Lutz, FL

Crisis #n+1: Tuesday (the 22nd) morning Lew was walking Smokey and noticed that the fur on his posterior was smeared with feces. So when he got Smokey back inside and up on the bed he looked more closely and discovered an ominous situation -- the feces were diarrheal, bile stained, permeated the perianal fur and the base of the tail and had started to dry out on the edges. And the skin under the contaminated fur was grossly inflamed by the alkaline enzyme-laden fluid.

Clearly a bit of an emergency. So Lew spent most of the remainder of the day trimming the contaminated fur away strand by strand with blunt-tipped surgical scissors, alternating with soaking the inflamed skin. Not surprisingly, Smokey objected to this manipulation and wriggled like the proverbial worm. So we went to bed with a prayer that we had caught the situation quickly enough to avoid complicating his recovery from the surgery. And as we went to bed, the rain started, slowly.

An impressive storm battered the Airstream throughout the night. Next morning (Wednesday the 23rd) we found a bucket that Lew had placed behind the Airstream had floated about four feet down the driveway!

We apprehensively checked Smokey's inflammed tissues, and Lew thought he saw significant resolution of the inflammation. So we watched him carefully as we tried to conduct another housekeeping day -- washing our accumulated soiled clothes and bedding, as well as our dirty sweaty bodies. After Lew ate another supper with Scott's family while Bobbi dogsat (Lew did bring her her supper) he sat down next to Smokey to rip CD's, while Bobbi continued her obsessional correspondance with mycolts.net.