Last night was a bit of a curveball. I know this can't be true, but "disaster preparedness" must be the thing that is stressed the most by the Boy Scouts/Girl Scouts types of organizations these days. I mean, I know it's important...and a terrorist attack or tornado can happen at any time, I guess, but I'm hearing a lot more about potential disasters than I do knot-tying or cookie-selling. Ben was all about this stuff a few years ago and now Teenie, per her Honey Bees trope leader, scheduled a "disaster-slash-fire-slash-earthquake escape drill" for last night, "sometime after dinner"...(you should have seen the announcement flyer she made and hung on the refrigerator. It was a drawing of three houses side by side, on fire, with the slogan "better safe than sorry". Fear sells, right?)

So, she drew up plans and had routes and everything...what doors to use, etc. She decided Pam and Carl's should be our meeting place...she told everyone, one by one, what to do and when. She was all over it. And she made it real, too. Air horns, fake smoke, tipped over chairs...Bill helped spread the chaos to the three houses, but then we all jumped into action and "escaped" to Pam and Carl's. I have to say, Nicki was "the best" at escaping...Barb was not. She forgot to turn off the gas (which is what you're supposed to do if there's an earthquake) and didn't "stay low enough" during her exit. Teenie's only critique of me was that I wasted time getting to the meeting point by trying to close the door on my way out.

"Who cares about the stupid door, Margie...the house is on fire!" She hollered at me from Pam and Carl's. So, I left it open...jogged across the street with Nell and met up with the fam. (This "door left open" thing comes back into play, unfortunately...at least I think it does. I'll get to that in a minute.) We got our breakdowns from the Bee Boss and headed back home.

Fast-forward two hours.

Nell and the boys are down, I'm on the couch, Nicki had just gone to sleep after watching the last 45 minutes of The Sound of Music with me...I'm just flipping channels.

(One quick sidebar I have to share with you, Internet. So I'm flipping channels, like I said, and I get up to the movie channels after finding nothing to watch. I'm just flipping...not looking for anything, really...almost asleep, anyway. And I stop on this 80's movie that has these two guys in an alley about to fight...like, fist fight. Really, the reason I stopped on it is because one of the guys was the guy that plays "Keith the Southwood Carpenter" on Mr. Roger's Neighborhood...which the boys love and we watch all the time. Anyway, so in this movie, "Keith the Southwood Carpenter" refuses to put on this pair of sunglasses and for some reason that prompts a massive fight...and they fight for, like, 8 minutes...just a fist fight, nothing extravagant...nothing but one punches then the other guy punches...just a cheesy 80's fist fight in an alle...but they never leave the alley and the fight never, like, escalates into something bigger. It's nothing but a "you punch me/I punch you/you punch me/I punch you" fight, over and over and over. But I think it's the longest fight ever in a movie...EVER. It's HILARIOUSLY LONG. Seriously, I know it's random, but check it out on youtube (search: "they live fight scene" and tell me you don't start giggling after a minute or so).)

Anyway, so I watch that fight on TV and think my night is winding down because it's not gonna get any better than this. No, sir. I hear a rustling in kitchen...and not human rustling. Vermin rustling. I crept over to the kitchen, tip-toeing?waiting to see what I was hearing. I wish I hadn't it. It was a skunk. On my counter. On his back paws. In a cupboard. Eating out of a bag of pretzels.

I screamed. He scurried.

It could have been so much worse. He ran into the laundry room and I closed the door and locked him in there, but at that point I was already panting. Bill ran over in his boxers, all kinds of panicked from my really wussy scream. I told him the deal and he peeked into the laundry room. It was kinda funny; obviously I told him what was going on, but still, when he opened the door and saw the thing for the first time, I could see the energy and nervousness rush through him from his toes up. His eyes got all big.

"Yep, that's a skunk," he said, after closing the door...his hand still on the knob.

"Yeah," I said. "I know."

After getting Barb and Nicki involved in the pow-wow in the kitchen (and Ben), Bill decided it was probably a baby and said (why he thought he knew this, I don't know) that baby skunks don't really have their spraying skills down yet so he diced to roll the dice get physical with the cute/scary beast. Nicki was his number two and they were a pretty darn good team. They used a laundry basket and one of Nicki's dresses that was drying in there to trap the booger and quickly get it out of there. Bill swooped him up into the basket and Nicki threw the dress over the top and held it tight and they shimmied and shuffled til they got outside then Bill hurled the basket into the yard and the skunk went tumbling to freedom.

Now, Pepe Le Pew could have gotten in some other way, of course. He could have gotten in a million other ways. But come on. Isn't the wide-open front door a pretty decent possibility? Teenie didn't budge. She started counting on her fingers all the other ways the skunk might have gotten in, none of them that good, but she kept going and going. I gave up trying to convince her and finally just went to sleep. This morning, there was a typed up list of taped to my bathroom mirror of even more ways he could have gotten in. "Open Front Door" still hadn't made the cut... -- Edited by margini at 07/16/2008 12:47 PM PDT