Welllll…I posted my Good. Morning on the football thing…I don’t do football but I do do Good Monrning! And Happy Anniversary to Cheryl and her husband! 💕
On my anniversary, my skunk shot. 🙂 Well, I didn’t get a skunk when I married my man, but I did finally get a photo of one! We were heading out (in the car) and I told my hubby there was a skunk down by the creek–he’d already hit the gas to get onto the main street, so he had to find a place to turn around, but he did. It was an overcast day, so I guess the fella decided it was a good day to be out and about during the day. This skunk was 20 or 30 yards from our door. The last skunk I saw, my husband-to-be was taking me to his parents’ house since I stayed with them when I visited him at his hometown. Two skunks were in the road, but on the other side of the line. We didn’t startle them. So this is the third skunk I’ve seen in Indiana, and my first where I could take a photo.
I was driving the only time I saw a skunk in Nashville. I had friends in the car with me–friends who’d come to visit from Chicago–and thought I saw a black cat about to step into the road, and didn’t want to hit it, and just about the time I was avoiding hitting it I realized it was actually a skunk and all the more reason to avoid it! I saw skunks from time to time growing up, since we camped and that is a way to see them, but the only other time I’ve seen them as an adult, I was with my “adopted grandma” in northern Arizona, and she and I had gone out for lunch to a restaurant with a huge picture window on top of a mountain, whose drawing card is a wagon outside the window in which they put hay, and mule deer and elk come to eat the hay. We only had cows of both species, first a few mule deer, then the elk came in and chased off the mule deer, even continuing to chase them for a little bit after they’d moved away from the hay. On the way home from that lunch, I told her that there were three skunks in someone’s front yard, playing, and she stopped (no traffic in that town) and we watched. A sweet memory. (Another time I was with her, my mom had asked me to stop by the property where we’d formerly lived–we took the mobile home off it after Dad died, and moved back down to the Phoenix area–and make sure it was tidy and ready to list it for sale. I picked up a scrap of wood, and in doing so exposed a little mouse of sone kind. Since I was wearing work gloves and since the rodent froze, I petted it with one glove and called her attention to it. She thought I should put the board back down, which I hadn’t planned to do (I’d planned to remove it as trash), but I think I did so. Yesterday would have been her 103rd birthday; she died while we were courting, and when I tried to call her at her nursing home, they told me only that she wasn’t available. But I sent her a wedding invitation, knowing she couldn’t come but I still had to invite her, and her daughter wrote and apologized for not letting me know she had died. Since she’d called me to let me know when her (my grandma’s husband, her own stepfather) had died, I was surprised she hadn’t let me know, but I also thought well, at least my courtship days weren’t marred by that grief. . . .
I just as happy not to see skunks. Or smell them for that matter. We once had five at the end of the driveway. They sometimes like to inhabit the culverts at the ends of driveways. They dig up the yard. They can spray when startled by a light suddenly going on. Other than that, they are great. 😉
When I think of the debate tonight what runs through my mind is a Sat. Night Live type skit of the mic suppressor turning the mics on and off as both candidates speak; like flipping radio channels and hearing sentences resembling Mad Lib ones. Imagine the entertainment value.
One rainy day in Washington, I led my cub scout meeting in the garage. I don’t remember what our craft was (I’m crafts-challenged, these things don’t stay with me), but I tossed some remainders into the trash can.
It began to rock.
I peered inside and there was a, um, busy skunk.
Slamming on the lid, I turned back to an eager group of eight-year-old cub scouts, who wanted to know what was in there.
I lifted the lid carefully and they gathered around.
Which only agitated the skunk’s, er, glands more.
After they left, I debated what to do. We lived in the country, but I didn’t want a skunk becoming too proprietary about my house.
My husband, of course, was out to sea. (Which was remarkable because at this point he was an Engineering Duty Officer who repaired submarines, not ride them).
The bachelor next door had a truck and he drove our . . . guest . . . further out into the country and after tossing rocks at the trash can so it would exit, saved the day.
Always looking for a learning opportunity, I was pleased to see an article in the next week’s Ranger Rick Magazine about spotted wood skunks–who don’t look like the Pepe LePew above.
Several months later, my husband jumped out of bed in the middle of the night and began flinging on the lights and running through the house.
