Spring has sprung, Pepe le Pew style!

All those who know me know I prefer warm weather and really look forward to spring. Well, we had a little, itsy-bitsy warm up of about a day and a half and that was enough, apparently, to get ole Pepe le Pew stirring and marking his territory.

Richard and I were sitting on the sofa yesterday doing computer stuff (that's a whole other posting - I was infected with a trojan horse!) when we started smelling Mr. le Pew. We thought it was coming from outside, of course, but the smell was getting stronger and stronger. We have a wooden porch in the front that we've often thought could be housing skunks underneath. (We had a mom and 4 babies hanging around most of last summer.) After stepping outside and trying to find the culprit just to have an answer as to where this was coming from we decided to check out our basement. WOW! We were blown away by the powerful stench. I started getting a headache immediately and the cat (why she would choose to be down there is anyone's guess) threw up. The smell was strongest toward the front of the house so we checked all around and up in the ceiling rafters but couldn't find anything.

After having the Consumers Energy guy out just to make sure it wasn't a gas smell (when we went into the basement the smell was a combination of skunk and rubber leading us to believe that maybe it wasn't a skunk, maybe it was either gas or an electrical burning problem) Richard cut a hole in the wood porch so that we could look under to see if the skunk, possibly dead, was under there. But - nothing. We found nothing.

It's getting better but the smell still lingers. We had to have our bedroom window open last night because the smell made it upstairs and made it hard to fall asleep.

The nice thing about all this was waking up to the sounds of the morning with the window open and the sweet smell of the fresh air. It made me happy to know that spring is only a month away. I love sleeping with the windows open and listening to life outside. Especially when the trains go by...

Has anyone else had any dealings with skunks yet this year? Anyone know of a skunk deterrent that we might think of using this year? I don't want these things hanging around our house again.