skunk update and travels

I could never hope to write a witty posting on skunks, as Hope of Humor Hangout might, but I thought I would update interested readers with what I have learned about skunk/dog interactions, and what to do and not do when they take place. Probably most of you know this already, but just in case someone else awakes from a deep sleep to take a dog out at 5AM and his/her dog is sprayed with a skunk, here goes.

When our black lab Bachelor (for Mt. Bachelor and in honor of his condition in life) was sprayed, the scent on him wasn't nearly as strong as I thought it would be, so in my sleepy condition I assumed that he's just been sprayed a very little bit, let him into the house, thought I would deal with this later, and went back to bed. When I woke up I bathed him twice--didn't have tomato juice and thought bathing with soap should do it--and cleaned the carpet in the places where I knew he'd been.

What I now realize is that Bachelor probably did get fully sprayed, and that while the odor wasn't as bad as I expected the staying power of the scent is much, much worse. Over the weekend when I was working at home, I got somewhat used to the odor in the house and on Bachelor. But when I went to work, came home, and opened the door I realized that it was there--and it was powerful.

Boy did I feel dumb, dumber, and dumbest.

What I should have done was to put Bachelor in the basement or better yet in a basement room that open only from the outside, driven straight to Winco for tomato juice, and bathed Bachelor as soon as it was light/warm enough. Hope has already emphasized the craziness of letting him into the house, and all I can say was that: a) I was half asleep and wasn't thinking clearly and b) the smell was so much less strong than I expected that I didn't realize how fully Bachelor was sprayed and even more importantly how just a tough of contact with Bachelor would get the skunk's scent deeply into the carpet.

My husband is now home from a trip to his family's to celebrate his mother's 90th birthday. As I write this, he is washing Bachelor in tomato juice--because even with my multiple baths he still smells like skunk. Later today he'll rent a carpet cleaner, buy extra anti-odor stuff, and clean our carpets.

And you thought academics wrote only stuffy entries on the history of authorship, blogging, and citizen reviewers?

Oh, yes, I leave tomorrow for Middle Tennessee State University, where I'm giving a talk and facilitating three workshops. Later today I hope to post my talk, which is about 12 pages long, as a blog entry. It has some stuff on the history of technologies of writing and publishing that, based on comments to earlier posts, might be interesting to some (but by no means all) readers.