Jenelle and I went camping this weekend.  While we were sitting at our campsite near the banks of the Clackamas River, we munched peacefully on s’mores until we heard a rustle in the bushes behind us.  We turned around and found a skunk checking us out.  My instinct told me to get a picture, but I restrained myself.  Fortunately, all three of us stayed calm, and nobody got stinky.  He went his way back into the bushes, and we went to bed.

When we got home the next day, we found that a problem we’ve had with our lawn had gotten worse.  Mysterious divots (i.e., holes in the grass) have appeared on our back lawn over the past few months.  The divots underwent a population explosion sometime between Thursday evening and Saturday afternoon, and the lawn looked horrible in some places.  A little research revealed that some small mammals (including skunks) dig holes like this in grass to get at grubs livings beneath the lawn.  (Or, there’s a horrible golfer who comes to our backyard to practice in the middle of the night.)  We haven’t decided how to deal with the skunk-grub problem yet.

By the way, after we got home from camping, we also learned that the striped skunks indigenous to these parts can shoot their stinky stuff 15 feet, and that this can cause blindness.  This means that we were much too close to that skunk. . . .