Bill Roper's Journal

So I need to tell tonight's story. The trick is knowing how to begin.

It was a dark and stormy night. Well, it was dark anyway, but the storms had passed and we were now on the cool side of the front.

Happily, I used to work in a sulfur lab. This is true, but will only give a hint to the extremely wary who also have worked in chemistry.

I wanted custard. This is true and probably as good a place as any to start.

You see, school is opening next week and there is a meet-and-greet for the students joining the chorus tomorrow morning at 9 AM. Those students include both K and J, but J has a dentist appointment of some standing at that time, so she can't attend. I suggested, therefore, that K might go and bring back information for the benefit of both, but apparently she had failed to RSVP for the event and greatly preferred not to just show up at this late date.

I had thought to try to bribe K with the offer of custard, but clearly that wasn't going to work.

I still wanted custard. (This was originally prompted by a message from Andy's that offered double loyalty points for purchases today.) So eventually, I determined that K and I were the only ones who wanted custard and that we might as well just pack up and go. Ruby wanted to go out so K ran by and let her out into the back yard to take care of her evening ablutions as we headed out the door.

About the time that we got to the intersection of Mt. Prospect and Rand, the phone rang. It was Julie who I figured had decided to recant her decision to not have us bring her back some custard.

I was wrong.

"SKUNK!" This was followed with a lot of mostly coherent babbling about how Ruby had managed to get skunked in the face, possibly in the mouth, and how it smelled really, *really* bad. We established that Julie did not want any custard (still), but that Gretchen was really interested in having some anti-skunk bath for the dog once we were done getting our custard which Julie advised that we should really, *really* consume before we got home.

So after picking up the custard, we headed down to the Jewel. I went in and grabbed a couple of bottles of hydrogen peroxide, a fresh box of baking soda, two cans of Campbell's Old Fashioned Tomato Rice soup, and the large bottle of Cardini's Original Caesar dressing. The latter two items were not part of the recipe for skunk juice, but they are items that I can only get at Jewel, so as long as I was there...

I finished my malt about the time we rolled into the driveway, grabbed the groceries, and went in to prepare a bucket of skunk juice. I then handed this to Gretchen, who was waiting in the downstairs bathroom with the very stinky dog. Several minutes later, Gretchen had bathed all of the surfaces of Ruby the Dog that seemed to have suffered from the skunk, and we turned her loose.

Gretchen changed the paper in the kennel before we put Ruby in for the night, since she had been rubbing her face on the paper there right after coming in. While this was going on, Gretchen suggested that I could, in my retirement (someday), create a web page devoted to the North American Potato Hound. Like many breeds that are bred to hunt specific prey, so is the North American Potato Hound trained to hunt wild skunks. I observed that this is how the breed got its name, because if you are going to hunt skunks more than once, you have to be about as dumb as a potato.

I am hoping that Ruby, actually being a relatively bright dog, might remember that it is a bad idea to hunt the smelly squirrels at night.

I am, of course, an incurable optimist.