What the Autumnal Equinox Brought Me!

NASA warned that Wednesday was a rare autumnal equinox around here and to watch out! The moon would appear inflated and there would  be a rare glow, with Jupiter hovering nearby.  So when I awoke for the third day with a raging sinus headache (or allergy?) I was not encouraged.

(I'm getting a CAT scan of my sinuses this morning). Jen came to clean, which cheered me, and I managed to paint and read a little, comforting myself that the second episode of Survivor would be on at 8pm and I could distract myself with pizza and silly women in bikinis, this series featuring the old versus the young, except that Survivor's opinion of old is 40, not 80. My practice is to bring Kodi in before dark, to avoid any night critters, but it was a hot night and he seemed so blissed out sprawled in the patio on the cool cement...so I decided to procrastinate until the first commercial.  Suddenly about 8:09 I heard a single bark.  I leaped to my feet. Then the odor struck me.  Skunk! Kodi was nowhere to be seen.  I armed myself with a spoonful of peanut butter, which usually attracts him. Leash and flashlight in the other hand, bedroom slippers flopping, head throbbing, I stumbled around the greenhouse, through the orchard, down the paths, calling, Kodi, Kodi.  No response.  The moon mocked me. The odor grew more intense.  I cursed the moon and all the planets, my headache, and especially my own inertia.  Finally I caught him down the front bank.  Of course now we both smelled like skunk.  I coaxed him inside to the laundry room, where on the top shelf of a cupboard I found an old bottle of "Skunk-Off".  It probably had not seen daylight in ten years.  At nine and a half, I think it was his first encounter with a skunk.  Memories of other days and other dogs saddened me.  I remembered forty some years ago when Lee and I came home from work to find our two Schnauzer puppies had played tug of war with a banana slug.  That was the worst! Meanwhile, here was I alone to deal with Kodi.  I doused and scrubbed for about twenty minutes.  Then I closed him in for the solution to do its work. Still the whole house reeked.   I got back to the tv just in time to see the ending.  Apparently the "young" lost the challenge, and one was being eliminated.  Meanwhile, this old woman was facing her own test of survival.