I was pregnant with #4 and bewildered. “What are you doing?”
“Can’t you smell that? There’s a skunk in the house!”
I didn’t smell anything.
Until I did.
He ran downstairs, same thing, and then I heard the automatic garage door opener. Our bedroom was above the garage.
The cat ran in from the garage–smelling like a skunk.
Apparently, she’d gotten trapped in the garage and the skunk . . . went to town. She was actually wet with scent.
My husband gingerly picked her up and put her back in the garage for the night.
The next morning, our 11 year-old, whose room was opposite the garage, said the cat had been acting strangely the night before, desperate to get into the garage. So he let her in.
Voila.
Later, he told us when he got on the bus for school, someone said, “It smells like a skunk in here.”
“Oh, that must be me.”
Boys can be clueless at 11 . . . we moved away a year later. 🙂
Re skunks. Growing up, we had a campground in California (Ventura, I think) that we visited often when I was quite little. I don’t know that we ever went after I was 10 or 12, and I don’t know why we stopped going, but we probably went about once a year in my early years, as it was quite a familiar place. Several of my favorite childhood memories are from there, like the fact that if we drove in or out of the entrance around dusk, that took us past a small grassy field that would have several rabbits in it. There also were sunflowers growing somewhere around it, and they also grew near where my favorite brother worked, and I think those two associations of sunflowers combined to make me love them. In fourth grade we had a unit on growing things, and our teacher read off a whole list of our choices of plants to grow, and we each chose one. When she got to “sunflowers,” that was my choice. Several plants grew but only one survived to flower. (We grew stuff in pots at school for a while, and then took them home to transplant.) At the end of the growing season I pulled up the plant and then realized it had a few seeds–just three, since I pulled it up just as the seeds were starting. I saved those three seeds and grew sunflowers for several more years (until we moved away from Phoenix and into the desert).
I don’t specifically remember when I did or didn’t see skunks as a child, but we probably did see some at that campground. Skunks were definitely associated with that campground in my mind. In those days when we went camping, we took a very small trailer. It would have been my parents, one to three of my older brothers, and us three little ones. Well, that trailer had a bed in the rear that my parents would have used. And the dinette would fold down into another bed, probably actually intended for one person, but my younger brother and my next-to-me-in-age older brother would probably have slept in it together (they are six weeks short of being ten years apart). Then above the table was a loft that could be used for storage or could sleep one person, and there my sister and I slept. Since I was the less claustrophobic one, I slept in the back, with my face almost touching the ceiling. We were, thus, crammed to the gills and there was no room for any older brothers to sleep in the trailer too. So if any others came with us, they slept outside on cots. (We eventually bought a larger trailer that was self-contained, meaning it had a toilet and small shower, but by that time my brothers were all out of the house or at least old enough to decide whether or not to come with us. All moved out at 16 or 17, though I think the two youngest did occasionally camp with us even after they moved out. My second-oldest brother “moved out” by going to college in California before his December birthday in which he turned 17, so he wouldn’t have been able to camp with us after that, since he wasn’t living locally, but the two youngest of my older brothers stayed local for a while. The oldest had lost his leg, and wouldn’t have gone camping after that.)
My third-oldest brother has talked about sleeping outside at that campsite. He said the first night he lay outside, he saw a skunk crossing the campsite. I don’t know if he was outside alone, or if one or two other brothers were with him, but he was lying there and saw a skunk, and it frightened him. So he lay perfectly still as he hoped not to scare it. It ended up coming into the campsite and even at one point walking under the cot he was lying on. But it ignored him and he saw how beautiful it was. Every night after that, if the skunks came he liked seeing them, and he decided he wanted a pet skunk. (No, he never had one.)
Another time one of my parents, I think it was my mom, started to step outside the trailer and saw a skunk quite close. Startled, she stepped back into the trailer and slammed the door shut, and then she said oh no, she probably scared the skunk by slamming the door and it would probably spray. But those skunks were used to people, and maybe even used to people being jumpy around them, and it didn’t spray. But none of us went outside for an hour or so in case it was still there and in case it had sprayed.
Skunk stories, I’ve had dogs sprayed several times, they seemed to be hanging out in my backyard one summer. We occasionally see one on the even walk — we cross the street.
