Dear Ferret Folks-

The other morning I got up and let the ferrets out of their cage for
morning romp. I scooped up Ping (Puma does not like to be cuddled) and
sat in front of the computer, tucking him into the front of my red
velveteen bathrobe. He likes to wake up there, doing his shaking and
stretching thing for a while before he decides to set off and explore.
I started with my e-mail, and Ping yawned, sleepily. I remember
thinking "GADS, his breath is awful." After a few minutes he made his
way to the floor and there was still this awful *smell*. I mean, a
really bad smell. Like something dead.

As I was thinking this my gaze happened to fall onon the dog, the Noble
Allis Chompers, who was in obvious Denial Mode. Her Denial Mode covers
a number of situations, such as "I deny that you are about to order me
to get off of the bed...I can't hear you...La-la-la can't hear you."
In this case it was "I deny that I found something hideous to roll in
outside this morning when you let me out to pee. You can't smell a
thing."

I smelled something, though. It was an oily, soft smell. Something
bad, something long dead. A close examination revealed that the back
of her neck was stiff with it, whatever it was. The fur was rucked up
in greasy spikes, like a teenaged boy who has just discovered styling
gel and, as a result, he leaves the house every morning looking as if
a cat has just groomed his wet hair with its tounge. It's not a good
look. Especially when you use a decaying animal instead of Aussie
Scrunch, although I suppose anything is possible these days in the
world of adolescent fashion If Paris Hilton thought she could get
attention by rolling in a suppurating groundhog...well...she might
start a trend and the darn things would sell for $3500 a piece in
Tokyo inside of a week. Within a year, they'd be extinct in the wild.
But I digress....

In any event, no amount of canine denial was able to stave off the
inevitable, the dreaded *bath*. I hate bathing Allis about as much as
she hates being bathed. As an act of passive aggression, she always
sheds as much of her dampened black fur all over the bathroom as she
can. On the floor, partway up the walls, all over the tub and shower
enclosure of course, and especially all over the white ceramic toilet
where it sticks like glue and makes your bathroom look like you invite
hairy homeless people in to use it on a daily basis. She also *shakes*
while in the tub, and directly after the bath, dampening me in a
hygenically unacceptable fashion. Bathing Allis means bathing the dog,
getting sopping wet, getting down on my hands and knees and cleaning
the bathroom floor and fixtures, then bathing *myself*. All because an
animal supposedly blessed with an exquisite sense of smell rolled in
something from an episode of "Quincy, Medical Examiner."

I sighed deeply and ordered Allis into the bathroom. She tried Harder
Denial, then Hardest Denial, but I was not having it. I tested the
water for temperature and started to fill the tub. Allis, trapped in
the bathroom with me and her truly *incredible* ODOR in the confines of
the small, increasingly humid bathroom Power Sulked. I was not having
it. The smell permeated all of the clean towles, my clean hair, every
roll of toilet paper, and her black hair started to fall out. Just in a
sort of a test pattern, she was only warming up. Ping and Puma began to
scratch madly at the base of the bathroom door. I shrieked something
hard in ancestral ape language, some clipped chattering primate curse
that had originated on the African savannah millions of years ago, and
the scratching stopped abruptly.

I sighed deeply once more and reached for my dog, who was trying very
hard to be invisible. I wasn't having it.....

End Part One
Alexandra in MA

[Posted in FML 5488]