This Really Stinks!

Last night Brian and I let Reggie out around 9:30. We sat on the back steps peacefully watching him do his "business" and let him sniff around a little. All of sudden he takes off down the alley growling.

This is not unusual. You would think, by Reggie's actions, that the cats in our neighborhood are the greatest threat to safety and peace that our community has ever seen. Honestly. And he lives with two cats! But we would rather he not go chasing a cat around the block so we usually act pretty fast, yelling at him, "Come on Reggie, let's go in. REGGIE. GET OVER HERE!" And he responds fairly well and happily zips back into the house.

So this was the routine we followed last night when he ran into the alley growling. But as Brian and I went to follow Reggie into the house Brian said, "What's that smell?" It seems to me that "what's that smell" is never referring to the smell of baking bread or freshly picked flowers. Usually the reference is to something foul. And then the smell wafted to my nostrils. SKUNK.

And then the realization hit us. Our eyes met. I watched the horror sweep across his eyes...the same horror that was probably mirrored in my own eyes. It was no cat that Reggie chased down the alley. It was a skunk. Our little dog was in the house and we needed to find out if he had escaped the skunk's spray.

Upon walking into our house the scent that assailed our nostrils was more potent and vile than I had thought possible. We bent over to smell Reggie. We did not need to bend very far to be certain that he the smell torpedo had hit it's target.

I had heard horror stories of other dog owners whose dogs had been a little too curious with a small striped animal. I always worried that this could happen to us. We did not panic. There was no time for that though we would have liked to. We needed to move fast. We became an efficient crisis-management team. I shouted out commands.

1. I yelled at Brian to move the dog outside while I went to the Internet for instructions on handling this crisis. (I found an article walking me through the crisis step-by-step. I didn't read several articles to see what they said. I went with the first one. It seemed reliable.)
2. I began running bath water, opened windows, and plugged in an air freshener.
3. I then stripped down to little more than a pair of rubber gloves and told Brian to bring the dog in and deposit him in the tub.
4. I handed Brian the computer and told him to mix up the recipe for skunk-removal wash. (It involved hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and dish soap.)
5. We screamed about how horrid the house smelled, disbelieving how the 60 seconds Reggie had spent in the house had tainted our happy home beyond all reason.
6. I secured the area that had been sprayed on the dog and began washing it vigorously...all the while telling Reggie how bad he is.
7. Brian brings the mixture and we wash the aforementioned area with that as well.
8. Brian then removed the dog from the tub and dried him.
9. Reggie then did his happy I-just-had-a-bath dance and began running through the house totally unscathed.

We, in the mean time, are left with a house that smells like a mixture of burnt plastic and organic foulness. Every 20 minutes or so we would break down and start screaming about how bad it smells in this house! I made popcorn to try to cover the smell. Even that didn't work. Brian seems to have an especially weak constitution where the smell is concerned. When we finally head to bed Brian admits that he feels queasy. I ask if he's gonna throw up because I'm ready to boot him out of the bed. I can't handle cleaning up another disaster. Luckily he made it through the night.
Alas, when I awoke Brian had plugged in the little potpourri pot again, and the smell of skunk is clearly still present. And even though it's freezing in here (which is stupid because it's still August) the windows shall remain open until the stank too has passed.