Midnight Marauder

As a result of fairly miraculous financial circumstances, we are staying in Ocean Beach this summer.

Well, Cheri is "staying," while I commute back and forth to Las Vegas on the weekends.

We're not on vacation (see previous post regarding, "Getting It Right").

But it's an outright blessing.

The house we're renting is a classic, 1921 Southern California beach bungalow complete with all of the original windows, doorknobs and hardwood flooring.

It's a jewel.

All five hundred and twenty-one feet of it.

I've told you before about the marvelous, eclectic ambiance of Ocean Beach so I'll not repeat myself.  

What I haven't told you is that Ocean Beach has a rather infamous skunk!

I'm not kidding.

Whether it's one skunk, or an entire litter is open for discussion.

The reality is that said skunk makes an appearance at the most inopportune moments.

Like last night.

One-thirty AM.

I awoke from a most pleasant dream to a most unpleasant odor.

It was fetid, rank, and not a little bit nauseating!

The skunk was on the prowl.

The skulking OB skunk is notorious for filling the community resident's olfactory senses with a scent so foul as to make one believe that the portals of hell have opened and one is poised on the precipice between the living and the dead...and the dead are winning!

Hurrying to close each and every portal to the outside world, I collapsed back into bed hoping against hope that the midnight marauder would veer from its plotted course and savage someone else's nostrils.

Alas...it was not to be.

Seemingly, the dread creature camped out just below our bedroom window, savagely intruding upon our nocturnal slumber.

In the face of such blatant intrusion, I did what any rational, cognitive adult would've done in similar circumstances: I closed the window in fondest hopes that by ignoring the repulsive creature...it would go away.

I am nothing if not resourceful!