Murphy lives.
Not only that, the SOB's still in charge. Recently tuned up so that it should be in good shape, the insurance company having told me the check should be in the P.O. box today, the pickup won't start. Until I can get that handled, I'm glued to the house, because I still can't quite walk all the way around the block, much less to the Post Office and back. My friends who say they know a very good mechanic have no phone, so I'll have to wait until they call me, which will likely be when they need a ride someplace. Truthfully though, they do call sometimes just to check on me.
Old conclusion: this planet was designed by Murphy and built on government contract.
So - I have the live-trap baited and set, and since my TNIR (Trap, Neuter, Inoculate and Return) buddy can't do any relocation past 9:00 PM tonight because she has to work in the morning, that means the stinker(s) won't be out of their burrow under the bedroom until 9:05 or so. I need to catch at least one of them, though. Last night I had to put Tiger Balm on my mustache so I could breathe! A concern: there was a strong component to that smell last night that was redolent of skunk mating smell, but they don't mate (usually) until February. The weather has been off-cycle lately, though. When my wife, Koloneh and I were bopping around out in the woods that last few years, we noticed that increasingly, a lot of things were sprouting and blossoming at the wrong times, or failing to. In fact, we noticed this a decade or more ago. A lot of things sprouted or bloomed in this most recent false-Spring and then got frozen just days afterward. I wonder if this climate change has affected the animals so strongly now that their mating cycle is off?
Some years ago, my wife and I, whilst snuggling quietly on the couch with the television off and hot chocolate in hand, suddenly smelled something burning, something that should never be burned around delicate human noses, whatever it was. Lutefisk is famous for smelling horrible. I've tried in the past to describe it to friends who were considering buying it just to try something new as a sort of fillet of Firestone marinated in essence of skunk, then cooked in the unique ambiance of an open tropical sewer. This was worse. Besides, there are no Norwegians around here. Or open sewers, aside from the City Counsel and the Chamber of Commerce, and those are on a more philosophical level than an olfactory one. Anyway, unable to find anything in the house, we decided it had to be something some snorfle-dead fool was burning in a burn barrel, so we called the Fire Marshall. When he showed up, after wandering around for a few minutes he stood about thirty feet back from the front door and shouted, "That's no fire! It's a skunk, and man, have you been hit!" I went outside and sure enough, diluted by enough air and distance, plus having to fight it's way upwind - surprisingly successfully, I might add - the base of that smell was unmistakably skunk, but it wasn't just regular skunk. Take the usual smell and add onion, garlic, a touch of rotten eggs and maybe a little ten day-old roadkill and that might come close. As it turns out, they have a really special smell for mating season, and that was it. Maybe it's an evolutionary development to make sure they don't get interrupted. I'm sure it works.
Ah, the skunk is out there! It completely bypassed the trap, having had to walk around it to get to the cat food, which I forgot to put out of reach (skunks don't climb or jump up, so if I put it up on the bench by the back door, it can't get to the food). Just to let me know it knew what I was up to, it upended the cat food and is now happily spreading it all over the back walkway, munching as it goes. Next it will go for a drink, standing in the big water bowl for reasons unknown, before upending that, ditto reasons. Now and then a skunk decides to come in through the back cat door in search of more food. Or maybe they're just feeling adventurous. Inside the house, in the spirit of born interior decorators, they like to move furniture and other things around. One skunk a few summers ago had a lovely time around 3:00 AM, loudly scraping the big plastic bowl on the linoleum floor as it steered the thing around looking for just the right spot. Having found it finally, now that the household was wide awake, it upended that on the divide of the living room carpet and the dining room floor, cursorily spreading kibble around on both.That job done, it headed for the water bowl, stood in it for bit, then wandered around to see what else it could relocate, leaving muddy little skunk prints all over to mark the trail, I assume. They're very serious about moving things around, too. An extra large skunk once managed to get the kitchen trash can into the middle of the dining room floor, then somehow got the rather large, homemade cat scratching-post and back-window lookout - it's a little over three feet high on a two inch thick, two and a half feet on a side, square wooden slab base - around two corners and almost into the living room, where it obviously thought the thing belonged.
