Thanks Jill, There is one thing about these experiences. They are so intense that you don't soon forget them. It is one thing to smell a skunk near by in the neighborhood. It is a whole different smell and experience when you ARE AT GROUND ZERO. I might not have remembered so well if we hadn't had the incident in our basement window well. One of the worse things there was that one of the pieces of glass had a crack in it and it was a really hot time of year here in Chicago. The AC was running and the main unit for our AC/Furnace was in the basement. It was only a matter of minutes before the smell was through the entire house. It got sucked in through the AC and blown out all the vents in the house.

If this should ever happen to anyone else, first thing, turn of AC or Heat. Close all doors and windows.

After the same thing happened a year later, almost to the day, the Animal Control Officer hadn't been gone for 5 minutes before I was in the car on the way to Home Depot. I picked up covers for all of our window wells. About $150 I think. but well worth it.

I don't know if there is something special about this time of year but all of our problems have happened in about August to September. Odd thing is that Sunday night when pulling in our driveway I thought I saw what looked like a hat in the middle of the street. It was very dark, about midnight. Just then I saw the hat run accross the front lawn and then caught the white stripe down it's back.

One other word of advice that we got from animal control. The warden had been getting many complaints around our area about people with torn up lawns. There were large patches that were literally torn up and dug down into the dry dirt. He did a walk around our yard during last years incident and made note of all the dead grass and scratching under the bird feeder. He pointed out that there are grubs that live under the turf. If your grass has large dead spots, is dry or unhealthy it may be a sign that these grubs are eating the roots to your lawn. The grubs feed on unhealthy lawns, The Skunks feed on those grubs, thus the tearing apart of the lawn and scratching of the turf. If you lawn is sick than do something to revitalize it and kill any grubs and such that might attract skunks to your yard. Keep your lawn healthy. One suggestion that we got from Joe, (The Animal Control Officer) was to spray our lawn with dish soap. Joy or such. Don't know what it does but it supposedly helps keep your lawn healthy.

Especially if you have animals in your yard you would want to do everything you can to keep the little wild critters away.