By Musette the Insensate

I’m reading Diane Ackerman’s “The Zookeeper’s Wife”, a story based on the actions of Antonina and Jan Zabin’ski who managed to save over 300 otherwise doomed people during the Nazi occupation of Warsaw.   Reading Diane Ackerman always heightens my senses – she writes like I think, with little bits and pieces of pertinent (and some maybe not-so pertinent) information flying around the core nugget of information ….anyway, I like her writing a lot (trying to stay on track here, darlings, hangin’ by a thread…).  One of the terrifying things written about in The Zookeeper’s Wife is how quickly we adapt to whatever ‘reality’ confronts us.  One minute one is worrying about which dress to wear to a concert and the next, one is grateful to be sleeping on a mattress wedged in a doorframe, possibly allowing you to shelter your small child from shrapnel.   I, and a lot of others, call these adjustments New Normals.

So why am I yarking on about this?  Well, my New Normal isn’t anywhere near as dread and dire as it was for the citizenry of 1941 Warsaw but it’s my current New Normal.  I have lost a good 60% of my sense of taste and about 40% of my already-iffy sense of smell.

It’s bizarre, watching myself adjust to this.  I’m not really worried about it, as I think it’s a combination of an ongoing respiratory situation (involving all aspects of respiration, including a stubborn spot of pneumonia (my 14th occurrence, still some gurgling in the lungs) and  4 years of unrelenting stress, which has settled in my neck and shoulders.   The resulting ‘blockage combo’ has short circuited a lot of smell/taste receptors.  Weird disconnects:  I can taste some HFC but not sugar; El O just heated up some roast chicken, which I could smell from 3 rooms away and I drifted towards it, salivating, like one of Pavlov’s pups, only to find it nearly tasteless in my mouth.  Dang.   Not surprising, the inability to taste certain things  has dissuaded me from eating a whole lot of stuff (salty is okay, sweet is iffy, spicy is altered, much to the terror of my household as they taste a curry that seems ‘mild’ to me yet, apparently, could fuel the Hubble to another planet)…but…well ….obviously I haven’t completely stopped eating , since I’m still a solid size 12 and able to type this post without keeling over in a dead faint.  But the lack of taste and smell has created a New Normal for me, while I try to get this fixed.

What Doesn’t Work: The Food Chronicles:

Dough.  At this rate I should be a size 8 by March 22nd.  I can’t taste any bread or pasta. Weird. The hottest curries or sauces are muted by the bland dough.  Rice?  Fuggedaboutit.  I can taste toasted tortillas but that’s not really true – I can taste the little crispy bits but not the sweetness of the corn.

Sweet:  see above.  No point in eating brownies or cake.  They taste like flour.   My last waffle was this morning.  What a waste of good maple syrup (which I also can’t taste)

Salty:  salty is good – but only for a few minutes.  Then, like the ionones in violets (which we’ve discussed here before) the salt vanishes..then reappears (maybe)….then vanishes.. I gave up on potato chips – it’s not worth the calories.

Salty/fatty:  this is a weird one.  Salted almonds:  can taste them in the back left quadrant of my tongue but only fleetingly.    The rest of my tongue is a wasteland.  This gets boring, quickly, as you can imagine.  I’m using them for the protein and fibre.

So the New Normal for me consists of orange juice, which I can taste, toast with peanut butter and Thai Green Curry (not together!).   And peppermint tea.

Has this happened to any of you?  How did you cope?  Did you lose weight?  If I’m going to be tortured like this, I would at least like to re-fit into those slammo black suede pants.

Perfume choices have had to change as well.  I’m limited to extremes.  Carnal Flower is UP! as is Amouage Epic.  Chanel Coco, No5 perfume and vintage My Sin make their presence  known.  1/20th of what I normally get in vintage Ubar . Other than that, I’m mostly confused.  All the Diors are null -  Diorella languishes in the back of the drawer as I can only smell something vaguely pond-y that I never smelled before.  Are you all sitting down?  Good.  I CAN’T SMELL MITSOUKO!   I KNOW!!!  Alert the media!  Just joshin’.  I mean, I can smell it – but it’s a pale reflection of its normal glorious self, with all sorts of notes awol.

So I’m looking to you guys for some guidance – I’ve given you the basics of my smell limitations.  What would you suggest for my New Normal, as I try to adjust to these limitations?  I am open to any notes.  Bring ‘em!   With any luck this will dissipate but in the meantime I am going to have to change what I sniff,  lest you get a few weeks worth of book reviews or stories about my dogs.  So, a little help here?  Thanks!

image:  Gerhard Richter “Mirror Painting (Grey, 735-2) tate.org.uk  – this is how my olfactory world feels right now.

