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]