(Another) Week of Smelling Badly

That should scare you, a couple of days past Halloween! Just Lil' Robin the Good, rolling around exposing her teeth. And as frequently happens on my blog, the picture has NOTHING to do with the post. (I simply could not locate anything that smelled badly...)
This Wednesday, I was thrilled/relieved/ecstatic that I had NOTHING that I was required to do: no deadlines for submissions, no WTF merchandise to prepare (although I am receiving more orders!), no where I had to be. In short I had the day to myself and I decided to (finally) spend the day with Robin and plant the white daffodil bulbs I had ordered.
The day was perfect; warm (really warm), sunny (finally) and delightful. I gathered tools and dog and headed down to my "spring garden" area. As I wheeled the wheel barrow, I couldn't help but notice that one side of the yard presented the distinct aroma of chicken soup. Someone was obviously cooking. It wasn't the worst smell, just not what I expected.
But as I began cheerfully excavating rocks (lots of them) and inserting my first bulb, the atmosphere changed from chicken noodle to asphalt. The road crew had decided that today was the right day to pave our section of the road and I had to be party to it. Soon, further scents drifted over from our neighbor's house in the form of laundry softener sheets. I had anticipated the autumnal smells of fallen leaves and maybe a bit of apple cider but instead I got petroleum and artificial floral. Yeech.

This weekend, Bob and I are driving to Vermont to retrieve his sculpture that has been in a show all summer. In preparation for our voyage, Bob decided to apply a liquid metal patch to our truck's manifold which has a crack. (No danger in driving it, but it was getting loud.) As we are down to one vehicle, I have been driving the truck to work. About three miles up the road this morning, I became aware of a pungent, sulfur/eggy smell. The source was manifestly the patch, burning off but boy did it stink! I rolled down both windows, opened the back slider and tried to breath minimally. I have a forty minute commute to work.
As luck would have it, I wound up behind a school bus that was burning oil. The combined odor was something else and I was gagging by the time I arrived at work. There, I knew something was up because the front door was ajar. It has been unseasonably warm but it turns out that several pieces of furniture (and maybe a rug or two) that had come to the auction house smelled of cat piss and my co-workers were attempting to air the building out.
But I did ultimately get that pumpkin spice/cinnamon latte/apple cider autumn smell I had sought. There is a leak somewhere in the wall behind the bathroom at work and to mask the smell, our general manager had plugged in one of those peculiar room fresheners that get stuck in wall sockets. (Who thinks up this stuff??!) Truly this week, my world stinks!