The ionones reference comes from Diane Ackerman’s vaunted A Natural History of the Senses which was my introduction to her work.

by Musette

Oooh!  Before I forget:  Winner of Honour Woman/Honour Man is ….lala!  Contact me at evilauntieanitaATgmailDOTcom with your details.  Thanks!

So….nothing really bad.  Just stupid-bad.  Smells are ‘off’.  I’m recovering from whatever this nasty chestal thingamajig is, but it’s also my sinuses, which are almost totally short-circuited.  Upshot of all of that weirdness?  My cooking is off and smells have morphed into Bizarro World.

Made chicken noodle soup yesterday.  What on earth was I thinking?  I put enough red pepper in there to stoke a furnace!  This soup will be a base for the next 6 batches of soup, it’s that spicy – and not in a good way.  My tastebuds are gone because my nose is shot.

Which is probably a good thing…because…

I’ve been up since 2:45a.  120-lb Rottweiler.  Bark! Bark! Bark! (pause)  BARK! BARK! BARK!  Got up, took him out.  He peed.  Laughed at me.  Danced back inside.

BARK! BARK! BARK!  3:30a …locked him in his room but the longterm barking continued.  Took him out again, 4:30a.  Peed again.   Bark! Bark! Bark!.  Somewhere between 5a and 6:45a, when I did NOT get up to let him out, he was butt-sick all over his room.  120 lbs can produce a lot of sick.  Soapy bleach water, 3 rinses and another bleach rinse.  Smell is still there.  Can’t tell if it’s in the room or in my nose. Hey!  I thought my nose was shot!  Now is not the time for it to recover.

I ground some dark espresso beans this morning and the base-grind (you know how, if you don’t shake the grinder the bottom is way more powdery than the top?  Yeah, that)…anyway, I realized that the fine grind released a skunk-like scent.  I’m aware of the skunky qualities inherent in a super-dark bean but …is it me or is there actual skunk in this batch?

Bacon.  My favorite food group.  Tastes like fat.  Chocolate, my best friend in the world?  Doesn’t taste like anything at all.  At this rate I will be Kate Moss’s size by Christmas!

Consider:  after de-sicking the boys’ room, mopping the kitchen (I’m buying stock in Clorox)…..yet ANOTHER pervasive smell….another dead mouse.  How can something so small smell so bad?  Found this one, luckily.  NOT under the fridge like the other one.  Put on my big-girl panties and picked it up myself.  It’s not the dead body.  It’s the taiiiiiiil.  Ew.  Interesting, though, that I picked it up by the taiiiil.  Gah.  The stink.

I am Smelled OUT!  And it’s not even 8am!  Time to regroup and try to salvage a Day of Disaster Smells!

So all the floors, walls, etc are washed, back end-washed dog is resting.  I’m showered and de-ickified  and totally not into anything other than peppermint tea and getting some customers attended to.    But I did want to wear a fragrance that would beat back the bleach/dogsick smell and give me some sense of control over this totally out of control day.  Work is piling up – gotta pull it together.  Mitsouko was out of the question, the olfactory equivalent of firing an ICBM to kill a spider.  These are garden-variety icks, not Real Trauma.   Citrus didn’t seem right – I pulled out all my lemony/orangey stuff and…nah.  Still too stench-y in here, which made Fresh Lemon Sugar smell like Scrubbing Bubbles.  Ack!.   Aldehydes were a migraine waiting to happen, so no Brillante, dammit.  Incense only incensed my already roiling guts…..I settled on vintage Diorella because it’s so weird that it transcends all genres.  It’s like the Moon Maiden Visits Jupiter.  It’s green enough to cut through the “my house is a disaster but I’m workin’ on it” smell but strange enough to not attach itself to any particular olfactory memory.  I will be able to wear this on another, less fraught day and not make any scent associations.  Besides, Diorella associates with no one except, maybe, her stepsister Parfum de Therese.  But I wasn’t willing to take a chance on her – don’t know her all that well.  ‘rella has stomped all over dogsick before – she’s very reliable.

