It's late. Don't ask.

My nose is pathetic. Seriously. I can't smell much of anything.* I don't know if it's from having two smoking parents, each with smoking SO's growing up, or some kind of sinus problem, or something hereditary. Once Amelia gets her service dog, I'm thinking of applying for a smelling nose dog.** It could alert me when there are cookies baking, when the flowers are blooming, or when a diaper needs changing. ***

* Is there a name for that. I mean if you can't hear, your deaf. If you can't see, your blind. What if you can't smell?

** They do have those, right?

*** No, it's not a clever ploy. Well, at least not usually.

I don't know how many times Lori has said "Can't you smell that?!" Then I sniff purposefully and go, "Oh, yeah I guess you're right," even though sometimes I'm just faking.

So how is it that my nose is totally locked in on skunk smell?

Wait. Let me back up.

We had a skunk living in our barn. Then the barn cat, Kiki, chased it off. Not until she got sprayed several times, but still.* Anyway, so after the skunk relocated, a possum** moved in. Kiki apparently couldn't persuade the possum to leave, and so she adopted our garage as a temporary home base. I wouldn't have minded all this, except that this possum was almost as fearless as the skunk, a much better climber, and it could eat more chicken feed in one night than our 17 chickens eat in four or five days. Plus it was stealing whatever few eggs the chickens were laying.

* I'll never forget the time I was in the barn, standing on top of a wooden pallet, when I saw Kiki chase the skunk into the barn. The skunk hid under the pallet I was standing on. Then the cat proceeds to start batting at the tufts of skunk fur sticking out between the slats right at my feet. How I didn't get sprayed, I'll never know.

** Apparently what we have is technically an "opossum" rather than a possum. Yeah whatever, Wikipedia.

So after weeks of trying, I finally trapped the possum.* (E5 was pretty taken with the giant rat tail, the beedy eyes, and the sharp teeth.) We relocated him to a new home "down by the river," a couple miles away, to get fat on corn and soybeans for the rest of his days. Either that or to get chewed up and spit out by a giant combine harvester. Hard to say.

* Possum shit smells terrible, by the way. Even for me.

But for some reason, the vacancy sign in the barn hasn't been noticed by the skunk or the cat. They're now battling over the rights to our garage. Our attached garage.

Being a newer house, we've got one of those "open" floor plans. Living room, dining area, and kitchen, all in one big open space. The living room shares a wall with the garage, and the door into the garage is right off the eating space. So when a skunk sprays in the garage, you know it.

We've experienced this twice (so far) this week.

In case you've not been up-close-and-personal with skunk smell, let me borrow some words from Chris Martenson:

Now, skunk spray doesn’t have just one smell, it has three. There’s the not entirely unpleasant smell you get from a distance (aka “classic skunk”), there’s the similar but stronger and physically disturbing smell you get up close (aka “my last three dogs”) and then there’s the smell that wafted through our open bedroom window and set off our fire alarm at 3:00 a.m. last August (aka “skunk-to-the-third”).

So sitting in the living room, you first get that earthy, fermented, beer / cabbage smell, followed shortly thereafter by the same smell only more intense, with a bouquet of scorched rubber.

But open the garage door, and well... imagine if a tire fire took a giant crap on a dead skunk.

And here's the problem: No matter where I go in the house, I can smell it. Lori says she's not even noticing it at this point. I can't shake it. It will haunt my dreams.

No sugar plum fairies for me.

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