One night some years ago Tess and Cowboy managed to get out of my old side gate which had blown open. They were out most of the night from what I was able to piece together later.
My neighbor knocked on my door early and she had them with her, they willingly followed her home when she spotted them down the street and called them. They reeked of skunk and looked really tired — but still kind of happy. It was quite the night, apparently. Stories surfaced later about people seeing the two border collies chasing this or that cat, trotting around blocks away in the middle of the night …
I remember a trip I made with a friend. We stopped to camp at a KOA between here and coastal Virginia, and when we got up in the morning we could smell that a skunk had been on the premises. It did not spray there because the odor was not that strong, but it definitely left a bit of that Unforgettable fragrance. That’s probably the closest I have been to a skunk, and I did not even realize it when it was just outside our tent.
My neighbors’ labs were sprayed not too long ago in their backyard — the day after they’d been treated to the mobile dog groomer and were fresh and clean.
I feel for Kim in her last comment from yesterday’s prayer thread. It’s not so much the ‘noise,’ but the specific noise of this political climate we’re in.
But the noise itself can wear you down, when my mom’s sister/my aunt moved in with her after selling her house in Idaho, my mom told me the hardest part of it was that my aunt turned the TV on first thing in the morning and it stayed on all day long. My mom was retired by then so it was an irritant (though she was pretty active and had a couple volunteer gigs she went to).
Something about having the TV on during the day is annoying I think.
But in this 24-hour news climate with such a contentious political and election atmosphere it can easily create misery.
The most fun was trying to get the scent out of the cat the next morning. Her fur was WET from being sprayed so many times, I was 5 months pregnant and couldn’t get particularly close to the sink to scrub her.
Tomato juice, of course, left the kitchen looking like a murder scene.
And the cat still wasn’t happy.
We had potpourri in every room of the house for weeks afterward, and the windows wide open.
CNN is toxic. I can tell when my friend has been watching it. Her husband is a Democrat and he tells her not to watch it because he, as a psychiatrist, sees what it does to her.
I can’t even imagine watching the cable news shows all day long. I am at the point where I’m only very rarely watching them at all, some of the weekend panels they have on Fox are good and informative, but the nightly hash dished up on either CNN or Fox can really drive one batty at this stage.
I kind of doubt I’ll even watch the “debate” tonight.
It is tonight, right? Somehow I thought it was last night and I’d already missed it lol But since I didn’t see any news stories on it this morning, I guess it wasn’t last night after all.
Funny cat vs skunk story, michelle, but I’m sure it wasn’t fun living through that. Annie’s never been sprayed, I tend to think cats are smart about those things (while dogs are hard-wired to chase all critters smaller than they are); but of course your cat was trapped in the garage, an unwitting victim, poor thing.
And the scent does linger.
Re political climate, I listened to the morning devotion from Westminster Seminary this morning (on FB) which was about the Tower of Babel. Nothing new under the sun …
I met Mr. Cheryl 11 months ago when I was in Indiana. The first thing I did was ask him if, on behalf of Cheryl’s WV friends, I could hug him and thank him for making her so happy.
He’s tall, but I managed.
I really liked him.
Congratulations, Cheryl. It’s been a pleasure watching your life, romance, and marriage bloom.
Yesterday, one of Nightingale’s patients was yelling and pounding on a table that she wanted a jelly donut, over and over again. So Nightingale went to the kitchen, made a jelly sandwich, trimmed off the crust and cut the rest into a round shape, then sprinkled it with powdered sugar. The lady ate it and enjoyed it, thinking that she was eating a real donut. Then she started yelling that she wanted another donut. AND ham and eggs. 😀 (I don’t know if she got those.)
Nightingale says that being a long-term care nurse is like having 20 small children. (She said this with compassion and affection, not being mean.) They even get jealous of each other. One lady saw that her roommate was getting some extra attention the other day, so she was trying to make herself have a pretend fall, so that she could get some attention. Nightingale caught her at it before she could make herself slip off the bed.
I still remember the 90 year old woman complaining to me about another woman who was trying to steal her boyfriend. I just had to chuckle to myself. The job Nightingale has is not an easy one by any means.