So…..now that I’ve thoroughly ooked you out with the skunk and mice and dogsick – here’s a question:   when you are having the kind of day(s) I’m having, where things aren’t really serious but they stink – in a literal sense – what scents do you reach for ?  Or do you go commando?   I’d love to hear how others cope.    If you like, I can have Pick hit ‘randomize’ on random.org for a little sample of vintage Diorella – hang on, he’s ringing his little bell again.  I don’t think the Immodium has ‘taken’ yet.  <sigh>.  Okay, I’m back.  If you guys want to share your Scents that fix those Nasty-Smelling Days I will have him wash his paws and he’ll pick a randomized winner for a sample of the vintage Diorella (houndstooth bottle).  That’s the least I can do, since I probably put you off your breakfast with this tail, erm, tale.    Besides, it’s the Hollerday Season.  I like giving!

1965 advertisement for the Ditto Corp. spirit duplicator

by Anita/Musette

I’m actually blushing as I type this.

Okay…I took Carmine out for a walk this afternoon so he could do what dogs do when you take them out.  He’s a healthy dog so, like most healthy mammals, his elimination is pretty normal-smelling (given that it is, uh, poop – (wow…You know, when I first started thinking about this post, I figured writing the intro would be a breeze.  Uh…I ..well, forging ahead here)

Don’t puke yet – we’re not going to stick with the dog-poop angle for much longer.  I’m hoping to segue into Weird Smells We Like; re this poop: the first 3 seconds of  bready/yeasty smell should’ve been disgusting, right?  Instead it was vaguely….interesting.  Then it turned “appropriately’ disgusting.  But that initial reaction was not something I was prepared for – even as a card-carrying Smell Freak.

…..so why am I grossing you guys out with this?  Well, a few weeks ago Angela over at Now Smell This did a post on Smell Fetishes, those slightly tilted aromas that captivate us – and the comments that followed were fascinating – and very comforting.  Turns out that what I always thought was just Sheer Weirdness on my part is, in fact, pretty banal.  One of mine is the fleshy part of the  knee, when it is bent and I would’ve gone to my grave with that little secret, had it  not been that at least 4 other people commented on that very thing (and I think we’ve discussed knees here before – I probably blocked it out. 1960s Childhood trauma, I’m sure).  Another is the smell of an uncropped dog’s ear, where it just joins the head.  It’s this warm, waxy, slightly oily, cheesy smell.  I never get the dog paw/Frito connection – but that ear join could give a Cheeto a run for its money.

Google groans under the weight of  sites on armpit-love.  Butts are big.  Feet…I could walk from LA to Hilo to Tokyo on the list of sites without getting my own feet wet.  Non-body perfumistas cop to asphalt a lot.  And gasoline (though that’s a no-brainer.  Anybody who loves Mitsouko after 1990 has to love gasoline).  My herpetologist pal is addicted to the smell of newly sloughed-off snakeskin (warm, right off the snake – she has about 20 pythons, the weirdo, so she orta know).    I had a moldy carpet that smelled exactly like puppy-breath and even though I knew it was likely to give me plague…I loved catching that quick whiff of baby dog breath (is there any sweeter animal smell in the world?)  The list of unconventional smell-loves is HUGE!  With the advent of the Internet (and it’s relative anonymity), lots of folks are ‘coming out’ with their love of smells.  Back in my youth,  in the Jurassic Era, you got beat down BAD if you were the booger-eatin’ Urkle who sniffed weird stuff or ate library paste – and then threw it up all over the floor.  Now that’s an early-60s scent memory from Hell.  The Urkle.  The paste.  The puke.  The sawdust (and the really disgusted janitor).  And the nuns would never let you change seats, even if the Urkle threw up in the aisle next to your desk.

But I was a little weirded-out by the breadypoop thing– then I realized  the initial smell is replicated in the first blast of Bois Farine and (Lord, I’m gonna get a beatdown for this one)..En Passant.  And Cheerios! It only lasts a second but there is this warm, fecund, internal smell that doesn’t even smell fecal – more elemental – and having little to do with the actual poop. I know Secretions Magnifique worked hard to be the Bad Dog, with it’s bloody knife, etc…but in that first blast,  En Passant is more ‘real’, more deeply organic than that poseur SM could ever hope to be. I’m not a total freak…right?  12 years of 50s-60s Catholic school can make you doubt yourself.

But let’s get back to the SMELLS! My list is long and weird, but I shared a few of them with you (in the 60s,whole classrooms were cracked-out on purple ditto ink -yeah, baby!).

Do you have any unusual smell-loves?  Don’t be shy.  After all, we are people who pay Good Money for perfumes made with cat-butt, whale poop and blue cheese .   Do any of those smell translate in perfumery?  M. Malle is probably sending the ninjas over here as I type this..(am I crazy with the En Passant?  For reals.  You can tell me.  I can take it.)

 Okay, give it a minute for the page to load, LOTS of pictures!

