Smell ya later

**Angry Gnome and Kelly Goodlad! You've been linked (hope you don't mind!)...**

Last night, Corn and I woke in the middle of the night to a sudden bang noise. Corn said it was Flea getting spooked (which she does, oh - at least 5000 times a day). Last night, she opted not to come sleep in the crate beside my bed. Instead, she stayed rolled in a tight little ball on the couch - snuggled in a warm throw. I suspect what she did was come into the room in the middle of the night, tried to get into the crate and got spooked (maybe she forgot Chachi was already in there?). Corn said after the bang noise, he heard her little nails scurrying out of the bedroom and back into the living room. Either way, it woke us up. And once we were awake:

We immediately noticed the smell. SKUNK! And so thick in the air, I thought for sure the thing was in the apartment. The odour was just a few degrees shy of chokingly bad. I actually got out of bed to check around (totally lame since we live on the 2nd floor). No vermin. But the smell was insane.

This is the third time in as many months that I have awoken in the middle of the night to a vivid smell - and each time, the smell was DISTINCTLY different! You know how every building (and especially apartment buildings) has a smell? Not even necessarily unpleasant...just there.

Well, our apartment building has a 'smell'. It's not food or bodies or human. It's kind of vegetative. And it changes. Sometimes, Corn will walk into the place and proclaim, This smell is NOT us! (and believe me, we are often smelly so we recognize our own brand). And it's TRUE. It's not us. And then other times, it is gone for days. Only to return, for instance in the middle of the night.

Which brings me back to the three late night smells. So, yes the first would be the vegetative smell belonging to the building itself. I woke up in the night, smelling it so clearly I might as well have been standing in a bog.

Smell Number Two (hahahaaa!) is the aforementioned skunk (which I actually believe was real and not building-or-boyfriend-produced).

and...

The third smell that woke me up recently at some ungodly hour...

CAKE!

I'm serious! Cake! I actually woke up, inhaling so feverishly that Corn woke up and asked what I was doing. To which I responded, CAKE! Can't you smell it? It smells so good!

He didn't smell it.

And I am definitely no stranger to late-night ramblings so I distinctly remember telling myself to make sure I was awake and not half-dreaming. And I could STILL smell it. It was vanilla. And it smelled amazing. How simultaneously lucky and cruel is that? It's like having your jaw wired shut at Thanksgiving dinner. You can looky, but you no touchy!

So I dunno. Maybe we're haunted. I think I've heard that ghosts are supposed to smell like sulfur. But cake? I'm okay with that, I guess. At least SOMEONE can bake in this joint! Actually a friend of mine sez when she was a kid, there used to be an old lady in this building who'd stand on her balcony and throw old teddy bears at them. Maybe this is HER old place. Maybe she used to bake vanilla cake and throw that at the kids, too. Maybe we have to enlist the Pillsbury Dough Boy to do an exorcism!

Maybe I should stop doing NyQuil shots before bed.