I think I told the story before about our neighbor’s pet skunk, Alvin. He had been descented. He went missing one day. The neighbor boy and my brothers thought they spotted him in the ditch, so went to pick him up. It was not Alvin, however, which they quickly found out the hard way. Those were in the days where children wore play clothes, so my mom just had my dad help them bury those clothes out in the woods.
Just interviewed a source from a New Mexico horseback-trail ride with 100 other folks, He was sitting at the campfire. A lot of people I interview seem to have really interesting lives 🙂
Got the trash hauled out and the dogs fed. Guess I’ll check out the debate, apparently some more info came out today on the Biden story but i really don’t have time to deal with it on working days. So I’m in the dark on that one, but a conservative editor was g-chatting me all day about it. So I got some snippets.
I was hitch-hiking down the mountain to Tucson one evening. I saw a small animal approaching. It was a skunk. I walked back to my cabin and got a ride down the next morning.
AJ at 2:52: LOL, I did almost do that once! We had a black and white cat when I was growing up. One evening, around dusk, when I was walking across the lawn to go next door to my grandparents’ house to practice piano, I spied the kitty (I thought) hanging out near the morning glories trellis between our yards. At less than a foot away, I started bending down to pet her when I noticed a pointy face, not the familiar round face of our cat, looking at me.
Skunk! I pulled back my hand fast, and then turned s-l-o-w-l-y and walked back home, hoping not to freak it out and have it turn around and spray me.
That may have been one of the last times I attempted to go to Grandma & Grandpa’s to practice piano at night. 🙂
—
Prayer request updates, while I’m on this thread. 1) The other teacher I’d mentioned who contracted covid is recovering well and will be back to the studio on Monday. 2) I met 3-year-old prospective student tonight, and his whole family (Dad, Mom, little sister). It’s a go, and he starts on Monday!
I didn’t know ahead of time whether he was a “younger” three or an “older” three. I asked his parents tonight, and mom said to him, “Go ahead and tell her when your birthday is.”
He looked at me, eyes twinkling, a big grin on his face, and said, “October 18!”
He’s three years and four days old!!! He’s got quite good verbal skills, and I was happy to see that he can “cross the midline” with ease. He loves music and was willing to try everything I asked, except for singing a little solfege — he laughed when I sang, “so, mi.” That was right around the 30-minute mark of our meeting, and his attention span was about gone by then. Overall, though, he did quite well. The parents aren’t interested in making a little Mozart of him — I was glad of that! — but simply want a music experience for him outside of the home, to give him another outlet for expressing himself musically, which he clearly loves.
We are all looking forward to his official start next week. 🙂
Well, the weather cooperated beautifully for our anniversary, giving us perhaps the last 80-degree day of the year. We’re supposed to be in the sixties for the next week (wrapping up October), so this may well be the last butterfly day of the year. If so, it was a good one (by October standards). At least six species, probably more–the skippers can be tricky and we also have two nearly identical species of sulphurs–and quite a few individuals. I also got to watch ants taking their “nuptial flight,” which is always a fun sight and special on our anniversary.
We did get to a state park briefly this morning, but my husband ended up not feeling very well so we came home, and decided we’ll look for another day with good weather and “celebrate” late.
Wandering Views 
What happened to my coment?
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It works. Must have been something i did/didn’t do.
I said “Happy Anniversary Cheryl.
Good morning everyone else.
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Happy Anniversary to the Mr. and Mrs.💑 who said, “I do!” and have been doing life together with God’s blessings ever since. Have a great day, Cheryl!
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It’s another beautiful fall day here. I have a cup of Irish Breakfast tea to enjoy while I get into my Bible study. My online group is in Hosea now.
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Welllll…I posted my Good. Morning on the football thing…I don’t do football but I do do Good Monrning! And Happy Anniversary to Cheryl and her husband! 💕
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On my anniversary, my skunk shot. 🙂 Well, I didn’t get a skunk when I married my man, but I did finally get a photo of one! We were heading out (in the car) and I told my hubby there was a skunk down by the creek–he’d already hit the gas to get onto the main street, so he had to find a place to turn around, but he did. It was an overcast day, so I guess the fella decided it was a good day to be out and about during the day. This skunk was 20 or 30 yards from our door. The last skunk I saw, my husband-to-be was taking me to his parents’ house since I stayed with them when I visited him at his hometown. Two skunks were in the road, but on the other side of the line. We didn’t startle them. So this is the third skunk I’ve seen in Indiana, and my first where I could take a photo.
