Airing Out After Midnight

It was just after midnight, I was inside my ground-level apartment, writing my last blog post, when I noticed in the air, an intense, petroleum-like smell. My slider door was open and I thought the smell was coming from outside. It was rapidly becoming highly unbearable to breath, so I closed the slider and vacated, outside into fresh air.

I found the origin of the smell coming from the darkness of the bushes beside my patio. The patio light was on, back-lighting the brush. I stared for while, then started to notice in the brush, what looked like a strange, vertical fir branch. I stepped toward this fir branch, when it suddenly charged at me, postured like a wild bull, emerging onto the lawn, revealing it was an angry skunk, making highly-aggressive eye contact at me. I immediately retreated into the building, and at the same time, hated thinking that I was letting it know it could push me around. I was worried it would stay...

I returned outside, looked around for rocks, didn't find any, and found one pine cone. I returned to the skunk's last location, threw the pine cone and saw there was no movement. So I assumed it left, then spent the next two hours airing out my apartment, to a point where I could tolerate it, then wrote this post :-)