You knew this day was coming – it’s Patty’s Pets Day!!! Well, I will have a couple of review and a draw as well.  Hey, I won’t inflict pain without giving back.  Ready?    Oh, come on, you know you want to!

 That’s Buddy, my almost 5-year-old lab, who thinks the camera steals his soul.  Even at the distance I took this picture, he is jittery, but he’s in his chair, what could go wrong?  Lynus, the baby kitten, right out of the picture, who rolls through and ousts Buddy out of his chair about 30 seconds later. I’ve never seen a 3-pound cat so able to terrify and unseat a 70-pound dog from his very own comfy chair.  Yes, my furry friends are spoiled beyond belief.

Boo, my big, black cat, refused to participate in pictures this time and for the previous 9 years of his existence.  He does exist and sleeps right next to my nose every night. He waits until I go to sleep to take that position, which leaves me waking up about 10 times in the night either peeling Lynus off my head or moving Boo from my breathing airways so I don’t suffocate.

This is Rex the Magnificent, formerly Tyrannosaurus Rex Kitty as he was single-handedly wrecking my house when he was a kitten.  He is my perfect and beautiful Toyger, and if you ever put even one finger on his fur, you would know why he is magnificent. There is nothing in the world that I have felt as soft as Rex, and that includes my uber-soft blankets that everyone that comes into my house fawns over.  His personality is what makes him one of the coolest cats I have ever known.  Indifferent, affectionate, maddening. I, of course, adore him.

Lynus and Vinnie, inseparable. Lynus won’t get in pictures by himself, unless it was the pictures he let me take when he was an ornament on the Christmas tree (in my Facebook pictures).  This is the most hardcore cat I’ve ever run across.  All animals back down to Lynus, and he’s only about five months old.  He’s my youngest son’s cat, who I “temporarily” am keeping as they all decided they really shouldn’t have a cat in the dorms.  Wherever there is trouble in this house, Lynus is nearby.  I don’t know how Lynus can ever leave now – he’s wormed his way deeply into my heart and Rex’s and Vinnie’s so completely, he can’t ever leave.  Boo and Buddy would happily pack his cat toys and escort him to the door today, however.

Vinnnniiiieeee Barbarino!!!!!!!!!  Look at that chest and those wrinkles.  His breeder wants to evaluate him as a show dog when he’s six months – he was pick of a really great litter. And while I’m laughing about becoming one of those Best in Show people ( she needs the Busy BEEEE!!!!!) , he is a natural ham, outgoing, social, and outrageously funny.  I know now why people fall in love with English Bulldogs.  

 Now, nobody get offended at the caption. When Vinnie comes in from outside, he muscles around the house, looking for his kittehs and just gets all discombobulated and grumped if they’re napping and nowhere to be found. 

Vinnie also kisses. When you pick him up, he hugs you with his paws and kisses you by putting his flat little mouth and nose right on yours.  There’s nothing quite like a grunting, groaning bulldog wriggling around in your arms.

That’s the Perfume Posse Pet Parade for this Tuesday.  Perfume? Oh, yeah!  Let’s talk about and do a give-away on two more of the new MDCIs.  I don’t have notes for the Riche Orient, which I believe is going to be the name of the perfume, but it is a simply gorgeous spicy oriental.  I mean, yeah, it’s been done before, but it’s like the best of all of the big orientals, then tamped down so they don’t swallow you whole, and it comes out this great, elegant, hot oriental.

MDCI’s PDN #1, which is the working title for that perfume until it gets a name has top notes of fine orange essence, pineapple, galbanum; heart notes are ylang ylang , tuberose, orange blossom absolute, incense; base notes are ambergris, vanilla and musc.  This one takes a while to develop, so be patient with it.  It’s very much all orangey on the open, but the ambergris and musc show up pretty quickly, along with the incense notes, to heave it into a much more interesting direction than breakfast fruit.  I’m not sure any description I can write will do justice to this.  It is soft and heady and has a luminous quality that seems to just make it glow. When I first smelled this in Paris, and I admit to not having put it on since, my attention was distracted so completely by Peche Cardinal and Riche Orient that I didn’t quite get a focus on this.  Rectifying that today, I am completely enchanted - it is gorgeous, understated, and it wraps around your nose and brain slowly,  and it’s a scent I could easily sink into regularly.

But let’s let a couple of you find out for yourself. Drop a comment in, and I’ll give away  a couple of sets of samples of these two.

Winner of the Liz Zorn sample set of Grand Canyon, Underworld and Tobacco & Tulle is:  JAntoinette.  Just click on the Contact Us Button on the left, make sure to remind me what it is you’ve won so I get you the right thing!