I was driving the only time I saw a skunk in Nashville. I had friends in the car with me–friends who’d come to visit from Chicago–and thought I saw a black cat about to step into the road, and didn’t want to hit it, and just about the time I was avoiding hitting it I realized it was actually a skunk and all the more reason to avoid it! I saw skunks from time to time growing up, since we camped and that is a way to see them, but the only other time I’ve seen them as an adult, I was with my “adopted grandma” in northern Arizona, and she and I had gone out for lunch to a restaurant with a huge picture window on top of a mountain, whose drawing card is a wagon outside the window in which they put hay, and mule deer and elk come to eat the hay. We only had cows of both species, first a few mule deer, then the elk came in and chased off the mule deer, even continuing to chase them for a little bit after they’d moved away from the hay. On the way home from that lunch, I told her that there were three skunks in someone’s front yard, playing, and she stopped (no traffic in that town) and we watched. A sweet memory. (Another time I was with her, my mom had asked me to stop by the property where we’d formerly lived–we took the mobile home off it after Dad died, and moved back down to the Phoenix area–and make sure it was tidy and ready to list it for sale. I picked up a scrap of wood, and in doing so exposed a little mouse of sone kind. Since I was wearing work gloves and since the rodent froze, I petted it with one glove and called her attention to it. She thought I should put the board back down, which I hadn’t planned to do (I’d planned to remove it as trash), but I think I did so. Yesterday would have been her 103rd birthday; she died while we were courting, and when I tried to call her at her nursing home, they told me only that she wasn’t available. But I sent her a wedding invitation, knowing she couldn’t come but I still had to invite her, and her daughter wrote and apologized for not letting me know she had died. Since she’d called me to let me know when her (my grandma’s husband, her own stepfather) had died, I was surprised she hadn’t let me know, but I also thought well, at least my courtship days weren’t marred by that grief. . . .
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Good morning.
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Here, kitty, kitty, kitty….
I just as happy not to see skunks. Or smell them for that matter. We once had five at the end of the driveway. They sometimes like to inhabit the culverts at the ends of driveways. They dig up the yard. They can spray when startled by a light suddenly going on. Other than that, they are great. 😉
Happy anniversary, Cheryl!
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When I think of the debate tonight what runs through my mind is a Sat. Night Live type skit of the mic suppressor turning the mics on and off as both candidates speak; like flipping radio channels and hearing sentences resembling Mad Lib ones. Imagine the entertainment value.
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So, are we up to skunk stories today?
One rainy day in Washington, I led my cub scout meeting in the garage. I don’t remember what our craft was (I’m crafts-challenged, these things don’t stay with me), but I tossed some remainders into the trash can.
It began to rock.
I peered inside and there was a, um, busy skunk.
Slamming on the lid, I turned back to an eager group of eight-year-old cub scouts, who wanted to know what was in there.
I lifted the lid carefully and they gathered around.
Which only agitated the skunk’s, er, glands more.
After they left, I debated what to do. We lived in the country, but I didn’t want a skunk becoming too proprietary about my house.
My husband, of course, was out to sea. (Which was remarkable because at this point he was an Engineering Duty Officer who repaired submarines, not ride them).
The bachelor next door had a truck and he drove our . . . guest . . . further out into the country and after tossing rocks at the trash can so it would exit, saved the day.
Always looking for a learning opportunity, I was pleased to see an article in the next week’s Ranger Rick Magazine about spotted wood skunks–who don’t look like the Pepe LePew above.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotted_skunk
My children got excited. “Oh, yeah! I’ve seen skunks like that coming out of our garage. They see us and stand on their heads.”
Your reaction to that bit of news?
As it turns out, according to Ranger Rick, that’s what they do before spraying.
Lesson learned.
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Several months later, my husband jumped out of bed in the middle of the night and began flinging on the lights and running through the house.
I was pregnant with #4 and bewildered. “What are you doing?”
“Can’t you smell that? There’s a skunk in the house!”
I didn’t smell anything.
Until I did.
He ran downstairs, same thing, and then I heard the automatic garage door opener. Our bedroom was above the garage.
The cat ran in from the garage–smelling like a skunk.
