I've always been pragmatic when it came to issues of luck. I don't gamble, I've never owned a horseshoe or a rabbit's foot, and I can't recall ever stepping over the foul line on a baseball diamond. But last night, the dogs gave me a reason to thank my lucky stars.

I had sent Remy and Barrett outside to do their business, as is the norm in our house before bedtime. Moments later, I heard Remy's barking, just barely audible over the din of our air conditioner. This wasn't cause for any alarm, as Remy gets set off by just about any threatening sound outside our house: the neighbors in the garage, car doors slamming or the weekly fireworks at Mohegan Sun.

However, when I listened more closely, I was able to pick out two canine voices in the yard. Barrett rarely barks, so I knew something was up. At that moment, my wife walked in and said she smelled skunk. Quickly doing the arithmetic in my head (2 barking dogs + skunk odor) I came to a very troubling conclusion.

The last thing I wanted to be doing at that hour was bathing a dog after a skunk encounter, so I began to act a bit irrational. I first grabbed my Mini Maglite and tried to shine it out into the yard through the screen in the bathroom window. All this accomplished was to illuminate a small circle of screen. I sprinted out onto the back porch, grabbing a bigger flashlight, but forgetting to either take my socks off or put on some shoes. I skidded through the puddles on the wood deck and pointed the beam into the dark reaches of the yard.

Sure enough, the dogs had a skunk cornered behind a garbage can. Amazingly, they were keeping their distance, and both reacted almost immediately to our stern calls. We corralled them on the deck, where I could still smell skunk, but it didn't get any stronger when I leaned over them. I fetched Jen's flip flops for her and asked her to confirm. Neither of us could detect any smell worse than their usual dog funk.

How they managed not to get sprayed is something I'll never know, (along with how the skunk found its way inside our six-foot wood fence) but Jen and I were both counting ourselves lucky that we were going to bed rather than driving to the grocery store for tomato juice. Maybe I should have gone anyway and bought a lottery ticket.