You Smell WHAT?

I can honestly say I am pretty close--in human terms--to a bloodhound, when it comes to being able to smell things. Okay, a bit of and exaggeration, but I DO have a great sense of smell. Relatively speaking, of course. It is NEVER great to be able to smell well when there are people around who haven't bathed since Methuselah was a baby--and I seem to have those types around way too often.

One day, I smelled a gas leak. Not a good feeling to have when natural gas is your main source of energy. Of course, K was at work, so I had to take care of calling the gas company and having them send someone out to do a check for any leaks. The guy spent quite a bit of time in the basement, but found nothing wrong--which WAS a good thing, for sure. Still, after he left, I continued to smell 'gas.' Now I will digress a little bit. Our garbage is collected only once a week--but I put up a bag of garbage halfway through the week. This means we have to store the bag somewhere--and for us, this is in the basement. With the amount of critters that live in and around our yard, we can't put garbage outside, even in cans. Between the raccoons and bears--not to mention the roaming dogs--SOMETHING would get into the can if it was full. And I'm not about to begin cleaning up our yard every week. So anyway, the gas smell. After searching the basement, I finally realized just what it was that I was smelling: the turkey carcass that was in the garbage. Thank goodness we were never charged for the guy to come to the house, cause I NEVER would have lived that one down.

Many nights during the spring and fall--not so much during the winter--I will run around the house looking for what is burning, cause I smell fire. It is really beginning to annoy K, because all I'm smelling is a wood fire from one of our neighbor's. The smoke/smell travels down one of our chimneys or through the cracks and crevices that an old house such as ours has, but it makes me crazy every time I smell it. But I will continue looking for what is burning whenever I smell the smoke.

Of course, I'm always smelling different things in the house. There are times I am sure I smell urine--either animal or human--but can't find a source. Again, with a house as old as ours, I just MIGHT be smelling it. When the humidity level and temperatures soar, the smells just pour out of the wood--or so I think. K doesn't agree with me, as he never smells the things I do. It took him at least a full day before he smelled the dead mouse that we had trapped in the pantry--a time when I had to endure the odor all by myself. He also can't smell the garbage can when it gets ripe--that is until it is on the verge of sprouting maggots. Is it a man-thing or just him? I really do believe that men don't have the sense of smell that we women do.

The other night, my sense of smell, once again, was in overdrive. We were at the hockey game and the first thing that hit me was the smell of stale beer and cigarettes coming from the old man a couple of feet away. As if THAT wasn't enough, someone close was wearing a very sweet-smelling cologne. It was one of those gag-producing, sweet colognes--and thankfully I would just get a whiff now and again. Top all of that off with the smells of deep-fried foods from the concession stand and my olfactory nerves were jumping like crazy. My stomach and head were jumping, too--it was NOT a good combination for feeling very well. The only saving grace was that the old man never came back for the third period, so I didn't have him to smell anymore.

The smells around me were so gag-producing the other night, that I was hoping to be able to smell the players on the ice. Some people might think that all I'm smelling is the refrigerant used for making the ice, but I beg to differ. Sometime around the middle of the second period and on into the third, I DO smell the players. It isn't a sustained smell, just a small odor as they are skating by. And why shouldn't I be able to smell them? We are no more than maybe 75 feet from the ice, at any one time there are 15 young men skating back and forth, and they are sweating to the point where they can lose 10 pounds in a game. With the nose that I have, it isn't a wonder that I catch a whiff. And that is all the more reason I am happy that I never have been in a locker room--and probably never will be.