Apparently, she’d gotten trapped in the garage and the skunk . . . went to town. She was actually wet with scent.
My husband gingerly picked her up and put her back in the garage for the night.
The next morning, our 11 year-old, whose room was opposite the garage, said the cat had been acting strangely the night before, desperate to get into the garage. So he let her in.
Voila.
Later, he told us when he got on the bus for school, someone said, “It smells like a skunk in here.”
“Oh, that must be me.”
Boys can be clueless at 11 . . . we moved away a year later. 🙂
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And, as we backed out of the garage, me, as it turned out, within 45 minutes of delivering that baby, I smelled and thought I saw . . .
“Is that a skunk?”
“I took care of it. Don’t worry,” my now frantic husband zoomed down the driveway.
He told me later the skunks WERE back in the garage but he lied. He didn’t want me trying to solve another problem.
Which turned out to be the absolutely right decisions. It was a girl! Baby.
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Fun stories to hear as long as I don’t have to be there.
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I didn’t let my children watch television during the day (this, of course, was before computers), and at night, we only watched movies.
https://email.breakpoint.org/todays-breakpoint-social-media-influenced-or-influencers?
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Scary to even see a skunk photo! Brave photographer.
Cheryl, I posted a link late yesterday to a bird photo I think you’d enjoy seeing.
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Happy Anniversary, Cheryl and Husband!
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Janice, I did see that photo. Interesting.
Re skunks. Growing up, we had a campground in California (Ventura, I think) that we visited often when I was quite little. I don’t know that we ever went after I was 10 or 12, and I don’t know why we stopped going, but we probably went about once a year in my early years, as it was quite a familiar place. Several of my favorite childhood memories are from there, like the fact that if we drove in or out of the entrance around dusk, that took us past a small grassy field that would have several rabbits in it. There also were sunflowers growing somewhere around it, and they also grew near where my favorite brother worked, and I think those two associations of sunflowers combined to make me love them. In fourth grade we had a unit on growing things, and our teacher read off a whole list of our choices of plants to grow, and we each chose one. When she got to “sunflowers,” that was my choice. Several plants grew but only one survived to flower. (We grew stuff in pots at school for a while, and then took them home to transplant.) At the end of the growing season I pulled up the plant and then realized it had a few seeds–just three, since I pulled it up just as the seeds were starting. I saved those three seeds and grew sunflowers for several more years (until we moved away from Phoenix and into the desert).
I don’t specifically remember when I did or didn’t see skunks as a child, but we probably did see some at that campground. Skunks were definitely associated with that campground in my mind. In those days when we went camping, we took a very small trailer. It would have been my parents, one to three of my older brothers, and us three little ones. Well, that trailer had a bed in the rear that my parents would have used. And the dinette would fold down into another bed, probably actually intended for one person, but my younger brother and my next-to-me-in-age older brother would probably have slept in it together (they are six weeks short of being ten years apart). Then above the table was a loft that could be used for storage or could sleep one person, and there my sister and I slept. Since I was the less claustrophobic one, I slept in the back, with my face almost touching the ceiling. We were, thus, crammed to the gills and there was no room for any older brothers to sleep in the trailer too. So if any others came with us, they slept outside on cots. (We eventually bought a larger trailer that was self-contained, meaning it had a toilet and small shower, but by that time my brothers were all out of the house or at least old enough to decide whether or not to come with us. All moved out at 16 or 17, though I think the two youngest did occasionally camp with us even after they moved out. My second-oldest brother “moved out” by going to college in California before his December birthday in which he turned 17, so he wouldn’t have been able to camp with us after that, since he wasn’t living locally, but the two youngest of my older brothers stayed local for a while. The oldest had lost his leg, and wouldn’t have gone camping after that.)
My third-oldest brother has talked about sleeping outside at that campsite. He said the first night he lay outside, he saw a skunk crossing the campsite. I don’t know if he was outside alone, or if one or two other brothers were with him, but he was lying there and saw a skunk, and it frightened him. So he lay perfectly still as he hoped not to scare it. It ended up coming into the campsite and even at one point walking under the cot he was lying on. But it ignored him and he saw how beautiful it was. Every night after that, if the skunks came he liked seeing them, and he decided he wanted a pet skunk. (No, he never had one.)
