able to drive home? I would never make it. Is it just me or when you have a vague anxiety about something that finally HAPPENS, do you feel a sense of triumph, like the I TOLD YOU SO phenomenon? That’s probably a personality defect.

So that was my trifecta of sorta bad things.

Of course it could have been worse. I could have been hit with a GI plague so bad the car would have been totaled. The fire could have jumped the road and burned down our subdivision. The skunk could have sprayed me in the face instead of the dog, who was valiantly protecting the homestead. And of course there are far worse tragedies happening in the world right now which I will not mention because I figure you don’t come here for that kind of talk, right?

Hopefully, this week will be better. BlogHer and Comic-Con!