They say that skunks are docile creatures unless they're provoked. Well, I too am docile unless I've been provoked. And I have been provoked. As exepcted, removing the very large and very dead rat from my crawlspace didn't put any sort of damper on the smell. When I arrived at my stinky ol' home yesterday, the smell was still there, and seemed much worse. The dampness from the rain might have caused the smell to become stronger. Fortunately, I had a can of Febreze air freshener and odor eliminator to hopefully help solve the problem. I ran around the house spraying "meadows and rain" into every room until there was a thick fog everywhere. Then I did it again. A word of advice: when spraying something into the air in front of you, don't walk into it. And if you do walk into it, don't take a deep breath. Trust me, it wasn't very meadowy or rainy. I also turned on the furnace fan and sprayed Febreze into the air intake as it was running. I ended up emptying the whole can last night. So now I can't tell if the skunk smell is gone or if it's just being masked by the Febreze. I can smell the skunk briefly when I first go into the house but then everything smells like Febreze.

Tonight, I bought some stuff from Petco that's supposed to neutralize skunk smell in the air. I think the skunk died under my deck (which is a royale paine to access) because the smell is very strong around where an animal might be able to access the dark depths of my deck. So I sprinkled some of this Clear The Air skunk odor remover stuff around the area. Supposedly it works outdoors so I'll see tomorrow if it made any difference.

While I was prancing around with a can of Febreze last night, I missed the first hour of the 2-hour special of 24. Bah. The "previously on 24" really confused me at first because it was full of scenes I had never seen before. Then fear gripped my soul: I had missed an episode of 24. Unintentionally. But the episode summary filled in quite nicely.

Yesterday morning, I also discovered that I lost my badge and my keycard for work. Sucky. This evening, I found my badge and my keycard in my trunk. Cool. But the keycard has already been deactivated so it won't open any more doors for me. Alas poor badge, I knew thee well.

For the past week and a half, or so, my home has been plagued by a foul stench not unlike Grand Moff Tarkin's as he strolls down the corridors of the first Death Star. Only not as Moff-y. At first, I thought it was garlic, because, well, it smelled like roasted garlic, It also smelled like burnt ruber but I often use garlic when I cook so garlic seemed like a more likely culprit. It seemed possible that I dropped some garlic fragments somewhere and didn't realize it. After searching everywhere (meaning every location that was convenient to search) for garlic, I gave up and hoped that the smell would just go away.

Guess what? It didn't go away. When one's own intuition fails one's self, one must turn to the next best thing: the internets. A quick visit to the Googles took me here. About a quarter of the way down the page, a poster says that when his dog got skunked, it smelled like burnt rubber and garlic. Ah ha! So it wasn't my garlic-roasted rubber pie that was stinking up the house it was a skunk. From what I could gather, the scent of a skunk from afar is different from L'eau de Pepe Le Pew up close. And now I know. And now, assuming you didn't skip every word until this sentence, you know too.

That ThriftyFun site offers a lot of tips on de-skunking. Most of them are for people or animals who were directly sprayed by the bringer of stink though. Of course, I didn't read the site closely enough to understand that. I tried the hydrogen peroxide/baking soda/detergent recipe since it seemed promising and easy to do. The problem with that is that it works best when used on the source of the smell directly. The reaction from the peroxide and the baking soda is supposed to make something (oxygen, I think) and neurtalize the odor by bonding to it. The detergent helps break down the oil from the spray, which makes this a useful shampoo recipe for dogs who ended up on the wrong side of the skunk's butt. I poured it down the crawlspace under the house because that's where it seems to smell the worst. I also dumped some around the outside of the house where I thought the smell might be coming from. The crawlspace seemed to smell a bit better, but probably because I was slowly getting used to the smell.

That's the problem with skunk smell. People's noses become accustomed to the skunk smell pretty quickly. That's why people say that tomato juice works for getting rid of skunk odors. According to the never-false source of information known as the internet, after having smelled skunk for a while, you'll temporarily lose your ability to sense it. When the tomato juice comes along, its scent overpowers the skunk stink and you end up thinking that the skunk smell is gone because all you can smell is tomato juice. So I didn't try tomato juice. But I did spray my bedroom with so much Febreze that it became my best sanctuary from skunk smell in the house so I barricade myself up in there whenever I was at home. The rest of the house still reeked though.

The next thing I tried was putting bowls of apple cidar vinegar around the house. This works really well if you like smelling skunk marinated in vinegar but not so well if you prefer smelling skunk only if it doesn't smell like skunk. So great, now the house smells like vinegar and skunk. Fortunately, the vinegar smell goes away if the vinegar goes away. But the skunk smell doesn't follow it. To make matters even more fragrent, I got this orange-scented air freshener with activated carbon to absorb odors. So now my Casa de Skunka was now Casa de Skunka and Vinegar a la Orange-scented-air-freshener. It really sucked. I dreaded going home every day and I wouldn't even eat at home because the smell was making me nauseous.

Then I took a fateful trip down into my crawl space. The first time I went down there, I didn't really see anything skunky in there. This time, I looked in a corer that I didn't look at before and saw something that looked like it might be a dead something. I didn't get close enough for a good look so I just snapped a picture of it to examine when I resurfaced. It looked like it might be a dead rodent. Or it might be a pile of insulation and a stick. The picture wasn't very clear. So I ended up calling an animal disposal service to come by and see if they can Skunk-Off(tm) my place. The dude finally came today and disappeared into the crawl space like Mario. Only he didn't collect any coins, he collected a large dead rat. Ugh. But it was still no skunk. He looked around at other skunk-friendly hiding places but didn't find anything. Anyway, he took the rat away and I've been airing out the place hoping the smell would go away. I can still smell it though. I hope the rest of my Febreze will take care of it in the morning.

So please don't be offended if I don't invite you over. Aside from having no furniture (still!), it smells like skunk.

On a more figuratively stinky note, my company laid off another half of the employees and shifted its focus yet again. I somehow survived. That was my third layoff so I like to think that I've gotten better at it. It still hurts though. I may complain about how much my job sucks from time to time but I shouldn't, really. The people I work with are some of the brightest people around and they're really cool to work with too. Everyone was helpful when help was needed, smart when smartness was needed, serious when seriousness was needed, and oh so very silly when silliness was needed, Most of those folks are gone now. Having worked with them for about 4.5 years now, I can honestly say that I'll miss my now-ex-co-workers. A lot.

My new position is still a bit undefined right now. I'm trying to figure out where and how I fit in to everything. I'm sure management is trying to figure that out also. Until that's defined, I'll be a bit of a masterless samurai offering my fighting/engineering skills up to whoever needs them. I don't like to be in a state like this. I'd much rather have a goal to hit. But I guess times are tough and I need to be tougher. The worst part is the uncertainty. Not knowing what lies ahead really scares the carp out of me. I'm the sort of person who prefers to keep the carp inside of me. Maybe in the carp-al tunnel.

In any case, carp or not, I think I should really take some time to develop my hiten mitsurugi-ryu. Life's tough out there for a ronin.

They say stinky things happen in threes. The third stinky thing in this excessively verbose tale of woe involves a parking ticket.

Last Thursday I got a parking ticket.

Well that about sums up what's been kicking my behind lately. And since all three bad things have happened, it can only get better from here. Right? Right. :) There, I threw in a smiley for good measure.