The weekend has come and gone, and the Good Food Festival is history including all the herbed egg salad we served on crackers.

Wish I could say the same about the skunk smell in our house! It is disappearing, but it is not gone completely.

Over the weekend while I was working at the GFF, Murray scrubbed and cleaned, did laundry, hung clothes and blankets outside, sprayed the couches and cushions with Fabreze, bathed Cocoa a few more times, cooked bacon and baked a frozen pie – anything to reduce the burnt rubber and garlic smell Cocoa brought into the house after his encounter with a skunk. (Hey, with all the cooking and cleaning going on in my absence, maybe this skunk incident wasn’t all bad!)

Probably what worked best to remove much of the offensive odour was the ozone air purifier Murray rented. It was so simple to use. Just plug in and let it do its thing (whatever that actually is……releasing ozone into the air and taking out the skunky stuff, I assume). It also wasn’t expensive – $30 and we had it from Saturday morning until this morning (Monday).

As for the coffee solution I mentioned in my last post, I think it helped a little. In addition to putting a dish of it in every room in the house, I also put some in my vehicle. There was no need to stop at a drive-thru over the weekend as my vehicle smelled like Tim Hortons.

It’s been relatively nice weather for the past few days so being able to open up the windows to let fresh air in helped a lot.

It would seem that skunks are an active breed, at least according to the number of traumatic tales you’ll find on the internet of people trying to rid their pets, homes and clothes of the obnoxious odour these critters can unleash. Should you need advice, or if you just want to prepare yourself now for such an encounter (while you’re not in panic mode ’cause you know it’s the kind of thing that will happen late at night or on a public holiday when all the stores are closed!), you’ll find lots of suggestions for removing skunk smell from your house online.

I find it interesting that many of these suggestions use something edible/consummable as a solution. Obviously there are uses for coffee, baking soda, vinegar, lemon juice (and no doubt other foods) beyond drinking or eating.