The single most frustrated skunk I've ever seen, though, was frantically trying to push, pull or cuss an eighteen pound bag of cat kibble out through the back cat door, intending, I'm sure, to drag it across the yard and down into it's burrow under my workshop right across from the back door. (PO'ed skunks sound like an argument in Spanish blasted through athletic-type whistles and sped up, like the old vinyl thirty-three and third RPM records sounded when you accidentally played one on 78 RPM). If sheer determination could have accomplished it, that skunk would have succeeded, and my workshop would doubtless by now have a unique cat-kibble foundation. Our (at the time) twelve cats just stood there in awe and watched as their chow was dragged from the dining room and headed for the back door. Usually I can just tell a skunk to go on outside and wait and I'll bring food out for it. They generally just turn around, casually waddle on outside and wait on the back porch like tuxedoed gourmets awaiting a French waiter (okay, sometimes I drape a white dishcloth over one arm, but skunks are lousy tippers), but this one was having none of that! It wanted that whole bag, ownership had been transferred, nine-tenths of the law, done deal and all that, and there was nothing else to say. The stinker got the upper one third of that big bag stuffed out that little bitty cat door, too, but there it stuck. The poor skunk actually did a little dance of frustration between attacks on the bag; I felt sorry for it. For the skunk, not the bag. Well, my wife and I stood there in the bedroom door incredulously watching the whole performance, so I can hardly blame the cats for inaction. After a bit I took pity on the poor beastie and went around the house and opened the door from the outside to let it out. The door was instantly slammed in my face. My wife told me later the skunk saw the larger opening and tried to push the bag around to get it out the now-open door, slamming it shut. I finally had to block the door open with a cinderblock and go back around the house, in through the front door and sadly broke the news to that poor skunk. It took some convincing by me and a few threats on the skunk's part, but it finally gave in and left with one last, lingering look at the bag of kibble seemingly permanently stuck in the cat door as it went by. It had been a truly valiant, even heroic, effort. Some things, though doomed to failure from the beginning, are still uplifting and a lesson to the spirit in the attempt.The lesson I took from it was to make sure the food for the ferals and skunks stayed topped off at all times...
Once we started laughing, we couldn't stop for what felt like hours. We almost hurt ourselves laughing, and we both had the hiccups off and on for the rest of the night, which started us both laughing again every time, so that night hiccuped, giggled and chuckled it's way into a new day. Spooned together, we nodded off at last around dawn, exhausted, our stomachs sore, and no doubt smiling even in our sleep.
I really don't want to catch another feral cat tonight. I'd have to keep it overnight, and since the bait is food and they scarf it down pretty fast so they get as much as possible before having to fight for it, and since that food has to go somewhere, well... Let's just say that the last time one was an overnight guest here, I awoke having been dreaming that my bed was on a raft floating down one of the famous Paris sewers. As I woke up a bit more, I thought maybe someone had left a little gift on my pillow about a half inch under my nose. The carrier with the feral cat in it, a sweet-natured little orange/black/tan, long-haired calico, was in the back of the house - past the dining room, through the kitchen, in the far corner of the pantry/utility room in an enclosed (but ventilated) cat-carrier, and the smell was that bad. When I got back there, my respiratory system tried to close up shop in sheer self-defense à ‚¬" or attempted suicide. Sometimes I have this odd feeling there are still a few lost alveoli and assorted olfactory cells sitting around in a cheap motel room somewhere with palm trees outside, staring at their passports and waiting for their luggage to show up...
*Just tried to heat my coffee in the nuke and blew a circuit breaker (the breaker box is outside, and it's colder'n a porcelain outhouse seat in a blizzard out there). I was just going to sit, relax and play for a little while, but I'm almost afraid to pick up the guitar; it's a nice Martin I'd hate to lose. I had a twelve-string try to beat me to death once when the neck snapped just up from the brace that holds it onto the body. The twelve or sixteen hundred pounds or so of pressure from all those strings tuned to standard snatched the neck out of my left hand and whipped the headstock up so fast I didn't even have time to blink before it brained me squarely in the middle of my forehead while simultaneously stabbing the broken end into my left thigh, as the string that had snapped left a small cut on one hand and one on my face just under the left eye from the broken end acting as a whip. From there, it cracked me across the back of my hand like a nun with a two-by-four instead of a ruler, whacked me perfectly on the top of my right kneecap for good measure, then landed on my foot as I had dropped the whole former assembly before it could go for my throat. My best friend à ‚¬" at the time à ‚¬" just stared at me for a moment with her lower jaw almost in her lap, then wrapped her arms around her middle and slowly toppled over onto her side and curled up, laughing. The way Murphy seems to be winding up tonight, it makes me want to put on my old martial arts safety gear, helmet and mask, set up my most solid tent over the bed, bring along some good Scottish antifreeze, take the covers, crawl under the bed (it's a twin bed on a box stand with a storage space under it from the Fifth Wheel) with a hand gun and a baseball bat (for when the gun misfires) and write the rest of this day off as a total loss. Come to think of it, maybe I'll skip the hand gun.
Oh oh... there went the trap. *sigh* It's 9:00 PM on the button. Did I piss off an old Chinese recently or something..?
Ian MacLeod
October 22nd, 2009
Activist PRN, Nonprofit, Nonpartisan, 501(C)(3) Corporation.
http://painreliefnetwork.org/
Veteran, Disabled, Chronic Intractable Pain Patient, 26 years
Primum, non nocere!
Illegitimis non carborundum!
