MY View

BY JOHN MCLOONE

Some weeks stink worse than others

Some weeks are good, some weeks aren’t.

We ended the week on a high note, as we got to spend time with our entire family for three days.

The week was a real stinker leading up to that. Literally.

I stuffed a lot of newspapers growing up, and I got to get back to my roots last week. A weekly grocery insert that runs in one of our newspapers got lost in shipping. If people think the United States Postal Service is having problems moving mail, try to spend two days with FedEx.Twice we tried to intercept five box es that were being shuttled from a printing plant in southern Wisconsin to a point farther south, to the middle part of the state, to St. Paul and down to La Crosse. Four hours of driving later, they were where they needed to be, and we got the joy of stuffing pa pers to make sure they would be in homes on time. And because of that shipping snafu, I had to be up by 3:30 a.m. Thursday to get a truckload of papers to the postal carriers.

Wednesday night I’ll admit I screwed up. I like to go to sleep early, and maybe that’s because things I didn’t want to deal with happened later. When my family had to battle a bat in our house, I was asleep. My wife handles crisis situations in an efficient man ner, meaning she usually doesn’t wake me up. I get up in the morning, and the problem is solved like nothing ever happened.

Not this time. We were up watching TV until late, which for me is about 10 p.m. She let our two pooches out for their nightly ritual. A short time later, they pushed their way in the front door. That’s usually a good thing. I didn’t have to stand outside and wake my neighbors yelling for them. They’re good dogs…usually. This time, they ushered in a night of the kind of excitement I wasn’t looking for. It seems that our older dog, who should know better, tangled with a skunk. He lost the fight, and we're still losing the battle, five days later. Skunks stink when they're a half mile away. You have to have experienced it close up in your living room to really get a feel for how bad this odor is.

My first inkling was to take the easy way out. "Let's move out of our house. Right now. We always wanted to retire in Florida. How about tonight? We can buy new clothes when we get there.”

Ever level-headed, my bride convinced me to stay, and I scrubbed dogs. We shut the door to our downstairs to keep the skunk fog at bay, and I got a couple hours of sleep.

When I woke up far from bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I quickly fled home. During the course of the day, I knew I had to do something about that dog and that stink. I conferred with foremost Wisconsin outdoor expert Al Brown. Skunks live in the outdoors, and he was coming out of the grocery store. I knew that if he didn’t know what to do to get stink off of a dog, he would know an expert. He did. He called his wife, and she knew.

Ten minutes later, I was in Stink Central. The guilty dog greeted me at the door. I pointed up the steps, and he jumped right in the tub. He knew what was coming. A few quarts of hydrogen peroxide, some baking soda and dish soap, and he was a new man.

The reminders of the night are lasting. I still smell skunk everywhere I go. It’s burned into my senses. Plus, our house still stinks. I've lit candles, sprayed freshener and scrubbed floors. The outdoors expert helped me get the stink off of the dog. Now, I’m in desperate need of an indoors expert.

Anyone? [email protected]