(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!

The Week of Smelling Badly

 Every where we turned last week, things stunk. Bob bought a sweater at a second hand store; a nice blue color, in good shape. But when he brought it home and washed it, it smelled like someone's terribly clinging cologne. It seems the washing re-activated the smell. He hung it up in the down stairs bathroom to dry and the whole downstairs started to smell. Bob moved it outside, to the clothes line in the fresh air.
The sweater has been joined by a used LL Bean jacket that Bob bought at another second hand store. This one smelled heavily of some sort of commercial detergent or sanitizer that they used. Bob hung it outside and standing downwind, you could still detect it. Pretty powerful stuff! It should also be mentioned that a helpful posting on the Internet suggested that clothes inhabited by a persistent smell be spritzed with vodka (!) so Bob hastened to our local package store and has doused his sweater and jacket in an invigorating cocktail. 
It therefore seems appropriate that a skunk visited on Friday morning. That temporarily erased the smell of the clothing but it was not an improvement.The skunk was probably drawn to the happy hour featuring vodka-drenched outerwear.
Also this week, we had an unfortunate experience in the check out line on Wednesday when a woman in front of us (who my mother would have described as having "a big behind") let loose with a very ripe episode of flatulence. (Hey! I'm being polite here.) We were all nicely tucked up next to her, trapped between impulse buy Slim Jims and trashy tabloids. No where to run! And wouldn't you know, we met up with her again at the bakery.
If this weren't enough for one week, we purchased balloons (pictured above) to decorate for my sister Beatrice's birthday. We're so glad we selected the fun polka dot ones because the minute I opened the package, the house was immediately filled with a dreadful petroleum reek. An hour after tying them in a festive fashion around the living room, we banished them to the outdoors. You could still see them from inside the house but we weren't in danger of being poisoned.