The skunkification of Shadow

  My in-laws are vacationing in Florida. I think I mentioned that before. Yesterday, I went over to their place with Shadow for an hour or so. I had to drop off their van (I had used it to drive them to the airport) and retrieve my car. I also had to do a few little things around the house for them, like feed and water the ducks, turn off the water in the house, etc. When I go over, my father-in-law likes me to hang around for a while, open the garage door, start a fire in the fireplace, make the place look lived in to people driving by.
  I left Shadow to wander around the property while I puttered. When I was ready to go, I couldn't find him. Oh, great, I thought. If I've allowed this dog to run away my wife is going to kill me. I started tromping around the approximately one acre lot whistling and calling. The little putz was nowhere to be found. Finally, as I approached the extreme back end of the property, I let out a particularly shrill whistle and Shadow's head popped up from out of some long grass about 200 yards into the field behind my in-laws' place.
  As soon as he saw me, he started off like a shot in my direction. To encourage him to keep coming, I started to run away from him, back towards the house. With a Border Collie, this is an almost guaranteed way of making sure he keeps coming to you. When I reached my car, I turned and sank into a crouch with my arms out to receive him. As he came barrelling into me I discovered, to my horror, as you may already have deduced, that he had been sprayed by a skunk.

Eeeeewwwww!!

  And I had to drive home with him sitting on the seat beside me. Possibly the most distasteful fifteen minutes of my life. Neither of the preceding two sentences are grammatically correct. One of them isn't even a sentence. But I digress.
  Needless to say, the planned activities for the rest of the day were immediately shelved in response to the sudden emergency that is a skunkified dog in desperate need of a bath.
  Now, if any of you have ever owned an animal that has been sprayed by a skunk, you have been through all this. Simply bathing him in a solution of water containing equal parts mango/papaya dog shampoo and baking soda, while it did manage to blunt the eyestinging sharpness of the odour somewhat, did not do the trick. Everybody has heard about tomato juice, but take my word for it; don't waste good tomato juice on bathing your pet. Use it to make Bloody Marys instead. When our cat was sprayed by a skunk a couple of years ago, we tried that. We bathed her twice in succession with tomato juice, and ended up with a smelly, pink cat. Tomato juice does not work.
  The other thing we discovered during our previous experience is that a wet animal smells exponentially worse than a dry one. If you think the stench of your skunkified animal is almost gone, don't give her another bath. Trust me, you don't want to be proven that wrong.
  Having, as I said before, merely blunted the offensiveness of the odour, I bestowed Shadow in his 'crate' and sallied forth to the pet supply store (I needed kitty litter anyway) to ask for advice. They sold me something called "skunk-off" (an inventive product name to be sure) and told me it was the best thing available.
  The instructions on the bottle said to mix the entire contents with two quarts of water and thoroughly saturate the animal with the resulting solution. Not wanting to simply dump a bucket of the stuff over him and risk missing a spot, I hit upon the plan of filling my wife's plant sprayer with the solution (yes, I washed it out first). That way I could target the specific areas of stinkiness.
  Picture, if you will: A man, a bathtub, a wet, smelly dog. The man clutches the squirming animal to his breast, struggling to hold him still while a ten year old boy sprays the poor thing in the face with a Windex bottle. The dog. He was spraying the dog. I ended up as wet as Shadow, and not having the benefit of skunk smell myself, I now bear the equal and opposite aroma of "skunk-off." Shadow? He just smells like wet dog again. Unless you go up and sniff really close to his face. Thankfully, everybody knows you never put your face up close to a dog.