Another time one of my parents, I think it was my mom, started to step outside the trailer and saw a skunk quite close. Startled, she stepped back into the trailer and slammed the door shut, and then she said oh no, she probably scared the skunk by slamming the door and it would probably spray. But those skunks were used to people, and maybe even used to people being jumpy around them, and it didn’t spray. But none of us went outside for an hour or so in case it was still there and in case it had sprayed.
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Happy anniversary Cheryl and Mir. Cheryl.
Skunk stories, I’ve had dogs sprayed several times, they seemed to be hanging out in my backyard one summer. We occasionally see one on the even walk — we cross the street.
One night some years ago Tess and Cowboy managed to get out of my old side gate which had blown open. They were out most of the night from what I was able to piece together later.
My neighbor knocked on my door early and she had them with her, they willingly followed her home when she spotted them down the street and called them. They reeked of skunk and looked really tired — but still kind of happy. It was quite the night, apparently. Stories surfaced later about people seeing the two border collies chasing this or that cat, trotting around blocks away in the middle of the night …
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Skunks have the best defense system.
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I remember a trip I made with a friend. We stopped to camp at a KOA between here and coastal Virginia, and when we got up in the morning we could smell that a skunk had been on the premises. It did not spray there because the odor was not that strong, but it definitely left a bit of that Unforgettable fragrance. That’s probably the closest I have been to a skunk, and I did not even realize it when it was just outside our tent.
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My neighbors’ labs were sprayed not too long ago in their backyard — the day after they’d been treated to the mobile dog groomer and were fresh and clean.
I feel for Kim in her last comment from yesterday’s prayer thread. It’s not so much the ‘noise,’ but the specific noise of this political climate we’re in.
But the noise itself can wear you down, when my mom’s sister/my aunt moved in with her after selling her house in Idaho, my mom told me the hardest part of it was that my aunt turned the TV on first thing in the morning and it stayed on all day long. My mom was retired by then so it was an irritant (though she was pretty active and had a couple volunteer gigs she went to).
Something about having the TV on during the day is annoying I think.
But in this 24-hour news climate with such a contentious political and election atmosphere it can easily create misery.
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The most fun was trying to get the scent out of the cat the next morning. Her fur was WET from being sprayed so many times, I was 5 months pregnant and couldn’t get particularly close to the sink to scrub her.
Tomato juice, of course, left the kitchen looking like a murder scene.
And the cat still wasn’t happy.
We had potpourri in every room of the house for weeks afterward, and the windows wide open.
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CNN is toxic. I can tell when my friend has been watching it. Her husband is a Democrat and he tells her not to watch it because he, as a psychiatrist, sees what it does to her.
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I can’t even imagine watching the cable news shows all day long. I am at the point where I’m only very rarely watching them at all, some of the weekend panels they have on Fox are good and informative, but the nightly hash dished up on either CNN or Fox can really drive one batty at this stage.
I kind of doubt I’ll even watch the “debate” tonight.
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It is tonight, right? Somehow I thought it was last night and I’d already missed it lol But since I didn’t see any news stories on it this morning, I guess it wasn’t last night after all.
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Funny cat vs skunk story, michelle, but I’m sure it wasn’t fun living through that. Annie’s never been sprayed, I tend to think cats are smart about those things (while dogs are hard-wired to chase all critters smaller than they are); but of course your cat was trapped in the garage, an unwitting victim, poor thing.
And the scent does linger.
Re political climate, I listened to the morning devotion from Westminster Seminary this morning (on FB) which was about the Tower of Babel. Nothing new under the sun …
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I thought the debate was last night and told my brother but then he found out it is tonight.
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Pet the fuzzy kitty! 🙂
I dare ya. 🙂
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I met Mr. Cheryl 11 months ago when I was in Indiana. The first thing I did was ask him if, on behalf of Cheryl’s WV friends, I could hug him and thank him for making her so happy.
He’s tall, but I managed.
I really liked him.
Congratulations, Cheryl. It’s been a pleasure watching your life, romance, and marriage bloom.
xoxoxo
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In other spouse news, I’ve also met Kim’s Mr. P.
