To start another story of the glamorous life of a small business owner I must first give you a little background. For those of you who don’t know I own three dogs. I had started out with one, the nearly perfect dog. Simba is his name and as I said he is “nearly perfect”. My definition of perfect is, he doesn’t jump on people, and he only goes on furniture if he has been invited, he never, ever eats off counters or goes into the garbage and he walks quietly on his leash. He does have a few flaws though. He does believe that the word “come” means run as fast as you can away from whomever is yelling the word come. The worst flaw though is when he sees a skunk he believes that it is his purpose in life to take that varmit down. Simba has now been skunked 12 times.

My tale starts out with a sixteen-hour day. It was the last day before the show homes had to open and we had two houses left to set up and 4 houses to install draperies into. It was tense and I was exhausted. Mike made it home first and all I can think of is that he was so tired that his sense of smell had left and gone to sleep. I came home about an hour after him and drove into the garage when it hit me like tsunami wave. The smell came pounding through the small cracks of the car, driving through my nostril and taking my breath away. I thought, “oh no a skunk is in the garage looking for garbage” I was going to have to make a run for it. As I turned the handle of the house door I let my breath out ready to inhale the fresh air of my clean house. I breathed in and started to gag. It was worse in the house than in the garage. I started yelling for Mike, “What happened did the skunk get in the house?” Mike appeared bleary eyed at the top of the stairs and said,” what are you talking about?” For the first time that day I was speechless. Then a very sleepy and sheepish looking Simba came around the corner and the air became even fouler. At that point Mike’s face went green, “Oh, he groaned I don’t know how I didn’t smell that before.” Somehow Simba had managed to get himself skunked inside a fenced yard. It was too late Simba had managed to stink up the entire house. Poor Mike and Simba were sent packing outside while I lit every Lamp Berger I owned. An hour later the house smelt beautiful and I allowed both Mike and Simba back into the house.

The moral of the story always have a Lampe Berger on hand you just don’t know when you will be attacked by the perfect storm.