Wanted: Objective Nose

I think there’s something wrong with my toilet

It just doesn’t smell right to me, and not in the traditional bad-smell way one might associate with the bathroom.  It’s not a person-smell, it’s more of a… I don’t know.  Very unpleasant, somehow old, just nasty.  But extremely, extremely faint: I only notice it when I’m in there and it’s 5:00 in the morning and I realize, “Hmm, there’s no reason things should smell unpleasant in here, no one else is awake,” or at 1:00 in the morning when I have bolted out of a dead sleep to launch myself at the toilet and sing – albeit gutturally – its praises, and am spending sudden, up-close-and-personal time down there.  It’s not coming from the bowl or the tank.  It’s just… there.

Willem, of course, has absolutely no idea what I’m talking about.  This is a man who happily lived in a frat house, so my trust in his olfactory abilities is a bit diminished.  Emily has commented on it, without prompting from me, so that helps me feel a tiny bit less insane or pregnant-altered.  Because I know my sense of smell is changed during pregnancy; suddenly I can smell the milk just thinking about turning, and I am put off by someone smoking in a car, with the windows up, three lanes away during rush hour.  But I don’t think this is an artifact of pregnancy; I think it’s just wrong.

It’s not quite wrong enough for me to contact the landlord, but the moment I hear Willem admit that there is something not-quite-aromatic wafting up in the bathroom – perhaps some sort of air flow pipe or something?  the intricacies of toilet technology have passed me by – I’ll be calling in the troops.  Or, at least, one troop, in the form of the plumber.  I just want some objective – and, perhaps, adult – backup that I’m not entirely imagining things, even though I’ve never thought of my nose as the source of great creativity and imagination.