Canada, eh?

I don't know if this picture has been Photoshopped or not, but it's pretty amusing.  You know you're in Canada when, after a night of hard drinking, you open your front door in the morning...
( ...to this. )

Plonq, why are you smelling the cat?

I was sitting here this evening, chatting with a friend in Boston and holding the cat in my lap.  While I talked, I noticed a faint, sweet, not unpleasant smell reminiscent of cucumbers being sliced in the next room.  I knew we hadn't had cucumbers for dinner, so I assumed it was just my imagination.  It was faint enough to be on the threshold of my olfactory awareness, and for awhile I thought that maybe it was just my imagination.  Soon, though, the smell was undeniable and I began trying to figure out its source.  I made the connection between the cat jumping up on my lap and my first noticing the smell.  I did what anyone would have done in a situation like that.

I began sniffing the top of her head to see if I could figure out what she had gotten into. 

Just then atara glanced over and asked (a rather reasonable question, IMO), "Why are you smelling the cat?"  I explained about the strange smell and asked if she could not also smell it.  Apparently she couldn't, and I again began to wonder if it was all in my head.  I seem to remember that stroke victims sometimes experience phantom smells.  On the other hand I wasn't experiencing any other stroke symptoms, so perhaps it was something on my shirt, or maybe I was radiating the smell from my pores.  What would cause one to emit the essence of a sliced cucumber?

Anyway, sometime later atara caught a whiff of it too and suddenly remembered that she had plugged in the new scented oil deodorizer and cranked it up to 11 full strengh.  Sure enough, that turned out to be the cause of the phantom odour.  The bathroom at the far end of the house smelled... interesting.  Nothing at all like sliced cucumber.

As for the cat, well, she smelled like a cat.