Thanks to everyone for playing.  Now,  back to pets.  How many pets do you have?  Dogs/cats/gerbils/birds/snakes?  How many are too many?  I’m pretty sure at 3 cats and 2 dogs, I’ve hit capacity just to juggle animals until the babies are more grown, but for some reason, the more I have, the less work it seems (except cleaning the catbox and buying cat and dog food), they all just seem to amuse each other more and provide me with hours of entertainment.

Patty

I like it. Growing stuff, that is. Today I had a general tidy of the allotment, which meant:

1. Squishing caterpillars. I used to relocate them from my cabbages in some right-on, hippyish vein, but I realised I had to relocate thousands, and got bored of being beardy. I now squeeze them between my gloved and ungloved fingers, their green gunk squirting psychedelically across the ground. First of all, I feel squeamish; something about their lack of skeletal anything and their vibrancy seems wrong. Then, I get gung ho. Look at the damage on my brassica! They’ve made lace and filigree of my purple sprouting broccoli! Die, you b’stards, die! After nearly 30 minutes of this, I begin to feel squeamish again. My hands, the plants, and the ground surrounding them are coated with slimy caterpillar remnant. Yuk. I desist, and do something different. As an aside, caterpillar poop, at least on green vegetables, looks almost emerald like in its clustered intensity. Sure there’s a gelatinous gooeyness to it to, but in the right light and the right mood, it has a strange beauty.
2. Weeding. It’s a constant battle. The allotment was fallow for eight years, and when I took it over a year and a half ago, I cut swathes through brambles and nettles and bindweed. Those weeds still invade and threaten to take over if I turn my back for longer than a week. The allotment, by the way, is a portion of land 75 yards by 25 yards. It’s quite a lot! And there must be billions of annual seeds in that ground, a goodly portion of which germinate on a regular basis.
3. Picking vegetables and flowers. I grow both there as I prefer my garden flowers to stay in the garden, mostly. The photo above is from today, and I pick about as much every day. Bells of Ireland, dahlias and zinnias (I love the rich colours of late summer blooms); courgettes/zucchini (every vegetable growers’ glut this time of year), three types of bean, pimientos de Padron (if you’ve never had them… man…), cucumbers (normally three a day), potatoes, summer cabbage. I could’ve brought more home (no carrots, tomatoes etc), and left the artichokes I cut there by mistake (always tomorrow).

And the rest of the time is taken up with Gracie – who delights, infuriates and licks her way into my heart more each day. She spent the first week with us overbonding and not sleeping at night. She lost her voice. It’s now back. Now she’s good, except for the occasional whimper, even if the not getting up in the night routine (doing so was an utter disaster) means the occasional poo in a place where it’s least expected (in front of the fridge, this morning). And now we’re working on leaving her home alone for short periods each day, to be ready for the three hours she’ll be left for by the beginning of September. She’s currently my shadow, my lap her favourite spot, and my return from sleep in the mornings an orgiastic, pee-herself, delight, no matter how nonchalant and non-committal I am. But oh, she’s soft and loving and playful and sprightly and impish and silly too.

I love the way she sits up during her daytime naps, groans prolongedly, scratches her ear like a wind up toy nearing the end of its clockwork, and slumps back into a sleep, the groan subsiding as she does so. I love the way she has already learned to sit and stay. I love the way wiry hair, still baby soft, is developing on the tops of her ears, her eyebrows, chin, shoulders, back and legs. I love the way she delights in the world around her, even if it leads to destruction in the garden. Her favourite hobby is chewing bamboo. I’ve put this to good use. I’ve got one that’s a vicious runner at the root. All I need to do is expose the runners and she sets to severing them from the main plant. It’s easy to find a job for her to do. She’s not yet taken fully to her crate, her kongs, or being in a room where I’m not. But we’re going slowly.

I love the way she’s learned to look at me, waiting for our short but sweet training sessions (she’s training me, I’m sure of it). I even love the way I’m finding it impossible to get her into a down position. She’s too full of wriggle energy for any lure. In summary, she’s a wonder and though my eyes are tired from less sleep than I’m used to in my pampered, privileged life, that’s more than compensated for by a wagging tail, play time, and those almond eyes, whose colour has moved from blue to green to grey in a week and a half.

I love the way she lives for fetch games, and will retrieve anything, anything from the garden. I left Matt and her alone the other day and returned to find a heap of leaves and twigs in the living room, piled outside her preferred nest. I didn’t mind.

In short, I love her. She’s my favourite growing stuff.

Lee