No surprise, I liked him, too. 🙂
I’ve found the people I like tend to marry people I like. 🙂
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Yesterday, one of Nightingale’s patients was yelling and pounding on a table that she wanted a jelly donut, over and over again. So Nightingale went to the kitchen, made a jelly sandwich, trimmed off the crust and cut the rest into a round shape, then sprinkled it with powdered sugar. The lady ate it and enjoyed it, thinking that she was eating a real donut. Then she started yelling that she wanted another donut. AND ham and eggs. 😀 (I don’t know if she got those.)
Nightingale says that being a long-term care nurse is like having 20 small children. (She said this with compassion and affection, not being mean.) They even get jealous of each other. One lady saw that her roommate was getting some extra attention the other day, so she was trying to make herself have a pretend fall, so that she could get some attention. Nightingale caught her at it before she could make herself slip off the bed.
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I still remember the 90 year old woman complaining to me about another woman who was trying to steal her boyfriend. I just had to chuckle to myself. The job Nightingale has is not an easy one by any means.
I think I told the story before about our neighbor’s pet skunk, Alvin. He had been descented. He went missing one day. The neighbor boy and my brothers thought they spotted him in the ditch, so went to pick him up. It was not Alvin, however, which they quickly found out the hard way. Those were in the days where children wore play clothes, so my mom just had my dad help them bury those clothes out in the woods.
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Just interviewed a source from a New Mexico horseback-trail ride with 100 other folks, He was sitting at the campfire. A lot of people I interview seem to have really interesting lives 🙂
Got the trash hauled out and the dogs fed. Guess I’ll check out the debate, apparently some more info came out today on the Biden story but i really don’t have time to deal with it on working days. So I’m in the dark on that one, but a conservative editor was g-chatting me all day about it. So I got some snippets.
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I was hitch-hiking down the mountain to Tucson one evening. I saw a small animal approaching. It was a skunk. I walked back to my cabin and got a ride down the next morning.
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I think I would rather be on a trail ride lol
Or maybe not.
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Happy Anniversary, Cheryl and Mr. Sir. 🙂
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AJ at 2:52: LOL, I did almost do that once! We had a black and white cat when I was growing up. One evening, around dusk, when I was walking across the lawn to go next door to my grandparents’ house to practice piano, I spied the kitty (I thought) hanging out near the morning glories trellis between our yards. At less than a foot away, I started bending down to pet her when I noticed a pointy face, not the familiar round face of our cat, looking at me.
Skunk! I pulled back my hand fast, and then turned s-l-o-w-l-y and walked back home, hoping not to freak it out and have it turn around and spray me.
That may have been one of the last times I attempted to go to Grandma & Grandpa’s to practice piano at night. 🙂
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Prayer request updates, while I’m on this thread. 1) The other teacher I’d mentioned who contracted covid is recovering well and will be back to the studio on Monday. 2) I met 3-year-old prospective student tonight, and his whole family (Dad, Mom, little sister). It’s a go, and he starts on Monday!
I didn’t know ahead of time whether he was a “younger” three or an “older” three. I asked his parents tonight, and mom said to him, “Go ahead and tell her when your birthday is.”
He looked at me, eyes twinkling, a big grin on his face, and said, “October 18!”
He’s three years and four days old!!! He’s got quite good verbal skills, and I was happy to see that he can “cross the midline” with ease. He loves music and was willing to try everything I asked, except for singing a little solfege — he laughed when I sang, “so, mi.” That was right around the 30-minute mark of our meeting, and his attention span was about gone by then. Overall, though, he did quite well. The parents aren’t interested in making a little Mozart of him — I was glad of that! — but simply want a music experience for him outside of the home, to give him another outlet for expressing himself musically, which he clearly loves.
We are all looking forward to his official start next week. 🙂
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Well, the weather cooperated beautifully for our anniversary, giving us perhaps the last 80-degree day of the year. We’re supposed to be in the sixties for the next week (wrapping up October), so this may well be the last butterfly day of the year. If so, it was a good one (by October standards). At least six species, probably more–the skippers can be tricky and we also have two nearly identical species of sulphurs–and quite a few individuals. I also got to watch ants taking their “nuptial flight,” which is always a fun sight and special on our anniversary.
We did get to a state park briefly this morning, but my husband ended up not feeling very well so we came home, and decided we’ll look for another day with good weather and “celebrate” late.
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